Posts Tagged ‘high-impact practices’
By: Rebecca Frost Davis, Program Officer for the Humanities, National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education
Wednesday night Ken O’Donnell opened the AAC&U 2012 Annual Meeting by telling us that the road connecting civic and commercial activity is “collected work toward a common purpose.” He backed that up in part by citing the no. 1 answer on the National Association of Colleges and Employers survey of what employers are seeking: “ability to work in a team structure.” I’ve been promoting collaborative projects (usually between different institutions) for almost ten years now, and I routinely work in a distributed team with colleagues at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. But, after hearing O’Donnell speak, I wondered, how do we teach that skill to students?
This is not an idle query for me; in fact, it’s a homework assignment of sorts. I’m currently part of a working group (collaboration again) that is collectively brainstorming a curriculum for digital humanities pedagogy workshops, and collaboration is one of the topics we see as key. As those who attended the Digital Humanities for Undergraduates panel on Thursday know, collaboration is one of the practices that differentiate the digital humanities from traditional humanities studies.
Often, when I am introducing myself to a group, I start by letting the audience know that I am the mother of a four-year old son, and that reality makes me an optimist and a realist (for those of you who don’t know me, I am African American, which may shed some light on that statement). I make this opening remark not to elicit praise, sympathy, or empathy, but to state a fact about my lived experience, and my optimism and skepticism about what will be my son’s lived experience. What usually occurs after I make this announcement is several audience members—often other African American mothers—nod their heads in knowing agreement. They often are the first people to speak to me when the opportunity presents itself. I find this camaraderie refreshing, but I also find myself more focused on the members of the audience who may not understand why being a mother of an African American son makes me both an optimist and a realist. Let me tell you why.
My optimism stems from my current role as the senior director for student success at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, where I regularly engage in conversations with my like-minded peers about making excellence inclusive in higher education, and the need for equity in learning at all levels. These conversations tend to reaffirm my belief that “we” in higher education are poised for significant change focused on issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity—all leading to new definitions of student success. We often share with the larger community campus examples and information from our member institutions about how educators are asking difficult questions that are the foundation for sustainable change. For example, how do we introduce first-generation, low-income, and/or underrepresented students to the cultures of the academy? How can we alter those cultures to make them more inclusive and responsive to difference? How do we effectively engage traditionally underrepresented students in high-impact practices? How do we create equitable pathways for student success? These questions are at the heart of our conversations for making excellence inclusive, and illustrate the optimism I share with my colleagues about the future. I have no doubt that my son will attend educational institutions that have engaged in these types of discussions and created environments of inclusion, not exclusion. On that level, I am optimistic.
We want people to get jobs. No doubt about it. To get jobs these days, people need both broad learning and practical skills. In this series of posts, I have been presenting exemplars among community colleges of programs that accomplish these goals and connect K-12 and college learning, all with the intention of increasing people’s success in getting jobs. These civically minded colleges are taking their place as centers for learning aligned along the continuum from school to college to university in their communities. From these highly responsible and resilient institutions, I am learning a thing or two about a blended model of liberal education as practical education—a robust model of what sustainable learning for employment ought to be in the twenty-first century.
A recent visit to Oxnard College, a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) in Ventura County, California, has helped me articulate what it means for a college to invest deeply in the vitality of its community. Oxnard fosters applied learning in the arts and sciences, and liberal education in career and technical education (CTE). It is a thing of beauty. Driving to Oxnard, you traverse vast strawberry fields; you’re near the Pacific coast and the Channel Islands National Park. The massive agricultural enterprise abutting the coastal sanctuary reminds me how challenging it is to negotiate across different worlds within higher education, but also how urgently we need future generations of students to be ready for stewardship and civic responsibility as well as for workforce success.
How do community colleges serve as centers advancing the education and wellbeing of a region? Insights garnered from Significant Discussions in practice have much to tell. The Significant Discussions project, as I’ve written in previous posts, aims to improve student success by promoting collaboration on curriculum alignment among secondary schools, community colleges, universities, and employers. Let’s start with the Maricopa Community College District (MCCD)—ten community colleges and two skills centers in the Phoenix, Arizona, area. Leaders at Maricopa have launched a project using the Significant Discussions guide, and they report promising results.
Maricopa got into Significant Discussions through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant program. The program intends to strengthen connections between higher education and schools, and to accomplish that objective by giving priority to emerging knowledge in technology education in a region. In the greater Phoenix region, the economy will increasingly depend on technology, including emerging high tech fields such as bioscience, sustainability, and solar energy. It’s easy to see that outreach to future students in STEM is critical to the wellbeing of Phoenix, and that a diverse community of workers there is eager for employment. Many more applied fields are likely to emerge; the workforce needs to be ready to move and adapt. Attention now to secondary, community college, university, and industry connections will pay off in regional development well into the future. This concept is elegant and seemingly obvious. But it is difficult to enact on the ground.
