Area Report for Board of Trustees

The Academic Affairs division includes over 350 faculty and 100 staff, all of whom are focused on helping our students meet their goals. Spring quarter continues to be busy, as we celebrate students successes in many ways, including commencement. Simultaneously, faculty are advising students about next year’s classes, finishing this quarter’s classes, and planning classes for summer and fall. Staff are completing annual Institutional Effectiveness reports to reflect on progress made towards goals set for this year. These reports lead into summer work focused on setting new goals aligned with college priorities. It’s a busy time. What follows are highlights intended to illustrate the excellent work of faculty and staff in our division.

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

• Katie Baker, Nate Means, and Mariola Kulaweic (Biology faculty & staff) of the Life, Oceans and General Science department are redesigning Biology 211, “Majors Cell Biology”, with a Teaching and Learning grant from the College. They anticipate the redesigned course will improve learning and reduce equity gaps in this critical course for Biology majors.
• Colleen Sheridan (Biology faculty) has developed, and will be teaching a new course, Biology 239, which will provide extra support for students in Anatomy and Physiology I. This course will provide students with more practice and support for this very difficult class that is an important part of the pre-nursing and pre-allied health curriculum and is a gateway to these important educational pathways.
• Over 300 students from the English Language Career and Academic Prep (ELCAP) attended ESOL night on May 14th. This event brought non-credit and credit programs, as well as non-academic supporting offices and partners, together for an evening to educate our ELCAP students on their opportunities after transitioning. Students engaged in activities such as a resource fair, informational scavenger hunts, financial aid workshops, and more. Thank you to planning committee members: Deborah Tugaga, Tiffany Dinh, Sinai Hernandez, Rita Manalastas, and Rickitia Reid. Thank you to Laurie Stusser-McNeil for emceeing the event.

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

• Cait Cramer (engineering) participated in the spring Washington Council for Engineering and Related Technical Education (WCERTE) meeting. Among the important things that she discussed was a collaboration with Rebecca Sliger at TCC to update the engineering MRP degrees. This proposal will be brought to the State Board in the Fall.  She also learned about a CoP for developing support of lab writing in engineering, and using a new CTCLINK dashboard that helps students find engineering classes that Highline does not offer.
• A large Highline contingent attended the Integrative Learning Curriculum Planning Retreat hosted by the Washington Center for Improving Undergraduate Education on May 9-10. From the Social Science Division – Tim McMannon (History faculty), Diego Luna (Ethnic Studies faculty), and Salma Silva-Licon (Political Science faculty); from Arts & Humanities – Wendy Swyt, Lisa Bernhagen and Laura Soracco from the English department; from the Business Division – Cathy Cartwright (Accounting faculty) & Mary Kajoka (Business Faculty); and from the HPE division – Tracy Brigham (Nutrition/PE faculty).
• Emma Kong (Computer Science/Cybersecurity faculty), in partnership with Academic Affairs, initiated the process to develop an articulation agreement with Bates Technical College that will facilitate students transferring from the AAS/AAS-T IT/Cybersecurity program at Bates to the BAS in Cybersecurity at Highline. They hope to finalize the agreement in June.
• The Pure and Applied Sciences held their Student Awards Banquet on May 29th. This awards ceremony celebrated the top students in Computer Science, Engineering, Cybersecurity, Science, Pre-allied Health, Biology, Physics, Math, Geology, and Chemistry.  New this year was an award given to a faculty member by other faculty in the division. This year, the award went to Aleya Dhanji (Physics).

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

• On Thursday, May 23, the Legal Studies program hosted their annual alumni mixer. About 30 alums attended, enjoying the opportunity to connect with faculty, network for colleagues, and celebrate the alumni award winners. Program faculty Ché Dawson, Bruce Lamb, and Kevin Rainge hosted the event with support from the Highline College Foundation.
• Aleya Dhanji (Physics faculty) delivered the keynote workshop for a mini-conference at the University of Washington Physics Department “Supporting Underrepresented Groups and First-generation Students”. Dr. Dhanji’s talk was titled ‘What’s Your Superpower? Creating a Culture of Care and Accompliceship to Transform the Underrepresented Student Experience’ and discussed actions we can take that use relationships as a foundation for learning and success, shift advising to a strengths-based approach, and demystify the hidden college curriculum.
• Highline Cybersecurity students were selected to attend Virtual Cybersecurity Career Challenge, hosted by National Cybersecurity Training & Education (NCyTE) The challenge is ten weeks long and students work in teams of five to create a business, set up virtual machines, develop business processes, and secure their network.

