Politics

Bienvenido, Chancellor Salgado – Adelante!

So, we have a new Chancellor.*

Meet Juan Salgado–this interview from The Reader, published shortly after Chancellor Salgado was named a MacArthur Genius grant recipient for his work in community advocacy is a good place to start. Salgado is clearly connected to the city power networks and Mayor Emanuel–he also serves as a Commissioner on the Park District Board. Yesterday, I heard some grumblings about him as “anti-union” and guessed that it was related to his leadership of a couple of charter schools (and that seems to be the case–apparently he put up some resistance to one of his schools’ attempts to unionize, at least at first), but was happy to find this article from 2015 about unions and charter schools from just last year where, if you read through it, you’ll see him quoted as saying:

I sat down with Juan Salgado, the president and CEO of Instituto Del Progreso Latino, a nonprofit educational organization in Pilsen, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Chicago, to learn what it’s been like for him to oversee two charters that have unionized with AFT. Salgado believes that unions have been tremendous assets for his schools, particularly around some of the more fraught questions of wages and benefits. Can such issues be resolved “without a union?” he asks. “Yeah. But can we move forward to actually run a school? Probably not.” The mutual buy-in at the end of the negotiating process, Salgado said, created a better spirit at his schools.

Though Salgado was explicit that he disapproved of the way the union conducted its first organizing campaign—the organizers caricatured him as an evil boss, he says, solely to advance their strategy—he still feels the resulting unions, full of organized, passionate people, are no hindrance to excellence. “Unions ask a lot of questions! And that’s OK,” he says. “Critical questioning causes reflection and makes sure you have very good answers. And they demand transparency, and transparency is important. It’s a value that we should all have.”

I love the idea of having a Chancellor who has a moral commitment to education as transformative, though, I’m reminded that Chancellor Hyman has a deep belief in that same principle. I’m a little worried that so much of the talk about education and schooling that I see in relation to Chancellor Salgado (and the Mayor) consistently connects learning and jobs/careers. Even while I understand the appeal and value of a pathway to work and pay, we have seen where that narrow conception of the value of a liberal education can lead. I am heartened by his commitment to (and experience in) citizenship preparation and GED programs and recognize those and his charter school experience as providing something of what Faculty Council asked for in regard to an “educational background,” and I hope that Chancellor Salgado will recognize that his experiences at Moraine Valley and his work experience are a long way from being a complete understanding of what we do and do well. (For example, he is quoted in the Sun-Times article as saying, ““The school that I run, 54 percent of our students get some sort of college credential before they graduate from high school. We need to do that in every school because that saves students and families money and advances them into higher education,” he said. But a credit is not a credential, and a community college is not a bridge from high school to college–it IS college. But maybe that’s just semantics. Certainly everyone in a new job deserves the chance to learn and grow and show what they can do. I look forward to seeing what our new Chancellor does and can do. Hell, I look forward to actually seeing our Chancellor in the colleges for something other than a press conference with the Mayor.

 

*I have to also say that I was also happy to see that the news reports were not mere restatements of the press release, but provided fuller context on situation that our new Chancellor comes into. I’m not sure if it was a fluke or part of the information provided by our current board and leadership or whether we have Donald Trump to thank for the new willingness on the part of our local press to not accept the pronouncements of City Hall as unquestionable truth, but I’m happy to see it.

Testimony

City Council Chamber

Yesterday, the Committee on Education and Child Development for the City Council of Chicago met to discuss one agenda item – “calling for hearings to determine the impact and consequences of consolidating Child Development programs at the City Colleges to single location”. Several representatives from City Colleges provided testimony after which the Aldermen had a chance to ask questions. It was an interesting experience for me. I’ve never attended a City Council meeting before. I was impressed with the questions they asked about the 6 nationally recognized Child Development programs offered at City Colleges and the obvious time they had put in to understanding the program and its impact on the early childhood workforce in the city of Chicago. There were many moments when I felt the Aldermen had a better grasp of our program than upper administration at the District Office. Many people had the chance to speak including a graduate who described the impact of studying Child Development at a college close to her home in Englewood and how that helped her to make a better life for her own children as well as the young children and families she served in her work as a child care provider. It was quite moving, but also very informative and I’m glad people were listening.

I’ve included my full remarks below:

My name is Carrie Nepstad. I am an Associate Professor of Child Development at Harold Washington College. I have been in that position for 13 years. In that time, I have also served as the Board President for the “Associate Degree Early Childhood Teacher Educators” association. Currently, I am on the editorial Board of “Voices of Practitioners” a publication of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and I also serve on Mayor Emanuel’s Early Childhood Education Workforce Development Taskforce. In 2015, the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council of the National Academies produced a report entitled “Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation”. This is the full report. It is nearly 700 pages long. I served as a Practitioner Advisor on this report where I met with the committee at the National Academies offices in California Irvine as well as in Washington DC and then again here in Chicago.

