Area report for Board of Trustees
Overview
Faculty continue to rise to the challenge of engaging students in a variety of instructional modes in the time of a pandemic, even as our campus moves forward with significant changes, including implementing predictable advising for our students as well as our guided pathways approach.
Feeling a need to hear from more faculty directly, we’ve hosted two faculty forums this month. The first focused on the expectation that all full-time faculty be on campus this quarter, and the second focused on enrollment. A third will focus on faculty advising. Over 70 faculty showed up for the first one, and nearly 60 faculty showed up for the second. What stands out about Highline faculty is their deep commitment to students, to this college, and to the community we serve in spite of the challenges, and their multiple perspectives on how we can move forward together, better, for the sake of our students.
Completion (improve persistence, increase completion): focus on faculty advising
We have taken a step towards connecting more students with faculty advisors in a systematic way. Per a negotiated MOA with HCEA, advising loads for facutly this year are capped at 15, with exceptions for new probationers, new one-year faculty, and the option for faculty to have more advisees. We have made progress in addressing one challenge, which is that students who stop enrolling remain on faculty advisor lists. Thanks to Jill Hammitt for developing a brand new CTClink query, we will soon have the tools that we need in order to remove inactive students from faculty caseloads. We hope to remove inactive students from faculty advisor caseloads on February 11th.
We know that many faculty have been advising many more students than their MOA limit. These faculty deserve recognition. The inequities in faculty advising are unsustainable and need to be addressed. We are exploring strategies like group advising and in-class advising. A Faculty Forum on February 10th provides an opportunity for faculty to provide feedback and suggestions as we move forward connecting more students to their advisors.
Equity gains: (increase enrollment of sub-populations, increase completions of any sub-populations)
We are revising the Mission Fulfillment Report to better capture equity gaps in access to programs, and equity gains in program completion. Associate Dean for Workforce and BAS Dr. Tanya Powers, Director of Institutional Research Emily Coates, and I are participating in a year-long NWCCU fellowship focused on equity and assessment. Our project focuses on creating better visual representations of the students currently served by our BAS programs, as well as program completions. Having that data in a usable form creates a foundation for intentional action.
Dr. Paulette Lopez, Dean for Workforce Pathways and Partnerships, is working with her team to update our career and technical articulations with area high schools. These articulation agreements allow high school students to take a prof-tech class at Highline for minimal costs. The class counts for high school credit and shows up on the student’s transcript. These CTE articulations create the groundwork for encouraging students to enroll in Highline’s array of prof-tech programs. Our school district partners have been asking for posters that highlight the prof-tech courses for which we have articulation agreements. With help from ITS, we can now tag these students in ctcLink, which makes it possible to reach out to them to encourage them come to Highline as college students.
Faculty Laureates
- Melinda Hurst-Frye’s work will be hanging in several group show – November in Portland at the Sitka Center for Art Invitational
- Žanetka K. Gawronski, Fine Arts faculty, will have a solo show of her encaustic paintings this November, 2021, at CORE gallery in Pioneer Square, Seattle.
- Joshua Magallanes, counseling, was nominated and won the MVP award presented by Compete Sports Diversity. This is a national award.
- Mary Weir, criminal justice, had an article published in the Nordic Journal of Criminology. The article is about incarcerated women’s cooking/eating/food sharing practices in an open prison in Denmark which is based on the fieldwork that Mary did at a Danish open prison in 2017, before coming to Highline. The article has also been nominated for the journal’s best article prize, and if it wins, Mary will be invited to present in Iceland in May.
- Michelle Eisley, multimedia, has been working on a project about the Utah Raptor with Galetea Studios in collaboration with the State of Utah and their lead paleontologist.
Hospitality & Tourism Management Department News
Our HOST department, in collaboration with Teresa Pan from Human Services and Dave O’Keefe from the grants office, successfully applied for a grant from the Washington Department of Commerce in the amount of $232,500. The grant is to train persons without homes for positions in the lodging industry. Congratulations to all involved!
Report submitted January 28, 2022, by Vice President Emily Lardner, Ed.D.