Area Report for Board of Trustees
Faculty and staff in the Academic Affairs division continue to continue to respond to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic in resourceful, resilient, creative and caring ways. As we begin spring quarter 2021, marking a year of remote teaching and learning and service delivery at Highline, faculty and staff are currently learning to navigate the college’s new operating system—including a new process for entering grades, a new registration process, and a new process for providing students with pre-requisite course codes. Within the new system, staff are figuring out how to implement the new requirement to identify courses that rely on low-cost materials (< $50) and courses that use open educational resources (free).
Looking ahead to transitioning some instruction to campus for fall in light of public health conditions, faculty department coordinators are in the process of revising class schedules that had been submitted earlier in winter quarter. The internal processes in Academic Affairs operate many months ahead of the actual calendar. This is essential because we have to produce a schedule of courses well before the start of a quarter. However, the pandemic operates in real time. Even though everyone is working hard to track, interpret and use current public health information to guide our decisions as quickly and efficiently as possible, those real time decisions occur after schedules have been created and formalized. The brunt of the resulting labor falls to faculty department coordinators and our scheduling team, Kili Cambra and Mondi Fournier, with support from Division Chairs. A big thanks to everyone for continuing to flex and respond to emerging needs and possibilities. We have an amazing team in our Division.
Department news
The Puget Sound Welcome Back Center at Highline College was awarded over $90,000 by the Port of Seattle through the South King County Funds’ first Economic Recovery Grants Program. The Highline College Foundation will be the fiscal agent and the PSWBC will be doing what it does best: helping internationally educated professionals return to their chosen profession using the education and experience they bring to South King County. The grant is for 12 months starting in March 2021 and the lead for the project will be Fernando Ramirez, the educational case manager for STEM and business occupations at the PSWBC. The award announcement from the Port reads:
Puget Sound Welcome Back Center will prepare 30 internationally educated engineers for jobs in construction related fields near the Port of Seattle. Even though many have college degrees, they lack proper credentials to work in the US in their chosen profession. This project removes those barriers by providing resources in port-related industries, including Test Preparation Courses as part of the licensure process for construction related fields, and Strategic Training and Certifications such as Concrete Field Technician, CAD Training and Construction Management courses.
Highline’s Career and Technical Education (CTE) Dual Credit Program currently works with nine school districts and skill centers from around the region. The districts include: Highline, Kent, Federal Way, Tukwila, Auburn, Tahoma, Enumclaw, Renton, Bellingham, and Puget Sound Skill Center. Mary Willoughby, our CTE Dual Credit lead, has been working diligently to strength our partnership with those school districts. As of this report, there are 53 dual credit articulated courses. Furthermore, as of fall quarter 2020, approximately 20 high school students applied and received dual credit for high school and college courses.
In fall quarter 2021, the HOST department will be showcasing the talents of their students by running The Bistro in building 8 alongside long-time food and beverage professional Rachel Collins. Students will be responsible for all parts of the operation, from inventory, menu planning, food preparation, financial operations, and marketing. Students will practice their skills in a state-of-the-art commercial setting. HOST students look forward to preparing and presenting delectable sandwiches, snacks, and coffee beverages.
Rus Higley, Director of the MaST Center, is featured in chapter 6 of the newly published book by SPU English Professor Peter Moe, Touching Leviathan (published by OSU Press) which explores how can a person get to know a whale. In the chapter, Rus leads Peter and a small team to collect some bones from a whale dead on the coast near Westport. This led nearly 3 years later to the complete articulation of a whale at SPU this past fall quarter.
In the chapter, Moe writes
“I am coming to know this whale. I’d thought of names on the way to the beach, perhaps Eleanor (my wife’s middle name), perhaps Grey. Higley tells me, ‘The only thing we should name are kids and pets, and the whale is neither.’ Naming suggests ownership, so Higley has never named any whale he’s worked on. These whales, he says, should remain wild. Cascadia Research, in their necropsy, refers to the whale as CRC-1587, but for our purpose, the whale remains the whale.”
The Sustainable Agriculture Program has just received a $20,000 grant award from King Conservation District as part of their Regional Food Systems program. $15,000 of this award will go to scholarships for Immigrant and Refugee communities to assist these communities in overcoming barriers to entry to the college. The remaining $5,000 of this grant award will go to offsetting the Program Manager’s salary costs during an era of college-wide budget cuts. This grant award will be a huge help in supporting the educational goals of the underserved immigrant and refugee populations of King County, and in supporting the financial sustainability of the program for fiscal years 2021-2022.
Faculty news
Greg November is a 2021 Jack Straw Writer. The Jack Straw Writers Program was created in 1997 to introduce local writers to the medium of recorded audio; to develop their presentation skills for both live and recorded readings; to encourage the creation of new literary work; to present the writers and their work in live readings, an anthology, on the web, and on the radio; and to build community among writers.
Susan Rich has 7 surrealist poems published at Surrealist Jungle this past month and her COVID poem “Dear Wild Unknown” is being republished for Women’s History Month at Solstice Journal of Diverse Voices. And the first ever Highline literary salon was held cosponsored by Arcturus Editors and Dr. Mosby.
Laura Soracco got a Digital Pedagogy Lab (DPL) Fellowship. The DPL is a professional development event hosted by the University of Colorado in August. Laura will participate in a one-week course titled, “Social Justice and the Curriculum.” As a fellow, Laura also get to work on a project with other fellows and facilitate larger discussions on the work we do in the course.
Ben Thomas helped write and record music for a film called “Passages” which just got chosen for inclusion in the Cannes Indie Shorts series. Description below:
PASSAGES SELECTED FOR CANNES!
We are thrilled to announce that Passages: A Fable in Six Cycles has been chosen as an official selection in the Indie Shorts Awards Cannes! “Passages: A Fable in Six Cycles” is an animated film directed by CTA board member Scott Kolbo, produced by Scott Kolbo and Brian Chin. Passages features art/animation created by Scott Kolbo, and composed music by members of the chamber music collective, TORCH (Brian Chin, Eric Likkel, Steve Schermer, and Ben Thomas). The work comments on contemporary anxieties about security and immigration through six circular loops of imagery and sound, with a heavy emphasis on slapstick humor and absurdity. The piece also tells an inspiring story about resilience and hope in the face of historical tragedy and ecological crisis.
Report submitted Mar. 30, 2021, by Vice President Emily Lardner, Ph.D.