All this is to illustrate that I serve many roles at the city, state, and national level where I am routinely asked to provide my expertise on a wide range of projects, initiatives, and policy. I am not rare. All of my fellow faculty in Child Development at City Colleges serve similar leadership roles and yet our own institution did not seek our expertise when the decision was made to close 5 nationally recognized Associate degree programs and leave Truman as the only option for Child Development students across the city. If they had consulted with us they would have seen how destructive this decision is to the child care workforce in the city of Chicago and how this decision, based on misleading information and inaccurate data, will hurt young children and their families in our most vulnerable neighborhoods for many years to come. We need to build the workforce and provide more access to higher education in our south and west side communities – not cut them off or create more burdens for them.

A major recommendation of this report is to increase the education level for the early childhood workforce. There is a sense of urgency in our field to provide access to higher education so people can build their academic credentials in the field. And, as the report states, strategies will be needed to

“mitigate possible negative consequences such as workforce shortages, [and] reduced diversity in the profession…” (p.8).

We have repeatedly stated that it will be exceptionally difficult for Child Development students residing and working on the south and west sides to travel across the city to attend classes at Truman College. The early childhood agencies where they work, which are legally bound to keep workers on site while children are present, will not be able to release employees early for such a long commute. The employers in all of your wards are already suffering under budget crises and teacher shortages. Shutting down these 5 accredited college programs puts additional undue burden on students, on early childhood employers and agencies, and on families in the communities where the early childhood center is often one the strongest resources in the neighborhood.

Because we draw students from every region of the city, Chicago is in an enviable position to meet the recommendations of this report and to build a highly qualified and diverse early childhood workforce. But we have to be mindful of the barriers our students face; they typically work full-time in early childhood while pursuing their degree and they often have children of their own. They are not in a high-wage position, yet they often feel compelled to give back to their communities. The strength of the early childhood workforce in Chicago is that the workers come from the communities in which they serve. We know how important this is for the development of young children and their families. We also know that the stresses they face are not mere inconveniences.

From page 476 of the report,

“The health and well-being of care and education professionals play a critical role in their effectiveness as educators and thus in the development of children… These effects of the stressors they experience can restrict the ability of educators to create positive, high-quality learning environments for their students”.

One of my recent graduates is a veteran who has faced many challenges upon returning to civilian life. While in Iraq, he would often be asked to play soccer with the local kids. Through this act of service, he came to realize that working with children was his true calling. Another student started attending classes in the late eighties and through a series of life events has had to stop and restart her studies many times over the years. Last semester, she almost stopped out again because her daughter had been diagnosed with a serious illness, but with the encouragement of her classmates she was finally able to complete her student teaching and achieve her goal. Another student, late in life, is now raising her nephew with disabilities while working full-time and continuing to take one class at a time to finish her degree. In her final semester, she suffered an illness, but she completed her homework from her hospital bed because she was so determined to finish on time with her classmates, and earn her degree.

I’ve worked with hundreds of students over the past 15 years that are just like these. They are real people facing real challenges. The role they play is extremely important in our society and we should be doing everything we can to support them. Our students are strong and they have demonstrated an ability to face many challenges yet City Colleges asks them to do the impossible when they say that students can get from their workplace on the far south or west side of the city to a 6pm course on the far north side using public transportation or even a shuttle. This is physically impossible. How dare we suggest that they will simply figure this out or go somewhere else? As a city, we can do better to support early childhood education. This is arguably one of the most important workforce development projects of our time and we can do better.

This is not about faculty who are supposedly unwilling to change. Most disciplines and programs across the City Colleges struggle to align their curriculum, yet the Child Development faculty have twice redesigned every core course in order to meet the demands of the field, they have gone through a rigorous accreditation process, and they have worked together to align offerings with the state credentialing system.

We reinvent ourselves annually. We are not afraid of change.

Child Development faculty have been working closely with the Education Dean over the past year to provide ongoing recommendations for the various upgrades City Colleges is making to the classroom spaces at Truman. We fully support that City Colleges has made some investment in that program as it was the only program in the District that did not have adequate resources including a lab space. We can continue to work together to support all Child Development programs at City Colleges. This absolutely can be done within budget. In fact, it has the potential of becoming a model within the District and beyond.

I want you to know that because of its unique District system with 6 separate accreditations, the Child Development programs at City Colleges of Chicago are known across the country and this process is being watched closely by Associate Degree faculty and institutions of higher ed. from Washington State to Washington DC. The people in our field know about what is happening here. They know it’s a mistake to shut down these programs and they are watching to see what the city of Chicago chooses to do about it.

Thank you very much for your time.