Core Theme 4: CULTURE & CAPACITY: Promote a campus culture which fosters equity and inclusivity supporting employee growth and development, and institutional capacity for transformation

The professional leave committee (Jack Harton, Tracy Brigham, Woody Moses, Rashmi Koushik, & Dr. Lardner) awarded 9 quarters of professional leave, including 1 quarter of growth and enrichment leave, to faculty for the 2024-2025 academic year:

• Teri Balkenende (History)–1 quarter: “The purpose of my proposed leave is to explore best practices in digital history as well as the current literature on the opportunities and challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the study and teaching of history.”
• Helen Burn (Mathematics)–1 quarter: “The purpose of my professional leave is threefold: 1) to advance my knowledge of the historical development of statistical inference, 2) to learn specific topics in fields that currently impact statistics: data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, and 3) to examine data science competencies in selected courses at UW-Tacoma, Central Washington University, or Seattle University.”
• Chris Gan (Biology)–1 quarter (deferred to 25-26): “The purpose of my leave is to increase my understanding and appreciation of how medicine is practiced in southern Asia by volunteering in medical clinics in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world.”
• Lydia Garas (Biology)–2 quarters: “The purpose of my leave is to complete a scientific research project on inflammatory bowel disease. I plan to resume work on a research project I initiated in 2014 and worked on through 2016, during my PhD in Dr. Elizabeth Maga’s lab.)
• Tammi Hilton (Design–1 quarter): “The purpose of this leave is to survey, research, analyze and immerse myself in the design industry with the aim of using this information to benefit our AA students to obtain the skills needed to gain employment upon completion of degree.”
• Christie Knighton (Education/ELCAP)–1 quarter: “I will design and implement a case study research project to gather data on where Latinx ELCAP students are going when they leave ELCAP classes.”
• Monica Twork (Library)–1 quarter: The purpose of this leave is to research contemplative information and visual literacy, or the application of mindfulness strategies to information and visual source evaluation.
• Glen Avantaggio (Philosophy)–1 quarter: “The purpose of my leave is to significantly revitalize and improve my performance as a faculty member.”
• SBCTC published recorded workshops delivered at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE). Highline faculty and staff made presentations linked here at the WA SBCTC YouTube page. The Arts and Humanities Division is very proud of our English faculty member, Stephanie Ojeda Ponce who presented on “Love, Healing, & Pleasure for Social Justice Educators” along with Patricia McDonald (Education) and Alycia Williams (Women’s Programs and WorkFirst Services).
• Nate Means (Biology faculty) attended the American Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting in Denver, Colorado. As a result of his participation, he has adopted new activities into his Cell Biology and Microbiology classes. These active learning activities support student’s knowledge of blood typing and epidemiology. He also has shared these activities with his departmental colleagues, amplifying their impact.  He also attended a session on using CRISPR (gene editing). CRISPR has lots of potentials however, those potentials are often mis-communicated. This session provided background and activities from BIO-RAD on laboratory activities to help our students learn lab skills (pipetting, cell culture, solution preparation) while providing knowledge and working with CRISPR.
• Katie Baker (Biology faculty) attended the Washington Canvas Conference in March. She learned about how to appropriately use AI to help design her courses as well as how to incorporate AI into assignments and assessments.

Division Honors and Awards

• Spring election season is in the air. Division Chairs are important positions in the structure of Academic Affairs.  This spring quarter, we’ve elected two new chairs who will take office beginning September 1st.  Diego Luna, Ethnic Studies faculty, will begin chairing the Social Science Division.  Sam Alkhalili, BSTEC faculty, will begin chairing the Business Division.  Please join us in congratulating them on their election and thanking the outgoing chairs for their years of service.  Teri Balkenende, History faculty, has chaired the Social Science Division for the past six years.  Sherri Chun, BSTEC faculty, has chaired the Business Division for six and a half years.  We value and appreciate the work that they have done and perspective brought to our leadership team.
• Cait Cramer (Engineering faculty) will become coordinator of the Engineering Department starting summer quarter. Congratulations!  The Pure and Applied Sciences Division thanks Melissa Moehlig (chemistry faculty) for her service as coordinator over the last 5 years.
• Woody Moses (Environmental Science/Biology faculty) will become coordinator of the Life, Oceans and General Science department in summer quarter. The Pure and Applied Sciences Division thanks Lydia Garas (Biology faculty) for her service as department coordinator for this last year.
• Tommy Kim (English faculty) will become coordinator of the English department starting summer quarter. A big thank you to Matt Schwisow for coordinating in spring quarter!
• Marcia Welch (BSTEC faculty) will take over coordination of the BSTEC department in fall quarter. The division thanks Sam Alkhalili for his work coordinating the department previously.
• Aaron Hayden (CIS/Cybersecurity BAS faculty) is poised to take over coordinating the Cybersecurity BAS in the fall.

Report submitted by Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dr. Emily Lardner