With all of the news about internships lately, my favorite recent posting is from McSweeney’s. Advertising a news production internship, the position is described as a “tremendous growth opportunity” that “may lead to full-time employment with possible entry-level pay or occasional freelance work.” The listing concludes:
This position requires someone who is completely dedicated. We are NOT looking for college students or people who are currently in a career “transition.”
This is a great opportunity to gain more experience. Only experienced candidates should apply.
We have received thousands of applications for this position. Due to the overwhelming interest we CANNOT guarantee a response to your inquiry.
We apologize in advance.
I’m finally catching up on the latest data from the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (released in late 2009) and, as always, it has some fascinating information. Some of the new data (pdf) confirms what we as AAC&U staff members have been seeing and hearing from colleges and universities all across the country. Faculty members really are beginning to embrace a set of more engaged learning practices—at least rhetorically. As readers of this blog will already know, AAC&U published a report in 2008 by George D. Kuh called High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. It summarizes research that shows how a set of teaching and learning practices—such as learning communities, service learning courses, capstone projects, well-crafted internships, etc.—really do increase student success. In addition, these practices are at least correlated with higher retention rates, higher GPAs, greater levels of student satisfaction, and increased likelihood of students engaging in other academically valuable activities. A new study AAC&U will be releasing soon, The Impact of Engaged Educational Practices, extends this overview of research and documents even more studies demonstrating the positive effect of these practices on both these factors and on actual student learning outcomes.
The new FSSE data confirms that a large percentage of faculty members seem to understand the value of high-impact practices. For instance, 85 percent of faculty members think that it is important or very important for students on their own campuses to do senior capstone projects; 84 percent think it is important for students to do internships; 56 percent think it is important for students to do undergraduate research. This data is also consistent with other research AAC&U has sponsored. A survey of AAC&U member chief academic officers, (pdf) for instance, showed that 78 percent of AAC&U members are placing more emphasis on undergraduate research; 68 percent are placing more emphasis on internships; and 52 percent are placing more emphasis on learning communities.
By: Ken O’Donnell
Here’s an e-mail I got from a colleague after this session: “Brings tears to my eyes. Truly amazing.” I wasn’t quite crying, but this was an amazing set of stories. Professor Barbara Clinton of Highline Community College has developed an Honors Program that, since its 2003 inception, has transformed hundreds of lives. Her three copanelists were all alumni, with spectacular stories to tell.
Clinton described Highline as a college in a “poverty pocket” of King County, near Seattle, Washington. It’s the most diverse community college in Washington state, and most of its students come in not knowing a lot about higher education — where it can take them, and how they can get it. She was blunt about the raw material of the student body, and I was surprised her three panelists were, too. Read the rest of this entry »
By: Dwight Smith, Ed.D.
Highline Community College’s Honors Scholar program demonstrates that combining wit and will can benefit students’ wallets. Through the will of a dedicated faculty, the program was implemented in 2003 with thirteen students and three faculty and has grown to approximately 250 students who work with 100 faculty on research projects integrated in courses. The students enroll in a two-credit “bootcamp” course to develop a personal statement, an academic resume, and explore transfer opportunities throughout the United States. A one-credit course serves as a capstone experience to prepare them to submit admission and scholarship applications to further their higher education. Graduates of the program have transferred to public universities, elite private universities, and the military academies.
The three Highline honors graduate students at the session demonstrated the varied paths community college students take through higher education. One student was a Marine who is now a student at Tufts; the second student, from Ethiopia, now is in a master’s program at the University of Washington; and the third student, a UPS employee, is now a George Washington University law student. Some five years later, each student recalled in detail his or her research topic and the results of their honors projects. The three students represented very well the 85 percent of their fellow honors students who transferred to a university.
By: Laura Behling
Is Randy Bass right? Is the traditional course dead and it just doesn’t know it? Have we really entered the “post-course era,” a time where the bounded, traditional course, the defining item of our institutions and their curricula, is no longer the site of high-impact teaching and learning practices? Is the formal curriculum still at the center of our institution? And if it is, should it be?
Given all the practices we have worked to incorporate into our students’ experiences because of their increasingly proven positive impact on student learning—global education, undergraduate research, and experiential learning, for example—why, Bass asked, do we fund, hire, tenure, and promote as if the formal curriculum is the most important thing we do?
Could it really be this simple? Okay, of course not. But two recent events—President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren and the release of a new book on college completion—reminded me of a simple, but often unacknowledged, educational truth: More students are capable of higher levels of achievement, but we need to challenge them more to get them there. They need to put in more time and more effort; and if we create educational pathways that require them to do that, more of them will succeed. AAC&U tried initially to convey this simple message through our Greater Expectations initiative, and it lies at the heart of LEAP as well.
President Obama actually said something very similar in his address to the nation’s schoolchildren. “At the end of the day,” he noted, “we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world—and none of it will matter unless . . . [you] put in the hard work it takes to succeed.” Astonishing though it is, this simple truth is rarely spoken by educational leaders or reinforced by our practices and policies—which makes it all the more regrettable that, what with all the coverage of Obama’s “lying” to Congresspeople and “indoctrinating” our kids, so few people actually got to “hear” that message from the president. Read the rest of this entry »