Campus Zero Campus Woes

Posted on behalf of Michael Heathfield and FourSee Faculty

Campus Zero Campus Woes

FourSeeYou can’t take the context out of the college, whatever your status, you really can’t. Let’s just say life just got a whole lot tougher for Rahm’s crew at Campus Zero.  The ballot box dispatched Anita Alvarez faster than it takes for a college president to get a master’s degree!  Who knows whether the CZ crew will just double down on some disastrous decisions made of late or join with students and faculty as stakeholders with considerable expertise, opinions and power.

In my last post I asked my top ten questions.  Needless to say, there have been no responses from people with the data at Campus Zero.  It’s strange how data disappears when more challenging questions are asked of it. Of course, some is buried deep in the hope it doesn’t see the light of day. Some, if very politically inconvenient, is ignored and the PR lights move onto the latest glittery distraction.

It may also be true, since these things are rarely exclusive, that the best minds at Campus Zero do not fully understand the consequences, assumptions, and miscalculations in their policy decisions. It is very difficult to impute intentions when so very little of substance is provided for public debate and dialogue.  I get it as a political and management strategy. I really don’t get it as an academic strategy that should embed itself firmly in students, teaching and learning – these are primary drivers of all we do.

Everyone at CCC, including the CZ crew, exists on this simple foundation of students, teaching and learning.  Nothing around it exists without this trilogy. We are not a research institution; no one gets paid based on the amount and impact of faculty publications.  Postgraduate students don’t do the bulk of frontline teaching and grading work while stellar academics do the occasional star performances in huge lecture halls.  This is not who we are or what we do. So maybe I need to be clearer in my intent – when I ask questions of Campus Zero initiatives that are built upon our crucial foundations. Public education is exactly what is says, public. So private decision making and shutting down discourse is not the context in which we exist.

The Chancellor has publicly said she doesn’t care about recruitment – only retention and graduations.  Now, I have never been a full subscriber to the “logic model” approach to education, but surely you can’t have any outcomes that don’t have a relationship to inputs?  This has never been truer when you look, for example, at the quiet crises unfolding at Kennedy-King and Olive Harvey, where recruitment is significantly down over the past five years. Full-time faculty at Olive has been struggling to make load and have already been shuttling off to other campuses. I have seen nothing to convince me that, when finally complete, the new logistics and distribution center is going to lift everyone up together.

What will happen to declining numbers at Kennedy-King when Social Work and Addiction Studies transition to Malcolm X as planned?  Despite being the first-ever winner of the Aspen Award, Kennedy-King also stands as a stark rebuttal of the mantra, “If you build it, they will come”.

So tell me again why we are pulling Child Development programs from these important south side colleges?  How do we support our important colleagues as community disinvestment continues to surround them?

When the CZ crew makes a $21 million hole in the operating budget, by over-estimating how many students they can “incentivize” to become full-time, do we think budget impacts will be distributed with equity?  The differing states and fates of our vital seven colleges are intrinsically tied to broader social issues that raise Chicago’s profile on the national stage in very unflattering ways.

I live in Edgewater, very near Truman College, soon to be another north side recipient of capital and human investment as Child Development programs leave HWC and their south and west side neighborhoods. I can walk to my new 2013 library, next to my new Wholefoods, while I live right next to my new Mariano’s. What is happening here?

Chicago remains a very divided city.  The only resource that is shared with grace and equity from north to south is the lakefront.  Step away from there and you will enter different worlds that tragically demonstrate how politically controlled public resources are riddled with injustices.  Compare my Edgewater Library to the Woodson Regional Library, home to the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature. The façade of the Woodson has been surrounded by scaffolding for fourteen years. The Woodson is in the Washington Heights neighborhood. Yes, fourteen years.

When taxpayer resources are distributed with such disregard for equity, justice, and accountability – public servants must expect to be called to account. Questions and answers can be very challenging.  As Alvarez discovered, Chicago residents can deliver a very firm answer when public officials, and their decisions, are aired in public. National attention is trained on Chicago because of what elected officials and their chosen public servants are doing.  This is the context in which political decisions are being made. Public debate is essential, however painful or uncomfortable it may be. Community college policy decisions, by political appointees, are on the agenda and no amount of “business as usual” will shift this gaze.

— Mike Heathfield for FourSee faculty

 

 

Michael Heathfield Has Ten Important Questions

Posted on behalf of Michael Heathfield:

 

Top Ten Questions for Campus Zero Talent

 

In the spirit of academic freedom, openness, integrity and truth-seeking here are some suggested questions, many data-driven – all about management, to be asked of our leadership:

 

  1. What has been to total cost of the College to Careers program across all seven real campuses since its inception (personnel, branding, TV spots, etc.) and how many CCC students have acquired a $15+ per hour full-time job through the auspices of the College to Careers initiative?

 

  1. What was the total cost of the Campus Shuttle busing program since it began through to the end of 2015? During that time, how many individual student journeys took place? Were the taxpayers of Chicago or the State aware that they were funding transportation for students twice, once through the UPass system and again through the shuttle system?

