Redesigning America’s Community Colleges

Redesigning America’s Community Colleges
Author: Thomas R. Bailey
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2015-04-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674368282

In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.

The Costs of Completion

The Costs of Completion
Author: Robin G. Isserles
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421442086

To improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students. Our nation's community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree—or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success. The prevailing theory at the root of the community college completion crisis—academic momentum—suggests that students need to build momentum in their first year by becoming academically integrated, thereby increasing their chances of graduating in a timely fashion. A host of what Isserles terms "innovative disruptions" have been implemented as a way to improve on community college completion, but because disruptions are primarily driven by degree attainment, Isserles argues that they place learning and developing as afterthoughts while ignoring the complex lives that define so many community college students. Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching, advising, and researching largely first-generation community college students as well as an analysis of five years of student enrollment patterns, college experiences, and life narratives, Isserles takes pains to center students and their experiences. She proposes initiatives created in accordance with a care ethic, which strive to not only get students through college—quantifying credit accumulation and the like—but also enable our most precarious students to flourish in a college environment. Ultimately, The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them.

University-community Partnerships

University-community Partnerships
Author: Tracy Soska
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2005
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0789028352

Examines the roles that social workers have played in the expanding efforts by universities to respond to the social, economic, educational, health & civic needs of their local & regional communities.

Empowering the Community College First-Year Composition Teacher

Empowering the Community College First-Year Composition Teacher
Author: Meryl Siegal
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2021-03-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0472129007

Community colleges in the United States are the first point of entry for many students to a higher education, a career, and a new start. They continue to be a place of personal and, ultimately, societal transformation. And first-year composition courses have become sites of contestation. This volume is an inquiry into community college first-year pedagogy and policy at a time when change has not only been called for but also mandated by state lawmakers who financially control public education. It also acknowledges new policies that are eliminating developmental and remedial writing courses while keeping mind that, for most community college students, first-year composition serves as the last course they will take in the English department toward their associate’s degree. Chapters focusing on pedagogy and policy are integrated within cohesively themed parts: (1) refining pedagogy; (2) teaching toward acceleration; (3) considering programmatic change; and (4) exploring curriculum through research and policy. The volume concludes with the editors’ reflections regarding future work; a glossary and reflection questions are included. This volume also serves as a call to action to change the way community colleges attend to faculty concerns. Only by listening to teachers can the concerns discussed in the volume be addressed; it is the teachers who see how societal changes intersect with campus policies and students’ lives on a daily basis.

Marbles

Marbles
Author: Ellen Forney
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2012-11-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101617195

Cartoonist Ellen Forney explores the relationship between “crazy” and “creative” in this graphic memoir of her bipolar disorder, woven with stories of famous bipolar artists and writers. Shortly before her thirtieth birthday, Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Flagrantly manic and terrified that medications would cause her to lose creativity, she began a years-long struggle to find mental stability while retaining her passions and creativity. Searching to make sense of the popular concept of the crazy artist, she finds inspiration from the lives and work of other artists and writers who suffered from mood disorders, including Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, William Styron, and Sylvia Plath. She also researches the clinical aspects of bipolar disorder, including the strengths and limitations of various treatments and medications, and what studies tell us about the conundrum of attempting to “cure” an otherwise brilliant mind. Darkly funny and intensely personal, Forney’s memoir provides a visceral glimpse into the effects of a mood disorder on an artist’s work, as she shares her own story through bold black-and-white images and evocative prose.

Austerity Blues

Austerity Blues
Author: Michael Fabricant
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1421420678

Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

Community of Peace

Community of Peace
Author: Christopher Courtheyn
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 082298878X

Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations. Yet it also happens at the grassroots level, where communities envision and create peace on their own. The San José de Apartadó Peace Community of small-scale farmers has not waited for a top-down peace treaty. Instead, they have actively resisted forced displacement and co-optation by guerrillas, army soldiers, and paramilitaries for two decades in Colombia’s war-torn Urabá region. Based on ethnographic action research over a twelve-year period, Christopher Courtheyn illuminates the community’s understandings of peace and territorial practices against ongoing assassinations and displacement. San José’s peace through autonomy reflects an alternative to traditional modes of politics practiced through electoral representation and armed struggle. Courtheyn explores the meaning of peace and territory, while also interrogating the role of race in Colombia’s war and the relationship between memory and peace. Amid the widespread violence of today’s global crisis, Community of Peace illustrates San José’s rupture from the logics of colonialism and capitalism through the construction of political solidarity and communal peace.

