Many community college practitioners across California look forward all year to recharging during the Strengthening Student Success Conference. Each year, we return home energized and full of new information and inspiration for system change and the pursuit of equity.
Scroll down for links to presentations and materials CLP offered at SSSC 2019. The event as a whole, for which CLP was a sponsor, brought the equity imperative for redesign into sharp focus.
A keynote from Sara Goldrick-Rab, who studies how policy can reduce socioeconomic and racial inequality on campus, opened SSSC 2019, and the event formally closed with a keynote from Ed Bush, president of Cosumnes River College (followed the next day by in-depth post-conference workshops).
“When cash is on your mind instead of your homework, you are living #RealCollege,” said Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University. “This scarcity sits like a rock on your brain, and it makes it harder to do all kinds of things.”
She recommends all practitioners do several specific things:
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- Create a culture of caring in your classroom and on campus generally
- Provide information for students on where to get specific kinds of help
- Advocate for greater investment in students’ basic needs
- Advocate for more funding for public higher education.
“The times we are working in and operating in are fundamentally different so they require a different type of work,” said Bush. “So I need you to make a shift. I need you to gird up a little bit more…. If you already were outraged because of all the injustices, then I need you to get a little more indignant.”
Bush urged attendees to focus on fixing their colleges, instead of their students; and to interrogate all of their practices and policies; sustain their sense of urgency; and operate out of courage.
“Our babies, our children, folks in our community, simply deserve the opportunity to go to an institution that has been planned and designed for them to be successful.”
Career Ladders Project was honored to offer several presentations and sponsor the event with our partner LearningWorks and others.
For those who weren’t able to attend, here are links to presentations and materials from CLP:
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- On Guided Pathways from high school to college and the “Anatomy of Integrated Support for Student Success” (PDFs of presentations led by CLP senior director Luis Chavez)
- On creating dual enrollment partnerships, related professional development, and intersegmental pathways (from Naomi Castro, a CLP senior director, and Amal Amanda Issa, a senior program manager)
- On contextualized learning in a Guided Pathways framework, from Naomi Castro and colleagues at El Camino College and Saddleback College; here is their presentation, and here are examples of CTL in English from Saddleback College Contextualized Composition: Synopsis and Music/Art Contextualized ENG 1B and Health & Wellness ENG 1A Prompt and STEM ENG 1A Prompt and Contextualized Business & Economics ENG 1A (3 prompts)
- On putting “design thinking” to work in Guided Pathways redesign (at this link, you’ll find one of two presentations offered by CLP senior program associate Sia Smith-Miyazaki; Michelle Simotas, a director at CLP, with Jessica Hurless, an associate professor of communications studies at Skyline College, plus additional materials to build your own design thinking process)