 

  1. What has been the total expense (loss in tuition income, branding, PR, personnel time, etc.) at each of the real campuses for the re-invented Star Scholarship Program since 2014?

 

  1. In which City office did the idea for the 2015 $30,000 bonus for Chancellor Hyman originate?

 

  1. With the implementation of the new administrative system, CS9, how many students across the district had their financial aid delayed and how many students had their degree path erroneously changed?

 

  1. What has been the total cost in personnel (administrative, clerical, technical) time in correcting the mass of problems created by CS9 and who is accountable for the choice of a system which was so incapable of connecting and cooperating with our other well-established, functioning administrative systems?

 

  1. What has been the faculty participation rate, over the past five years, for attendance at the new, bigger, branded, too long, too early graduation event at U.I.C.(More info HERE, HERE, and HERE)?

 

  1. Who in Talent Acquisition at Campus Zero believed a college president with only a bachelor’s degree was the right academic choice for the third largest community college system in the U.S.?

 

  1. Who exactly at Campus Zero imagined that filling in a form to identify your religious affiliations for wearing a head covering should even be an agenda item for a diverse city college system?

 

  1. Why are college administrators now cutting college courses implying budget cuts are to blame, when Campus Zero over-estimated student income from an influx of full-time students by $20 million? (See this Board Presentation staring at Slide 20)

 

Many of the answers may confirm how much CCC believes in data driven decision-making, academic freedom and local government integrity for taxpayer dollars. The answers may also help everyone get at the philosophy behind some of our important fiscal and academic decisions of late. Our very risky financial environment is unlikely to change for the better any time soon. So management and fiscal decisions are very important to all of us.

 

Please use these ten questions as starters – be creative in your own follow up questions and do share the responses you receive. This is what democracy and dialogue looks like, right?

 

Depending on your level of assertiveness, tenure status, belief in democracy and organizing skills, you can ask these Top Ten questions in numerous ways:

 

  • Ask your own Alderman or Alderwoman to ask some or all of them to the appropriate people at the City.
  • Ask your Cook County or State Legislators to ask these questions to appropriate people at the City.
  • Ask the Governor of Illinois to ask the Mayor of Chicago, since they are wine and moneymaking friends.
  • Ask the Mayor to ask the Chancellor.
  • Ask students to ask their Student Government Association to ask whomever they want to.
  • Ask the Board of Trustees to ask The Chancellor.
  • Ask your friendly local media representatives, investigative journalists, the Medhill School of Journalism at Northwestern, NBC Investigates, or the Better Government Association to ask whomever they want to.

 

Whatever you choose to do, please ask and be persistent. We need to know the facts. Tough decisions, tough times, accountability and responsibility – we are all grown folks here – we can take it! No harm in asking, right?

Mike Heathfield

 

 

 

UP-UPDATED: CASTpods: listen, if you like

UPDATED: March 31, 2016  May 3, 2016

In an active attempt to hybridize CAST content, Kamran and I decided to take a two-prong delivery approach for CASTivities this spring: we’ve kept traditional meetings, but we have actively sought to CAST (pun, absolutely and totally, intended) a wider net.

I have been working to diversify and digitize content via podcasts or what Kamran coined: CASTpods. Currently, we’re housing the CASTpods on Sound Cloud. You can take a listen there, which 0ver 150 almost 275 300 400 of you have.  Here’s a rundown of the first six current nine fourteen for the spring 2016 semester. Due to space constraints, some of the earlier CASTpods have been archived on Dropbox.

CASTpod #1 (archived)
In the inaugural CASTpod, Kristin and Kamran talk about the preliminary questionnaire results; bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress; and what historical figure Kristin identifies with and how Kamran would choose to die.

CASTpod #2 (archived)
In the second CASTpod of the spring 2016 semester, Kristin talks about the spaces where we learn with faculty member Elisabeth Heard Greer. Elisabeth also serves as the academic online coordinator for the English department. From Malcolm X’s car sitting on a platform at the newly opened MXC to Foucault, Elisabeth and Kristin chat about the physical and virtual places where we teach and our students learn.

CASTpod #3 (archived)
For the third CASTpod of the spring 2016 semester, Kristin talks about math education with faculty member Chris Sabino. As an impetus for our discussion, we reference Conrad Wolfram’s TED Talk: “Teaching Kids Real Math with Computers.” Chris waxes mathematical about why we teach students math, numeracy, the value of math education, and the conceptual and practical realities of math education.

