Community College

As lifelong learning and workforce education grow increasingly more important in American life, the mission of community colleges is shifting more and more toward continuing education, certificate training, and workforce training. The lack of a standard set of indicators has led to a variety of approaches to the assessment of noncredit workforce education programs (NWEP) at community colleges. Absent a common and accepted set of quality indicators for NWEP and an accreditation process and authority to measure noncredit course quality and program-level outcomes, it is difficult for education consumers, educators, and businesses to compare program quality among community colleges or to benchmark programs for continuous improvement efforts.

This study aims to help develop standardized metrics to evaluate, improve, and communicate outcomes for those taking NWEP courses. This study used a qualitative research design employing an online survey with 50 total workforce education practitioners who participated, and semi-structured follow-up interviews with a subsample of nine subjects to examine challenges experienced by two-year colleges in evaluating NWEP program effectiveness. Respondents reported that faculty adoption of assessment in NWEP was unchanged compared to the preceding five-year period. Findings showed the three most common methods of NWEP assessment were course evaluations, licensure exam results, and noncredit enrollment count. Findings were inconclusive about the rate of transition from noncredit to credit-based programs.

All too often education research focuses on academic disparities with under-served student populations. Frequently, both remedial and introductory college-level mathematics courses are cited as gatekeepers or insurmountable barriers for adult low-socioeconomic status (LSES) students. There has been a call from within the mathematics education community for less gap-gazing at disparities and more studies of success within marginalized groups. Many previously unsuccessful, under-prepared, under-served, and under-supported students persist and eventually succeed. In addition, there is a lack of research through the lens of the community college as a unique educational context, distinct from both K-12 and the four year colleges and universities. The goal of this hermeneutical phenomenological study is to describe and interpret the lived experienced of previously unsuccessful LSES students who became successful. Ten students told their stories during unstructured phenomenological interviews. Upon analysis of the interview transcripts, themes appeared consistent with the patterns of the inward and outward journeys found in the Hero’s Journey or monomyth narrative structure. The stages of the monomyth as described in the work of Campbell (2008) are rooted in the universal human themes of the transformational quest. Six meta-themes appeared through the textual analysis of the interview transcripts; 1) the call of a better life that requires education, 2) connections with mentors and allies through authentic relationships, 3) the cultural border crossing at the threshold to higher education, 4) perspective transformations taking place as tests presented by an array of threshold guardians are passed, 5) increasing resilience through taking ownership and increasing networks of connections as the labyrinth of higher education was navigated, 6) after seizing the magic elixir of education the desire to pay it forward.  Their stories reveal a perspective transformation as described in Mezirow’s (1981) transformative learning theory. These stories of transformational learning as experienced by previously unsuccessful LSES community college students provide essential insights as to how we might foster positive learning transformations, and more importantly, avoid being the source of needless obstacles for our students. These findings present a narrative counter to the current deafening drumbeat of the anti-developmental education, completion and acceleration agendas.

This paper focuses on the elevated need for compassion in writing instruction. There is ample research and a long history of writing about empathy and compassion, from Plato and Aristotle to bell hooks and Paulo Friere, and I provide a brief overview. After a review of definitions, causes, and impacts of empathy and compassion, I will discuss what others have done pedagogically. We must reshape our approaches to revisions, deadlines, absences, learning resources, and plagiarism to demonstrate authentic caring. I close with a call to assess and reflect on how we can transform current practices and guide future instructors to a pedagogy of compassion.

The goal of this study is to understand how students experiencing homelessness experience community college. In particular, the authors focus on the multifaceted traumas that negatively impact their educational engagement and persistence. The authors conducted a life history with one student experiencing homelessness on a community college campus. Based upon the emerging themes, interviews lasting approximately 60 minutes were conducted with an additional six students experiencing homelessness at the same college. Homelessness creates significant barriers for students. Residential insecurity often forces students to prioritize meeting
basic needs over educational engagement. The participants consistently lived on the brink of residential crisis, which took an emotional toll. However, the stories emerging from this study demonstrate how important the participants felt postsecondary education was. They clearly connected their long-term stability to completing community college and transferring to a four-year institution. Unfortunately, their residential situations negatively impacted their ability to persist. Based upon the student experiences, the authors recommend more integrated services on community college campuses. The student narratives illustrate several important themes that have the potential to inform both research and practice. The participants viewed postsecondary education as a pathway to future stability. However, they experienced multifaceted and enduring trauma. The chaos of their residential insecurity resulted in constantly living at the brink of crisis. These students illustrate the need for integrated services at community colleges to support students experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity.

