Call for Proposals: Council for the Study of Community Colleges General Conference

The Council for the Study of Community Colleges has put out a call for proposals for their annual conference. 

Proposal Deadline is January 5, 2018.

CSCC will be held April 26-28, 2018 at the Marriott Quorum Hotel in Addison, Texas.

Comments

Edmund,

Is there an area of focus for this presentation?  Since I am not familiar with this conference, would you tell me a bit more about the type of people that attend this conference, too?

Thank you,

Brooke

Hi Brooke, 

Great question! Below are the categories by which proposals are reviewed. It is a smaller conference with attendance that hovers around the 250 mark. Attendees are a good mix of scholars, scholar-practitioners, and graduate students. I've attended the conference since 2013 as a graduate student presenting and engaging with community college scholar-practitioners. It's a very collegial environment and not as overwhelming as some of the larger conferences in my opinion. If you have some innovative practices on your campus and want to share those efforts or just looking for an open and engaging to community to reinvigorate you, I would highly recommend attending. If you have more questions, I'd be happy to talk about it further.

  • College Access and Student Success
  • The Student Experience, Student Affairs
  • Workforce Development, Career & Technical Programs, and Non-Credit
  • Teaching and Learning
  • Early and Nontraditional Credits (Dual-credit, AP, Credit for Prior Learning, etc.)
  • Faculty Issues, Development, and Assessment
  • Administration, Organization, College Leadership
  • Policy, Finance, Economics
  • Equity/ Diversity and Social Change

Thank you - this is very helpful.  We are contextualizing the gateway math course for learners in the Emergency Service field.  It has been very successful at helping students obtain completion of a math course they didn't think they would be successful in completing.

Brooke -

I'm interested in learning more about how you're contextualizing math for your emergency services program.  Is this an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) program, or does it include other emergency service positions, like 911 operators?  Can you describe how you've worked with the EMT content area course instructors to contextual the math content in the gateway course?   We talk a lot about the need to contextual in career pathways, but it would be great to hear more on the steps programs are taking to make this happen!

Thanks,

Mike Cruse

Career Pathways Moderator

michaelcruse74@gmail.com

I was SHOCKED to see that 80% of learners who identified Criminal Justice as their major need some form of remedial writing/reading.  My guess is that number is higher in mathematics since most certifications do not require anything higher than a mid-level algebra course and not the gateway algebra course.  I am going to pass this article along to my colleagues because this could become phase II to what we are doing for our learners in our Criminal Justice Program.

 

The intent of this "project" was to assist EMTs, Paramedics, Criminal Justice majors, and even 911 operators who would like to earn a bachelor's degree.  In Kansas, the gateway mathematics course is College Algebra.  This stops many learners from achieving this goal.  The way we went about this in our college was to identify subject matter experts in the field of criminal justice and paramedic fields since I already have the knowledge about the mathematics piece.  We then met over the Summer for about 80 hours of collaboration and discussions.  They would teach me about their field and I would identify the math in it.  This would lead to more conversations and discoveries.  It was a lot of fun and now I have a better understanding of the jobs they do and they now "see" the math in the world around them.  We piloted it with a small group of learners who were identified by Accuplacer as being skills deficient in mathematics.  We are still piloting this class but it is going well.

My recommendation for others who are considering this type of development is to find people who are open to sharing, learning, and open to the process.  We have many intense discussions and lots of laughs, too.

That sounds great, Brooke! I would encourage you to submit a proposal for a poster to share your process and findings. I would imagine that there are others that are doing similar work in practice or researching that topic and there may be opportunities for further best practice sharing and collaboration. Let me know if I can help at all.