CASTpod #4 (archived)
The fourth CASTpod of the semester is a conversation between Kristin Bivens and Youth Work scholar and teacher Michael Heathfield.  Mike is a youth work and assessment scholar who has an impressive publication and speaking record on both accounts. In our discussion, one that emotionally and intellectually engaged me as a Chicagoan, teacher, and scholar, we discuss the role of violence, social justice, and a staggering 47% statistic that you need to listen to Mike speak about.  There are changes underfoot and Mike most eloquently shows the impact of those changes on our students while suggesting privileging the recruitment of a certain kind of student at CCC.

CASTpod #5 (archived)
For the fifth CASTpod of the semester, assessment gurus Carrie Nepstad and Erica McCormack join me for a conversation about the Assessment Committee’s integral role at HW. At the end of the discussion, I draw the conclusion regarding apt disciplinary positioning that makes Child Development (CD) faculty the leaders in assessment. At the end of our CASTpod, we share worries about our CD colleagues, as well as wonder about the HLC’s next visit.

CASTpod #6 (archived)
One CASTpod just wasn’t enough for talking assessment with Carrie Nepstad. So, Carrie joins me again this week for CASTpod #6 to discuss “Closing the Loop”–the Assessment Committee’s effort to take what we learn via assessment to improve our teaching and our students’ learning. Want to get involved? Check out the Assessment Committee’s page: www.ccc.edu/colleges/washington…ges/Assessment.aspx

CASTpod #7
Frank Wang, in the 7th CASTpod of the semester, discusses his National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Numeracy Infusion Course for Higher Education (NICHE) during his recent visit from La Guardia Community College (CUNY) to Harold Washington College (CCC) with Kristin. Dr. Wang defines numeracy as the “contextualized use of numbers and data in a manner that requires critical thinking.” Further, he explains how NICHE is similar to Writing Across the Curriculum programs on many higher education campuses, while explaining the importance of quantitative reasoning across curriculum in community colleges.

CASTpod #8
The mid-term and CASTpod 8 are here. And in keeping with being in the middle of things, in this week’s CASTpod Kristin talk about embodiment, quantitative data in context, and post-humanism. She calls on our colleagues to be aware of how you use technology in the classroom and she suggests the potential repercussions that go hand-in-hand with technology–disembodied decision making.

CASTpod #9
For the 9th CASTpod of the spring 2016 semester, Kristin interviews esteemed colleague Jen Asimow from Applied Sciences. In the interview, Jen offers practical, expert, and preliminary advice for thinking about re-designing courses using universal backward design principles. During the conversation, Kristin queries where should someone begin if they’re interested in re-vamping an inherited course? Or designing a new one? Spoiler alert: start with SPAS and SLOs. Teaser: you’re going to have to listen to Jen explain how and why.

CASTpod #10
Joining me for the first CASTpod post-spring break is Associate Dean of Instruction Cindy Cerrentano and co-chair of the department of English, Speech, Theater, and Journalism Sarah Liston. In a longer CASTpod, Cindy, Sarah, and Kristin discuss some data regarding high risk courses at HW, the importance of contextualizing these (and all) statistics, and connections between success, learning, and embodiment.

Kristin begins by asking a tough question: aren’t we always going to have high risk courses? If you accept the premise of that question, you’ll enjoy the dialogue that ensued.

Want to know more? You can read an article Cindy mentions: “On the path to Graduation, Life Intervenes” (chronicle.com/article/On-the-Pat…-Graduation/235603; and an article Kristin refers to “The Home that Me Doesn’t Exist Anymore” (www.buzzfeed.com/sandersjasmine19…nQVNEay)(written for Buzzfeed by an HW student, Jasmine Sanders).

CASTpod #11
If you’ve been at HW long enough, you know that my guest for CASTpod 11 has worn many hats: faculty member, department chair, dean of instruction, vice president, and primary HLC self-study author, Dr. John Hader. Hader has superbly served many roles in his more than 20 years at HW. In this week’s CASTpod, I pick Hader’s brain about his experience writing the self-study report from the last HLC visit nearly (gasp!) ten years ago.

We discuss what he learned, how he managed it, and expertise according to Barbara Oakley. Oakley uses neuroscience to explain experts as “mak[ing] complex decisions rapidly, shut[ing] down their conscious system and rely[ing] on their well-trained intuition and deeply engrained repertoire of [learned] chunks [of knowledge].” Experts wear many hats, and in our conversation, Hader explores some of his.
CASTpod #12
Did you know there are many spaces where students can work with a tutor? In this week’s podcast—the twelfth of the spring 2016 semester—BriAnne Nichols sat down with me to discuss the work the office of academic support does.

Teaching face-to-face? There are tutoring opportunities for your students. Teaching online? There are tutoring opportunities for your students. Teaching hybrid? There are tutoring opportunities for your students.

See the trend? There are numerous opportunities for you to work with academic support to further enhance your students’ learning. You can listen to BriAnne explain how you can get involved and what we currently offer. (And don’t worry, I think she’ll present more during FDW.)

