What's Going On at the Faculty Senate?
As most of you know, members of the faculty at Cabrillo are represented by two organizations – CCFT and Faculty Senate – that traditionally have worked together to best serve our community. At the same time, these two entities have distinct areas of responsibility: CCFT handles workload and compensation issues, while Faculty Senate is in charge of academic and professional matters.
Change seems to be the order of the day at Cabrillo and in the world of higher education around the state and country. The Cabrillo Faculty Senate continues to plow forward – but perhaps the better metaphor is the tacking of a sailboat, back and forth and eventually forward. Here are some areas still on my radar:
- Hiring Committees – 8 new contract faculty, a new HAWK Dean, the college President, and LOTS of movement in classified positions
- The Cabrillo Accreditation Report entering its final phases of production - even as the conversation about the tendency of ACCJC (our accrediting agency) to put California community colleges on increasingly severe levels of sanctions enters a highly contested and public arena
- SLO (and AUO – Administrative Unit Outcomes) assessments becoming more a part of the culture of the college, and requiring more systematic mechanisms for reporting our assessments, and raising questions around the state about workload and academic freedom
- Curriculum Committee, programs, and PCs doing the heavy lifting on curriculum review, bringing us into line with the new repeatability and repetition regulations
- A rapidly evolving landscape around distance learning, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and the involvement of private companies in providing platforms for MOOCs, like Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, ItunesU, etc. - Just this week CA Sen. Steinberg introduced SB 520 that proposes a system-wide commitment from community colleges, UCs, and CSUs to develop and offer online courses in 50 heavily impacted subjects. This could be a game-changer. Cabrillo’s Faculty Senate has formed a committee to monitor the MOOC issue and keep the Senate informed on developments.
And then there’s the challenge of implementing the Student Success Act of 2012. HASS Dean Isabel O’Connor articulated the task a couple of weeks ago, saying that our job ought to be to find the intersection of state mandates and Cabrillo’s practices, more of an emphasis in scaling up what we already are doing, rather that inventing new burdensome practices. The Faculty Senate has been discussing Student Success at a number of meetings this semester, and the Cabrillo Governing Board has scheduled a special Board study session on May 5 to discuss the college’s efforts around Student Success. A Cabrillo task force – consisting of administrators, faculty, and staff from the Student Service and Instruction components – will begin meeting this month to help coordinate and focus our local efforts.
Student Success reforms require some state-mandated changes in matriculation – including students’ assessment, orientation, and Education Plans – that will involve not only Student Services faculty, but also Instructional faculty becoming even more involved in helping our students to successfully achieve their goals. The latest state-sponsored study from the RP (Research and Planning) Group concludes that the efforts of instructional faculty to inspire, engage, and nurture their students are the most important factors in fostering student success in our community colleges.
At Cabrillo we will be looking to sponsor more outreach efforts towards our K-12 feeder schools and better tracking tools to tell us what our students DO after leaving Cabrillo. We will be looking carefully at orientation processes, broadening the scope of Counseling and Guidance courses, using student cohorts, re-purposing faculty orientation, and giving all instructors a toolkit of “best practices” that we can use in our syllabi and in our interactions with our students.
All of these efforts will require faculty leadership and involvement. For my part, I am convinced that our Student Success efforts will benefit our students, as long as we continue to effectively uphold academic standards as we move to increase student success. At the same time, as someone in a position to try to impact our legislators and educational leaders, I will continue to speak out on the limits of the Student Success agenda. “Success” is a concept that can never be fully measured by objective metrics. We need to forcefully defend access to CA community colleges, especially among our non-traditional college population. And we need to defend some of the “traditional” values of our educational system, as I put in my own syllabus this semester: “Recognize that education is a lifelong goal – that the rewards of a good liberal arts education are often personal, ethical, and societal, not always financial.” The accountability and efficiency models that continue to influence educational policy are not always congruent with the best parts of our students’ educational experience. As faculty, we have a duty to continue to keep the best interests of our students at the forefront of all of our conversations.
What You Can Do:
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by Michael Mangin
Faculty Senate President
| "Success” is a concept that can never be fully measured by objective metrics. We need to forcefully defend access to CA community colleges, especially among our non-traditional college population. And we need to defend some of the “traditional” values of our educational system, as I put in my own syllabus this semester: “Recognize that education is a lifelong goal – that the rewards of a good liberal arts education are often personal, ethical, and societal, not always financial.” |