University-Community Design Partnerships

University-Community Design Partnerships
Author: Jason Pearson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2002-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

A survey of community design centers highlighting ten national programs, such as the Rural Studio and Studio 804 at Kansas State. Includes recommendations for strengthening these initiatives. The work demonstrates that exemplary design is a significant component of effective community development. Since the late 1990s, the National Endowment for the Arts, under the direction of Mark Robbins, has been promoting design excellence through an ambitious series of symposia, best-case design studies, and prototype projects. The results of these programs are now documented in a new series of publications, each focusing on design in the public realm and the potential for innovative architecture, landscape architecture, and planning.

Community Engagement Abroad

Community Engagement Abroad
Author: Pat Crawford
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2020-03-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1628953853

A landmark in our understanding of international community-engaged learning programs, this book invites educators to rethink everything from disciplinary assumptions to the role of higher education in a globalizing world. Tapping the many such programs developed at Michigan State University during the last half-century, the volume develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing study-abroad programs with a community-engagement focus. More than a how-to guide, it also offers seven theoretically framed case studies showing how these experiences can change students, faculty, and communities alike. The purposeful broadening of who is involved in these types of international learning programs leads to conceptual transformation and self-reflection within the participants. The authors take the reader on a fascinating journey through how they changed as a result of designing and delivering programs in full collaboration with community partners. The arguments given in this volume for developing truly reciprocal, mutually beneficial partnerships beyond the academy are powerful and persuasive.

Creating Space for Democracy

Creating Space for Democracy
Author: Timothy J. Shaffer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2023-07-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000980138

Published in Association with and We live in divisive and polarizing times, often remaining in comfortable social bubbles and experiencing few genuine interactions with people who are different or with whom we disagree. Stepping out and turning to one another is difficult but necessary. For our democracy to thrive at a time when we face wicked problems that involve tough trade-offs it is vital that all citizens participate fully in the process. We need to learn to listen, think, and act with others to solve public problems. This collaborative task begins with creating space for democracy. This book provides a guide for doing so on campus through deliberation and dialogue.At the most basic level, this book describes collaborative and relational work to engage with others and co-create meaning. Specifically, dialogue and deliberation are processes in which a diverse group of people moves toward making a collective decision on a difficult public issue.This primer offers a blueprint for achieving the civic mission of higher education by incorporating dialogue and deliberation into learning at colleges and universities. It opens by providing a conceptual framework, with leading voices in the dialogue and deliberation field providing insights on issues pertinent to college campuses, from free speech and academic freedom to neutrality and the role of deliberation in civic engagement. Subsequent sections describe a diverse range of methods and approaches used by several organizations that pioneered and sustained deliberative practices; outline some of the many ways in which educators and institutions are using dialogue and deliberation in curricular, co-curricular, and community spaces, including venues such as student centers, academic libraries, and residence halls. All of the chapters, including a Resource Section, provide readers with a starting point for conceptualizing and implementing their own deliberation and dialogue initiatives.This book, intended for all educators who are concerned about democracy, imparts the power and impact of public talk, offers the insights and experiences of leading practitioners, and provides the grounding to adopt or adapt the models in their own settings to create educative spaces and experiences that are humanizing, authentic, and productive. It is an important resource for campus leaders, student affairs practitioners, librarians, and centers of institutional diversity, community engagement, teaching excellence and service-learning, as well as faculty, particularly those in the fields of communication studies, education, and political science.Click here for more information on AAC&U and Campus Compact.