CASTpod #13
Thinking about teaching without a textbook? In the #13 CASTpod of the spring semester, Math Department’s Jeff Swigart eloquently explains his choices to seek out alternatives to textbooks for the math courses he instructs using Open Education Resources (OER). When asked about the essential question faculty should consider before choosing an OER, he responded: evaluate the text before you choose it.

Whatever your position on OERs versus traditional textbooks from for-profit publishers, OER’s are current alternatives for faculty and students to deliver content in traditional classroom spaces. Further, an important and pivotal question for teachers and teaching: do we use technology to close or open learning opportunities?

CASTpod #14
Whether you can believe it or not, it’s almost the end of the 2016 spring semester. Looking forward, in a solo CASTpod #14, Kristin talks about the soon-to-be-in if not-already-in-your-inbox Faculty Development Week (FDW) proposal request for presentations.

The theme of FDW 2016 is Creating Connections Across Divides. FDW will be held at HWC from Tuesday, August 16 to Friday, August 19 (9am to 3pm each day).

Please submit your proposal by May 20.

To submit, follow the Google Form link in the CCC email announcement.

Compensation for Presenting: Part time faculty are paid $25 per 1 hour of presentation (a maximum of $100). This is in addition to any compensation administration offers for attendance. For example, if a PT faculty member presents two, 2-hour sessions they will be paid $100.

Full time faculty are comped 1 hour of registration duties for each hour of FDW presentation. Presenting does not count as additional attendance for required FDW time. For example, if an FT faculty member with standard registration duties provides two one-hour presentations, they will only be required to complete 28 registration hours.

As always, we invite a wide variety of useful and/or stimulating breakaway sessions from faculty, including both full-time and part-time. To help you frame (but not limit) your proposal submission, you might find it helpful to consider Creating Connections Across Divides–the FDW 2016 theme.

Some suggestions for sessions might include, but are not limited to:

+ Discipline Exhibitions: Past sessions like the Cadaver Lab Tour, Architecture Walk, and Creative Writing Workshops provide a sample of all the amazing activities and inquiries going on throughout the rest of our building. Our community is filled with experts from a wide variety of disciplines. It is often a pleasure to learn something from our colleagues’ expertise, and these experiences can often have unexpected benefits in our own classrooms. We are interested both in reprisals of past sessions and new ideas.

+Semester Preparation: Sessions that help faculty setup their Blackboard sites, re-design a syllabus, or think of a new plan for assignments and tests are useful to many faculty. We are interested in presenters who wish to provide a tutorial on different design strategies, lead a workshop, or facilitate a showcase of completed syllabi, Blackboard sites, or assignments.

+Science of Teaching: If you have been doing research on the science of teaching, it may be useful for our community for you to disseminate and share what you’ve learned.

+Technologies in Pedagogy: As technology changes, faculty will find more applications for various programs and devices within the classroom. If you have something you would like to share, we would be happy to put you on the program.

+Seminar Discussions: Are you interested in hosting a seminar discussion around a particular pedagogical question or topic? This year, we are encouraging proposals for open-ended seminar discussions in the hopes of fostering more exchanges of ideas and perspectives between faculty.

+Support System Tutorials: Everybody loves filling out travel reimbursement forms, but sometimes a tutorial on our various support systems can be useful. If you feel comfortable and experienced with a particular set of support systems, we encourage you to share your knowledge.

Again, these are merely suggestions, and we will be happy to consider proposals that fall outside the above topics and within or outside the FDW theme: Creating Connections Across Divides.

See you at FDW 2016!

 

Thanks for continuing to listen listening!

I have had the most worthwhile experiences talking with our colleagues about different topics. The discussions in CASTpods #4 and #5 haunt me still.

Have a listen, and look for a mid-term end of the semester survey about CAST in a few weeks in your inbox over spring break around finals week, as well as our new CAST space on the HWC/CCC webpage: http://www.ccc.edu/colleges/washington/departments/Pages/CAST.aspx.

On Twitter? Follow us there, too: @CASThwc

Think, Know, Prove: Degrees of Difference (@ Harold Washington)

Think, Know, Prove is an occasional Friday feature, where a topic with both mystery and importance is posted for community discussion. The title is a shortened version of the Investigative Mantra: What do we think, what do we know, what can we prove? and everything from wild speculation to resource referencing fact is welcome here.

As promised, long ago, I have school by school installments of the degrees awarded. Unfortunately, my numbers do NOT include the remarkable 2015 numbers, as I have not been able to acquire a school-by-school breakout of those yet, but even still, the trends are still relevant. Here’s the picture for Harold Washington (click on the picture to make it bigger):

Degrees--HW 2014

As you can see, the total degrees for Harold tripled (!) from 2008 to 2014, with increases across the board. Almost a quarter of that growth, however, is due to a spike in AGS degrees. I do not have any accounting of how many of those 332 AGS degrees granted in 2014 were retroactive (probably not many since CS9 was not yet operational) and I’m also guessing that few of them were reverse-transfer degrees, since many of those articulation agreements (and, again, the software) were not in place either in 2014, which means that, likely, most of those were degrees actually granted to students finishing in 2014, a year that saw us grant more AA degrees in 2014 than we gave out degrees of ANY sort in 2008, which is an undeniable positive, double the AS degrees over the same period (again, a positive), and a year in which nearly 4 in 10 of the degrees were AGS, up from 1 in 10.

