Cultures of support and programmatic design
The article by McGrath and Van Buskirk in the last issue of The Journal of Developmental Education was timely for many reasons, bu t "Cultures of Support for at Risk Students" was most immediate in its assertion of the importance of building social and emotional capital through "... informal out of class interactions with peers and faculty, and participation in extracurricular activities." While issues raised here do not preclude such interactions, and a discussion of how we need to ensure such interactions is a topic I hope someone will explore in the Journal sometime soon, I would like to advance this line of thinking to include the building and sustaining of social and emotional capital through programmatic design rather than reliance on the goodwill of many faculty and support staff. What this can mean for Community College of Philadelphia as we move to strengthen Developmental Education (DE) is significant because it forces us to ask in what ways DE students might be different from the general population of student and, assuming we can identify some difference(s), what measures we may effect to assist these students when they enter our institution.
First, while it is wise to employ caution when intimating presumed differences for the purpose of generalization, I feel safe among friends who understand that when I do so it is with qualification always in mind, if not attached to every sentence. Having said that, after a year of working with committed faculty on the Task Force for Developmental Education and the last eight months of sustained conversation with faculty who teach in C.A.P. and twenty years of my own practitioner's experience both within and outside of Developmental Education, I am persuaded that DE students as a result of both social and academic disadvantage have little sense of how to situate themselves in a scholastic culture, and that long standing alienation from our accepted norms of academic discourse gives rise to problems ranging from inappropriate behavior to poor academic progress and, predictably, to continuation of the failure loop.
In short, the faculty member who walks into a DE class the first day with the expectation that his students have both the tools and the attitudes necessary to succeed in his course regardless of discipline will probably find himself in a loop every bit as frustrating as the one in which his students find themselves.
We have all said to ourselves and each other, "I don't understand why they won't do the work" or some such variation on this most familiar of themes. I believe that each such conversation—especially when it's with ourselves—is not only an expression of concern and perhaps bewilderment but evidence of a Stuck System. That is, after years of experiencing too many failures (alone: with a goodly number of heady successes) we continue to express surprise when the three hours a week, fourteen weeks a semester formula of chalk, talk and a date with the Learning Lab specialist or, as a last resort, the counselor, fails to motivate students to respond to the effort of an exceptionally talented faculty.
We need to unstick the system.
Right about now I can hear those who lose sleep over budgets begin to groan; for surely, what must follow is a prescription calling for more money, more money, more money. Actually, while I am not the least unhappy about recommending ways to spend more money on our students, I believe we can begin to unstick the system without laying in a supply of red ink by taking a programmatic approach to DE. This is different from the traditional course based model in which more reading, writing, arithmetic and perhaps a content course thrown in attempt to effect the remediation of academically weak students. In a programmatic approach we recognize not just the obvious symptoms of poor academic grounding but begin our instruction by addressing the root problem: If our students have trouble adjusting to our culture (and let's be clear that we are asking no less) then let's design and implement specific experiences that will help them see better what we are about and will assist them in reaching the goals we set for them, both social and academic.
Following are four recommendations:
1. Orientation as an Ongoing Activity. Currently we offer a day of good cheer and a few sober thoughts from program coordinators and faculty at the beginning of a semester. The good cheer is dependent on the Vice President of Student Affair's budget and the sober thoughts on the availability of faculty during in service week. While I admire the enthusiasm that goes into this effort and am consistently impressed with the good that it does, I would like to see it be the prelude to a prescribed series of activities hard wired into the academic programs of our students that will draw attention to the nature of the work they will engage and its connection to the careers they hope for. We know that our students often lack a clear sense of the relationship between academics and career and more importantly have few models to help with the transition to disciplined college work. Given this, we should accept the responsibility of helping them make this transition as a centrally located part of our program rather than the present practice of sprinkling workshops around the college under the name of "resources" which we encourage them, sometimes, to attend.
Orientation should be (forgive me, E. B. White) a "frontloaded," sustained agenda that addresses directly and skillfully the needs of our students to engage the dimension and significance of an academic experience. I would propose using our excellent counseling staff not only to engage students in faculty supported workshop but also to conduct staff development activities for DE faculty so that classroom and Learning Lab teachers may employ instructional techniques that clearly describe the world the student is entering as well as illuminate the academic content that is expected by that world. Surely, to assume that our DE students come to us fully ready to absorb the content of our disciplines can do little more than to leave us muttering in the hallways and our students either bewildered or hostile.