Braverman's analysis of the changing division of labor is crucial for understanding the impact of the neoliberal assault on higher education on academic labor. Much like Taylorism a century ago, adjunctification of the faculty, online education, and data driven planning are rationalizing academic labor. Teaching is being " unbundled " and its components parts automated, outsourced, and transferred to a growing middle level administration. As a result, faculty are becoming " just-in-time, " deskilled, disempowered, contingent labor. This newly emerging new division of labor is fundamentally transforming higher education. No longer merely subject to commercialization, academic labor is being reorganized to resemble the interchangeable contingent work that is ubiquitous throughout the labor market. To resist these developments it is necessary for faculty to study the new division of academic labor in order to devise new organizing tactics and strategies, such as the systemwide local and Metro organizing models.

Using social capital theory as a framework, the authors examined data from the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS: 2002) to examine how student contact with high school counselors about college information and other college-related variables influence students’ college application rates. In addition to some college related variables, the number of school counselors, and student contact were significant predictors of college application rates.  Implications for school counselors and counselor training are included.

L'antico monastero delle Agostiniane di San Paolo è sede della Biblioteca dell'Istituto Giuridico dell'Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia. Il San Paolo fu uno dei monasteri più prosperi di Modena capitale estense, grazie alle monacazioni di fanciulle di illustri famiglie. Crescevano il Chiostro monumentale noto come Cortile del Leccio, vari cortili come quello della Meridiana e il vastissimo orto verso la via Caselle. La chiesa, a struttura romanica a tre navate, fu rinnovata fra il 1653 e il 1654 nello stile del barocco estense.
The Ancient Augustinian Monastery of San Paolo is home to the University's Law Library. San Paolo was one of the most prosperous monasteries in Modena capital of Este. The monumental cloister as "Cortile del Leccio", the various courtyards like "Cortile della Meridiana" and the vast garden was confined towards "via Caselle" were increasing. San Paolo Church mantains the Romanesque structure with three naves. Between 1653 and 1654 the church was renewed in the Este's Baroque style.

Successful completion of online courses by community college students is an issue both at the national and local level. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore community college student perceptions of online learning within the theoretical construct of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model, which describes the manner in which the elements of social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence interact to create an educational experience. An online questionnaire, interviews, and artifact reviews were employed in the study. Interpretive analysis was utilized to identify themes and provide insights into student perceptions of satisfaction and success with online learning. The findings of the study revealed aspects of community college student perceptions about online courses, related these perceptions to the social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence components of the Community of Inquiry model, and provided examples of successful instructional design and course facilitation techniques utilized in the online courses. The study findings provided insights about student perceptions related to communication and interaction, isolation, preferred course activities, and the positive impact of prompt and helpful instructor feedback. Recommendations for practical applications by instructional designers and instructors are provided.

As a group, Latina/o students are more likely to experience a substandard K–12 education complete with underresourced schools, high teacher turnover, and fewer college-preparatory courses. It is this same inferior education that denies many Latina/o high school students the opportunity to engage in college-choice—leading to their disproportionate enrollment in
community colleges over 4-year colleges or universities. In California alone, approximately 75% of Latina/o students in higher education can be found in the community college sector—making this an important pathway for many Latina/o students. This qualitative study incorporated a Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Education framework to focus on the racialized K–12 experiences of four Latina/o graduate students who started their postsecondary career at a community college. This study was undertaken to better understand what led Latina/o students to enroll in community colleges after high school. Exploring the pathways of Latina/o students from high school to community college is imperative to community college practitioners (i.e., faculty, staff, and administrators) when considering best practices for their large Latina/o student body, as is found in California. The initial findings suggest that racism in K–12 in the forms of tracking, limited college information, and low expectations from academic personnel had a direct impact on the postsecondary experiences and opportunities available to Latina/o students. Lastly, the findings challenge prevailing portrayals where Latina/o students passively accept their marginalized position in education by highlighting their voice, resiliency, and agency in the face of systematic racism, as evidenced by their successes in academia.