So, what do you think, what do you know, what can you prove?

 

NPR Survey on Trigger Warnings

Speaking of trigger warnings, a colleague passed along a survey put together by and education reporter at NPR named Meg Anderson. She writes:

We are doing some informal research at colleges nationwide on the use of “trigger warnings” – a disclaimer to students that upcoming material could have adverse effects for students.

She invited my colleague to share the survey with “faculty and staff in your department who teach students directly,” and gave me permission to do the same. If you’re interested, click HERE for the survey. It takes less than a minute unless you’re a really, really slow reader. If you’d like to know more/say more, you can contact her at manderson@npr.org.

Think, Know, Prove: More Stats, More Questions

Think, Know, Prove is an occasional Friday feature, where a topic with both mystery and importance is posted for community discussion. The title is a shortened version of the Investigative Mantra: What do we think, what do we know, what can we prove? and everything from wild speculation to resource referencing fact is welcome here.

Yes, yes, I know I promised a look at the college by college numbers last week, and I meant it. But in the interim, I was contacted by somebody with a request to include the system-wide completion numbers from 2015 as soon as possible, numbers I didn’t have, but which the person provided for me (with assurances of their accuracy and the suggestion that they could be confirmed through Open Book). If you watched Chancellor Hyman’s speech to the Civic Club of Chicago, you saw a preview of these, but not the breakout by degrees (a breakout, which our Chancellor told us is just a tangle of “alphabet soup,” a rather flippant dismissal of one of our concerns, especially since it comes  RIGHT AFTER her telling the story about how her own AGS degree turned out not to have prepared her well for transfer! Amazing, again!! But I digress).

Suffice it to say that the numbers were interesting enough that I decided to delay my college-by-college account of changes in degree granting for a week (or two–I have a couple posts on “Merit Pay” that I’ve wanted to do for awhile now) to give another look at the system-wide completion numbers with our most recent year included. Here they are (click on the chart to make it bigger):

Degrees--System (2015)The numbers are astonishing. AA degrees increased almost 40% last year alone, while AS degrees more than doubled! AGS degrees are still much larger than they used to be, but down 17.4% from last year. So what happened? Something must be working…I don’t see how it could be the Pathways since they’re minimally rolled out at this point. Can’t be “Campus Solutions” Course Planner, since that just rolled out last spring. So…what the hell? I know I’m supposed to just clap and say, “Good job, everybody!” but it seems rather strange, doesn’t it? I mean, it feels kind of “Enron-y” doesn’t it? What am I missing?

I would be curious to see how many of these graduations were of students who were enrolled in 2014-2015 (and how many were students whose completion was a function of having completion credits reverse transferred from the school they transferred to. I wish I could take a survey of the recipients and find out how many were surprised to find out that they’d earned a CCC degree. Maybe none. Maybe lots?

And, per Anthony’s point (in the comments on my last week’s post) the increase probably has something to do with the huge enrollment spike we had during and over the couple years following the Great Recession of 2008. I also wonder how many of these students benefited from the relaxation of the home campus requirement to just 15 hours (when was that changed, 2014? I’m too lazy to look). But even with all of that, 575 AS degrees? I didn’t see that coming. It’ll be interesting to see what the school to school breakout is on those.

Anyway, there it is–a surprising set of numbers. What do you think? What do you know? What can you prove?

The Chancellor’s Address (Yesterday) to the City Club of Chicago

In which, the Mayor reminds everyone of what a terrible job we were doing educating a student he met in 2011 (based on pretty much nothing other than his own sense of things and our graduation rate) before announcing the new Start Scholarship partnerships with 4-year schools and offering an easy, but fallacious, equivocation between improved completion rates and “improved educational quality,” before introducing the Chancellor who announces our “preliminary” (but impressive) numbers for 2015, explains the strategies of reinvention, and engages with various criticisms of Reinvention and ‘Consolidation’ using textbook examples of various fallacies including:

~”Straw Person” (26:00–has anyone made the claim that “students don’t travel out of their neighborhoods to attend one of the City Colleges”? I don’t think that’s the point that’s been made in various critiques of consolidation. That’s obviously false. The question/doubt is about whether Child Development students will travel to Truman, which is a very different question);

