Area Report Board of Trustees

We are in the first week of Spring quarter. Faculty are hyper-conscious of enrollment and the challenges of aligning class offerings in the times and modalities that best serve our students. Enrollment in ELCAP is up 5%, and enrollment for international students is up 36%. Overall, enrollment is on par with last year at this time. Given the college-wide work underway to reduce barriers and increase retention, we are cautiously optimistic that enrollment will begin to climb as Summer/Fall enrollment opens in May.

Liz Word has accepted the position as Dean for Guided Pathways, effective April 1, 2023. Liz has served in an interim associate dean role for the past 18 months, leading the implementation of faculty advising through the use of Aviso, the design and implementation of COL 101, and the development of academic plans outlining how students can complete degrees and certificates. She’s been an invaluable member of the Academic Affairs administrative team.

The collaborative team of Business faculty Reagan Copeland and Mary Kajoka, Division Chair Sherri Chun, and Associate Dean Tanya Powers have officially changed the name of our BAS in Global Trade and Logistics to BAS in Applied Management in response to student feedback. While the curriculum still has a focus on global trade and logistics, the broader name, Applied Management, speaks more clearly to students with broad interests in business.

Core Theme 1: ACCESS, Reduce Barriers and close equity gaps to access for all community members

On Saturday, April 1, Kareen Maloney and Kelly Betancourt in Entry Services hosted an orientation for new and returning ECE students who are interested in our ECE Certificate in Spanish. They partnered with Education adjunct faculty Luz Casio and Karina Rojas Rodriguez, who attended outreach events in Spanish last quarter and created an interest list of 124 students who wanted information on the program. (Luz continues to teach every Saturday, on campus, as she has for almost nine years, on top of her full time responsibilities as the director of the Refugee & Immigrant Family Center Bilingual Preschool.) Dean Justin Dampeer and Transition Center Director Deborah Tugaga were key partners in making the event a success as well.

Nursing Director Steven Simpkins reports that Highline had a great presence at the Sound Careers in Healthcare event that recently occurred in the University of Washington’s Husky Union Building.  Over 500 high school students from all over the Puget Sound region were bussed in to learn about how to get into Health Care.  Students were incredibly engaged and asking amazing questions and represented so many communities in our region.  This was the perfect opportunity for our Health Care programs to speak with hundreds of students, opening doors for students that they might not have, otherwise, had available to them.  There was such a sense of community, not only with the students but with other colleges and entities that were represented at the event.

The 7th Annual Native Student Success Summit will be held on May 11th. We are pleased to offer this unique program to Native students in south King County. This event is unique in that most of the partners planning this are external. Associate Dean for BAS Programs Tanya Powers reports that “we are anticipating 100 students from Highline, Federal Way, Auburn, Fife, the Muckleshoot and Puyallup tribes. We have amazing programming with a variety of speakers and topics. We have generous sponsorship from Symetra, the Port of Seattle and University of Washington.” Learn more here.

Ten faculty (Eric Baer, Geology; Vicki Callagan, ELCAP; Roark Congdon, Fine Arts; Chris Gan, Biology; Tammi Hilton, Fine Arts; Christie Knighton, ELCAP/Education; Angie Meyer, ELCAP; Marie Nguyen, Chemistry; Angel Steadman, ELCAP; and Lidia Young, ELCAP) participated in the Faculty Experiential Learning trip to Vietnam over Spring Break, accompanied by VPA Michael Pham and VPAA Emily Lardner. The Highline delegation met with faculty, students, and administrators at the University of Science, Dong An Polytechnic College, and a branch campus of Foreign Trade University. At each campus, faculty facilitated a workshop for their counterparts and lively interactions ensued. The delegation also visited Viet Au High School and the US Consulate. Our Vietnamese hosts expressed significant interest in faculty exchanges, student exchanges, and ongoing relationship development. Big thanks for Dr. Pham for coordinating the trip, including a field trip to the Mekong Delta where two members of our delegation demonstrated proficiency in ziplining.

Core Theme 2: STUDENT LEARNING, Increase educational success, collaborate to improve

Library Director Gerie Ventura has been collaborating with Facilities to create two Zoom study spaces as a pilot. If students like the spaces and use them, we can create similar spaces next year in the new fiscal year.