This qualitative study explored higher education transfer student perceptions of (a) the transfer process between two- and four-year institutions, (b) social network influences on their decisions to stay in higher education, (c) the role of technology in the process, and (d) organizational policies and practices that might influence the process. This study used student departure, social network, and complexity theories to describe the higher education transfer student experience from a holistic viewpoint. The researcher conducted interviews with thirteen higher education transfer students from two- and four-year institutions located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Eight of the thirteen participants belonged to historically underrepresented ethnicity populations. The researcher asked the participants to describe and analyze their experiences and decisions during the transfer process, and influences that came from their background and from external environments. The participants perceived that they themselves had the greatest influence on their decisions to stay in higher education, but also perceived external influences. The participants relied on different people in their personal networks to achieve various levels of academic and social integration, respectively. Participants perceived great value in using technology for transfer purposes, such as electronic portfolios and social network sites, but sometimes preferred human interaction. Diversity and encouragement emerged as important themes. Social network and complexity theories enhanced and reconceptualized the concepts portrayed in Tinto's (1993) longitudinal model of student departure. Tinto's model comprised only part of a much larger fractal pattern of the overall transfer-related phase transition. New initial conditions existed every time the pattern repeated at a smaller scale over time (e.g., every year, every decision). Certain pre-entry attributes parents' educational experiences and the participants' prior schooling---were also phase transitions, not static historical constants. Participants sought or sought to be strange attractors---influences that could break them or others from repetitive, linear patterns. Recommendations were made for higher education transfer students and administrators at higher education institutions. Recommendations for future research included calls for further investigation of higher education transfer students who dropped out, barriers for historically underrepresented ethnicity populations, and case studies of inter-institutional programs that use electronic portfolios for transfer purposes.

Objective: The purpose of this study is to apply Yosso's community cultural wealth framework to the experiences of Latino male community college students to understand how they balance family obligations, work, and academics while also navigating their educational pathways. Method: The research team conducted 23 semistructured focus groups with 130 Latino male students enrolled full-and part-time at seven distinct community colleges in Texas. Results: Findings reveal the important role family members play in the educational pathway of Latino males who relied heavily on familismo and familial capital as a source of support as they matriculated through the community college environment. Despite entering the community college with multiple sources of community cultural wealth, Latino males had a difficult time navigating their educational experiences due to their first in family, first-generation status, and their apprehension around help-seeking. Contributions: Despite the multiple roles and responsibilities Latino males hold within their family units, they do not pose limitations on their educational pathways; rather, these family relationships motivate Latino males and provide them with support that strengthens their aspirations to persist onto graduation.

Serving as the introduction to TETYC’s special issue on disability in two-year college English, this article centers disability as a necessary consideration for two-year colleges’ mission of open access. Drawing on the work of disability justice activists, advocates, and disability scholars, this introduction frames the work of the special issue’s contributors by tracing the ableist obstacles faced by disabled people in two-year college English and how these ableist structures overlap and intersect with other marginalized identities, thus creating a nesting doll of ableism.

Data from the Community College Student Experiences Questionnaire were analyzed for a sample of 315 Black women attending community colleges. Specifically, we conducted multivariate analyses to assess the relationship between background traits, commitments, engagement, academic performance, and satisfaction for Black women at community colleges. Descriptive results provide a profile
of Black women who attend community colleges in terms of age, native language, units taken, and grades. Hierarchical linear regression results suggest that our statistical model accounted for 22% of the variance in satisfaction. Significant predictors of Black women’s satisfaction at community colleges include age, effect of family on school work, and social engagement with faculty. Grades may also be significantly related to Black women’s satisfaction, although the relationship was reduced to nonsignificance over successive models. Implications for future policy, practice, and research are highlighted.