~”False Dichotomy” (at one point the Chancellor says that to help students out of poverty, we must choose to provide “quality over proximity” as if the two were suddenly mutually exclusive? Can’t we provide both? If not, somebody should tell Starbucks that their business model is deeply flawed);

~and more (How many can you find?) before building to a final argument that  manages to take credit for student success on account of changes and supports that have resulted from Reinvention while deriding critics for their calls for various forms of student support. Because students need to learn the lessons of tough love. They have to want it, be hungry and make it work. So, people who provide things for students that they need are “innovative” while people who criticize those plans or ask for other kinds of supports are excuse-makers. I should try this with my classes. “I have provided you with everything you need. If you say you need more than or other than what I have provided you, I will know you are a whining excuse maker. Toughen up! It’s true that I have provided you with no textbook, but I needed no textbook and so it can be done. Make it work.”

Amazing.

My favorite quote? Speaking of Mayor Emanuel, the Chancellor says, “Neither of us have time for complicated deliberations when decisive action is required.” (13:55). That made me laugh out loud. In truth, this Chancellor and her Reinvention have accomplished many good things; our Student Services were a MESS for years after decades of neglect and administrative impairment, and they are much improved (or at least much expanded and much more attended to). They have some significant evidence of achievement, it’s true. It is, perhaps, too much to ask that a little intellectual honesty be invited along for the ride down victory lane. Anyway, you should watch this:

Website Wednesday: Models and Data

Website Wednesday is a (mostly) weekly feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.

Here in week 7 of our semester, I’m a little less far behind than usual for some reason, but a little further behind than I was last week owing to a cold and so I didn’t have enough time to put up the post I’d planned (maybe next week!). Instead, in keeping with Kamran’s theme, I offer you three gifts:

~a truly great (and short) read called, “The Deception that Lurks in Our Data-Driven World,” that includes stories about bathroom scales, the German “Normalbaum” disaster that ensued from human efforts to make an unruly ecosystem easier to quantify and an overabundance of faith in their understanding of they system they were quantifying, and the sentence “Raw data is an oxymoron;”

~an even shorter, quicker read on one example of what happens when a model (even a good one) is mistaken for reality; and

~this fun, heretical presentation on “Big Data” (you can skim through the slides and summarizing text by clicking HERE if you don’t have time for the video):

Enjoy!

And when you’re done, go read Kamran’s piece…

Website Wednesday

Website Wednesday is an occasional feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.

You might recall the article on Immigrants and temp work that I linked to a few weeks ago. It was published on today’s featured Web site, ProPublica–they describe themselves as an “independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.” They go on to say, “Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.”

I can think of a few people who might blanch at the squishiness of some of those terms, but as you can see from this list of stories, they pick interesting subjects to explore, use interesting visual representations of data, and quality writing and story-telling.

It’s well worth a few minutes, and you might even want it in your list of bookmarks. Good stuff.

Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading is a regular feature with three links to fascinating, provocative, or particularly well-written, (usually) long-form pieces that I have found and collected over the last three years. You should expect that each of the links will require some time to explore. There will not be a test, but there may be a theme.

~When Your (Brown) Body is a (White) Wonderland: Tressie McMillan Cottom is a consistently great read. You should be check her stuff out regularly.

~Reacting to Miley: A reflection on the criticism of Miley Cyrus, especially the new forms of it and what they tell us.

~Dave Chappelle Didn’t Melt Down: Maybe you are a fan of his (or not). Maybe you read the NY Times article about his return to stand-up while procrastinating on your syllabus writing (or not). Maybe you read about his latest controversial moment (or not). No matter. Read this. It’s not very long, but it will make you think.

And, just as last week’s theme (philosophy), might have been too obvious to need mentioning, same, too, for this week, but, just in case, I hope it is clear that the theme here is “Consumption.”

Cross Talk: Social Science Edition

Political Science/International Relations emphasis!

~9 Questions about Syria: Prepare for intervention talk; with a handy, fascinating chart about the Middle East; also, here is a look at two sides of the American debate.

~Gender Bias in Political Science: the political turns out to be personal after all!

~The New Power Map: In January I read a book my Dad gave me called, The Revenge of Geography; been fascinated by the geographical influence on geopolitics ever since.

~Geopolitical Insecurities and Territorial Grievances in East Asia: Not convinced geography matters? Check this one out.

Two for Tuesday: Preparing for Tonight’s Presidential Debate

I am providing the following as a public service. You can thank me in advance or afterward or not at all.

This is my second favorite essay ever written about Star Wars, entitled, “Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy Are Probably Totally Illiterate”.

And THIS is my most favorite, called “Death Star? No Thank You“. It is so full of greatness, that I try to read it once a month in the hope that some of it will rub off on me.  I hope you find it equally thrilling. If not, read the comments. Glorious.

Both or either or neither may prove helpful or unhelpful in preparing your mind for the evening’s political rhetoric.

Enjoy!