Sabbatical leaves provide significant blocks of time for tenured faculty to engage in activities that sustain professional growth and revitalization. These leaves play an important role in our collective ability to enhance student learning.  The Professional Leave Committee (Tracy Brigham (Health, PE & Education Division) and leave committee chair; Ellen Bremen (Arts & Humanities Division), Laurel Lunden (Business Division), Angie Meyer (Social Science/ELCAP Division), and Syeda Nizami (Pure & Applied Science Division) has announced the faculty who have been awarded professional leave (sabbaticals) for the 2023-2024 academic year. The depth and breadth of these proposals provide a glimpse into the intellectual and pedagogical strengths of our faculty.

Hara Brook (Faculty Librarian)—one quarter, to “develop a plan focusing on integrating information literacy (IL) practices to teach students in the STEM pathway courses… The goal would be to develop a plan to create resources and develop faculty training (including faculty librarians) for teaching STEM students the elements of scientific information literacy. This effort would go hand-in-hand with the work that Aleya Dhanji, Physics (lead for STEM101) and Colleen Sheridan, Biology, (Highline CURE institutional lead) are doing with the Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) at Highline.”

Rhiannon Hillman (English)—one quarter for “editing my memoir, taking courses (listed in Section One) to learn more about how to best market and pitch my memoir to literary agents and publishers, and beginning the publishing process.”

Shon Meckfessel (English)—two quarters for “the research, drafting, finalizing, and publication of a full-length creative nonfiction book using historic archival, contemporary theoretical, and autobiographical materials to explore radical antiracist political subjectivities beyond the limited construct of white allyship. I believe the work offers great promise not only in intervening in conversations of antiracist ethics and sociology, and perhaps will offer answers to the vexing question ultimately faced by everyone in this country: ‘What are we supposed to do with all these white people?’ This book would provide an important framework for better discussing white people’s active role in ending white supremacy, which would provide a valuable resource on our campus, and well as in representing Highline more broadly to other campuses and venues.”

Aaron Modica (Sociology)—one quarter for “researching and learning more about Universal Design for Learning (UDL). I aim to deepen my knowledge about UDL for my course development, to use this knowledge to inform my participation on the various committees that I serve, and to share my gained knowledge with colleagues across campus. My request for professional leave time is related to the work I am currently doing on campus around equity and academic success in the classroom.”

Deb Moore (Faculty Librarian)—one quarter “to learn more about copyright for educators and librarians, and how copyright and open licenses used for Open Educational Resources (OER) connect. As a librarian and one of the OER leaders on campus, I often get questions about copyright, and I don’t currently feel competent in answering these questions. For example, instructors ask if they can use a PDF saved from a library database in their Canvas class quarter after quarter, or if they have to get copyright clearance for that. They also ask how they can use a combination of copyrighted, openly-licensed, and library-licensed materials to replace their traditional textbook. To be a successful copyright coach at Highline, I need to learn more about these topics.”

Colleen Sheridan (Biology)—one quarter to “gain experience working as a nursing assistant with nurses in the healthcare field so that I can bring that experience and knowledge back into the classroom. This will allow me the insight to create a more seamless Pre-Nursing-to-Nursing degree pipeline for our diverse student body. I am hoping that this will help foster the success of our students and effect positive change in the health of the people in our South King County community.”

Wendy Swyt (English)—two quarters “to teach at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia through a Fulbright grant. I have applied to teach there for the second semester of the 2023-24 school year. In my plan, I proposed to teach an Introduction to Literature in English course and an American cultural studies course, Women on the Edge. However, as I explain in the timeline, the university will most likely ask me to teach different courses than what I propose, depending on their department needs at the time.”

Lisa Voso (Communication)—one quarter “to reimagine the public speaking curriculum at Highline College to incorporate something different then what I was trained on since high school. I would like to learn about other ways of approaching public speaking, other than the cultural patterns of logical, rational, and analytic thinking presently favored in this country.”

Core Theme 3: COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS, Create a more inclusive working environment and a more valued, visible relationship with communities we serve