When students enter into the college and university setting, they become part of a community. As they continue throughout their academic careers, students develop relationships with various stakeholders and undergo personal situations, which can either facilitate or hinder their level of engagement and involvement with the academic communities they are a part of. The university setting provides a platform where there are multiple stakeholders in a large, complex system, which inevitably, may also come with many conflicts. The literature shows that student engagement and involvement on campus has been linked to perceived positive experiences and feeling of connectedness to their alma mater, as well as the increased likelihood that alumni will be active with their campuses. This quantitative methods dissertation consolidates the fields of conflict analysis and resolution with the study of student affairs to prove that there are certain variables that significantly prevent and significantly facilitate student engagement and involvement levels on campus. The study was built on a theoretical platform developed, titled the Hypothetical Algebraic Formula for Student Engagement (HAFSE) and used multiple regression, stepwise regression and observance of bivariate scatterplots and trend lines to discover that feeling of connectedness to student service’s staff, the student body and academic advisors; number of hours dedicated to studies, number of children, and number of hours worked, of all variables observed, have the most influence on student engagement and involvement. These 6 variables held true, across all academic levels, in a national sample of 309 students enrolled in institutions across 46 states in the US. The findings of this study can help both theorists and practitioners of conflict analysis and resolution and in the field of student affairs to identify the complex needs and wants of students of the 21st century, for the purposes of enhancing students’ experiences in the campus setting.

This study utilizes state-mandated data collected by Arizona community colleges to analyze whether students from the Borderlands of Arizona, who enroll in a Borderlands community college during their first academic year after graduation from high school, place into freshman English or developmental English, at the same rate as their non-border peers. The state of Arizona holds all high school students to the same standards for graduation, and all community colleges in Arizona use the same assessment instruments. As a result, the study hypothesizes all students should perform similarly. Statistical analysis reveals that, despite equal education standards and assessment, not all Arizona high school graduates are similarly prepared for the first-year language arts curriculum at the state’s community colleges. The study suggests possible causes for the disparities and establishes a firm starting point from which researchers and activists can study the reasons why some high school graduates in Arizona are clearly less prepared than others for the demands of college composition.

Studies of gender gaps in science, technology, engineering,and mathematics (STEM) higher education have rarely consid-ered 2-year colleges, despite the fact that most enrollees arewomen. Situated in an interdisciplinary literature on genderand inequality in students’pathways to STEM higher educa-tion, this study used Beginning Postsecondary Students:2004/2009 nationally representative panel data on 5,210 undergrad-uate students. The primary research question posed was: How does initial college type influence the gender gap in STEM undergraduate degrees? First, we describe and illustrate distinct patterns in the degrees earned by men and women who initially enroll in 2-year and 4-year institutions. Leveraging rich control measures, we estimated a series of multivariate logistic regressions to robustly estimate gender gaps in non-STEM,social/behavioral sciences, life sciences, and natural/engineering sciences degree fields. Results from these degree clusters were distinct and underscored the limitations of“STEM”as an umbrella category. College type was more influential on the life sciences and social/behavioral sciences; effects on natural/engineering sciences degrees were experienced primarily by men, especially among baccalaureate degree earners. Gender gaps among life sciences and natural/engineering sciences bachelor’s degree earners were wider among initial 2-yearstudents (favoring women and men, respectively). The discussion contextualizes and offers implications from our findings.

Course description: “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.” So says the melancholic character Jaques in As You Like It, one of the plays we will be studying in this class. Students often approach the study of Shakespeare with trepidation, intimidated by the density of his language and the distance between the centuries. In fact, once you become more familiar with Shakespearean English, many of the themes and problems are strikingly relevant to modern times—including the idea that all of us are acting different parts throughout our everyday lives.

This course will tackle representative samples of Shakespeare’s sonnets, tragedies, histories, and romances. We will make use of the vibrant theatre culture of New York City by attending one play as a class: Hunter Theatre Project’s Mac Beth, which got rave reviews last year. We will never leave the plays in the past, but make continual reference to modern adaptations and productions, and think through different possibilities for our own Shakespearean creations.

The course will be challenging but rewarding. In grappling with Shakespeare’s English together and moving at a reasonably slow pace, we will learn to unfold the dynamics of the seventeenth-century theatre and identify the lines of continuity with as well as the markers of difference from the past. We won’t get caught up in understanding every word, but we will attend to meter, prosody, imagery, and figurative language to again a deeper knowledge of how poetry works to unearth latent meaning and universal truths.

Low graduation rates are a significant issue for colleges. The majority of higher education institutions in the United States offer learning communities (LCs), which have been found to be effective for improving course success and persisting to the next semester. However, there is a gap in the literature regarding the effectiveness of LCs with different types of populations and different types of LCs. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to identify the most effective types of LCs. Research questions addressed the effects of different types of LCs on different student success outcomes for community colleges. The study was based on Tinto’s interactionist model of student departure and Astin’s model of student involvement. Studies examining the relationship between student success and participation in college LCs provided the data for the meta-analysis. A random effects model was used to generate the average effect size for 39 studies and 50 individual effect sizes. The results showed that LCs are most effective with community college students when they include additional support strategies, counseling is available to students, one of the linked courses is an academic skills course, at least one of the linked course is developmental, and the focus is on increasing course success or student engagement. The implications for positive social change suggest that LC programs implement two linked courses, include an academic skills course, focus on developmental courses, and provide access to a counselor and additional student support strategies. In addition, LC programs are most effective when the goals of the program are student engagement and course success.

This bit of higher ed satire tackles several issues related to community colleges: expensive national position opening searches, appropriate skill sets for administrators, the value of front line staff, and the composition of interview committees. Biting perhaps, but certainly truthful and entertaining.

The purpose of the Classroom Context Study was to explore how classrooms impact students' overall experience of being at a community college. The study was conducted at LaGuardia Community College by the Student Experiences Research Group (SERG) from 2015-2017. 11 courses were included using surveys and observations, which 280 students participated. Technology use in the classroom correlates with student motivation and attitude. Technology can be quite useful, as well as distracting.

This case study examines why 2-year colleges struggle to increase the racial diversity of their faculty. Through interrogating hiring procedures and identifying reasonable expectations for diversity within a college faculty, ethical dilemmas and practical implications of efforts to increase the hiring of faculty members of color emerge.

Though the concept ‘global learner’ has become a buzzword in educa- tion, few have critically analysed it. This article examines three types of ‘unlikely global learners’ who are not usually considered global learners even though they could be, according to a current de ni- tion: Ma ̄ori–English bilingual students in Aotearoa/New Zealand; an American student who studied abroad in the U.K. in ways not valued in the dominant study-abroad discourse of immersion; and immigrant English-as-a-Second-Language students in the U.S. I analyse what their erasure as global learners tells us, arguing that the notion of global learner acts as what Walter Benjamin calls a phantasmagoria that masks the power relations involved. Though critical of ‘global learners’ as a globalist concept, I call for expanding the notion in order to engage with current transformations in education.

Abstract This literature review examines issues related to the immigrant population at the community college. It centers on first-generation immigrants, including naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents, individuals who are in the process of legalizing their ...

Two approaches to writing instruction are the traditional teacher-directed approach and the process-oriented approach made popular in the late 1980s. For community college Developmental English programs faced with increased enrollment and institutional budget cuts due to the current recession, incorporating process-oriented approaches may seem attractive for their potential to allow instructors to deal with larger numbers of self-directed students in the classroom. The research and literature suggests that such a strategy might not prove useful because the efficacy of each of the approaches is dependent on the cognitive and social
development of individual learners. There are additional implications for Borderlands learners. Further research on approaches such as differentiated instruction might reveal whether programs can apply both teacher-directed and process-oriented instruction simultaneously in classrooms
with students of differing needs.