2. More Effective Use of the Counseling Staff. First, as I make clear in the above paragraph, an institution could not ask for a more dedicated group of professionals than the counseling staff we have for Developmental Education. Yet aside from an all too brief visit to classrooms our counselors seem perpetually in a reactive mode, waiting for referrals and dealing with personal and academic crises one at a time. Workshops, of course, are organized, but attendance is dependent on vigorous encouragement by faculty; and regrettably, attendance is poor.
In short, we have a significant resource which, in my opinion, and, by the way, in the opinions of the counselors in C.A.P., we desperately need to use more effectively.
As an essential part of a program design, counselors, I believe, should work more closely with classroom and Learning Lab faculty to address those issues we identify where intervention as opposed to after the fact reaction can make the difference between students staying in our program or retreating in defeat to a lassitude of despair that is all too familiar from previous academic failures.
For instance, we can predict a serious commitment to our academic enterprise to result in serious changes in the lives of our students. I recall how traumatic was my own attempt to move from the River Ward life of Fishtown to the world described to me by my professors at Community College of Philadelphia more than thirty years ago. Fortunately, I found not only the insistence on academic discipline as a guiding principle to success but also a number of faculty who understood that guidance went well beyond instruction in how not to fuse sentences. I will tell you truthfully that without the personal attention I received while struggling to adjust to a new and often perplexing environment, I sincerely doubt you would be reading this right now.
Why must we wait until the difficulties of complicated lives generate symptoms which often result in the decline or abrupt halting of academic achievement of those who clearly have the ability to succeed? Why not incorporate, as some members of the Developmental Education Task Force are urging, a Counseling/Acculturation experience, or even a course linked with career exploration, that addresses clearly and honestly the issues our "at risk" students deal with every day.
We know that our students are under immense pressure, and we can identify within our particular student population many of these pressures; and we know that academic failure is often the result of these stresses rather than a lack of ability. So why do we wait for a string of MPs and Fs to signal a visit to the counselor? Why not include in our program a well designed component that addresses the problems we know our students will have and engage those problems in group settings where students may see that the problems they are experiencing are common and not manifestations of personal inadequacy.
3. More Effective Use of the Learning Lab Faculty. Presently, with a nod toward the exceptions, we embrace the myth that collaboration is proceeding merrily apace between classroom and Learning Lab faculty. Yet often—much too often—I hear how unrelated these experiences seem to students, of classroom faculty who neither encourage their students to attend Lab nor make much of an effort to communicate with the Learning Lab faculty. Further, attendance reports I receive even when classroom faculty and Learning Lab faculty work together are hardly encouraging. I would argue that these hours, sometimes as in the case of A Level, time that adds up to an additional three hours per week of instruction, be organized more predictably as part of the student's core experience rather than what seems presently an add on.
Currently we ask the Reading/Writing/ Math instructors to do a great many things, and given a programmatic approach we would ask even more of them, so why not define specific areas of instruction and reserve them for the Learning Lab faculty as part of a program we design. Why not move the Learning Lab experience into the fabric of a student's semester rather than have it appear as an accessory? Our Learning Lab faculty, as are our counselors, are much too important a resource to have on the periphery of our students' experience.
4. Make the Rhetoric of Academic Community a Reality It seems fashionable to talk about academic community, though the talk often seems more wistful than bounded by agreements about what community might mean in an academic setting or for a program of 1500 plus students. But if the concept of community is tied, no matter how loosely, to agreements of principle as opposed to details, then why can't we locate some of these principles and articulate them as tenets particular to our view of DE? For instance, as coordinator of C.A.P. it would not occur to me to directly challenge the content of a Math course. However, I am quite comfortable asserting that in Developmental Education the student must always come before the content of the course. That is, while a student will pass or not pass Math XXX based on demonstrated competence at that level of mathematics, instructor XXX must recognize that for the most part he' students have little academic preparation and will need a great deal more attention than her college level students, which is precisely why the college commits to a greatly reduced class size for DE courses. She must recognize that assigning a number of math problems or, as in the case of an English teacher, additional paragraphs to be written, has little to do with the concept of Developmental Education. In its rawest form a basic principle of Developmental Education should be that under preparedness does not equate to lack of ability, and before we have a right to assess the latter, we understand that the former is much more than placement scores on a data sheet.
Simply put, a community, academic or otherwise, exists when there are values to be shared and protected. Again, we do not have to pledge allegiance to each other and certainly not to pedagogy. But Developmental Education must mean something beyond the teaching of "catch up" skills; and if it does we should be able to identify what those things are and construct from them a system of principles that we may agree upon. More importantly, if we can identify these principles, do we not owe it to our students to be fiercely protective of them?
Final Thoughts. The Task force on Developmental Education has done fine work over the last year, and the recommendations that will come from that work may be counted upon to refocus and recharge our efforts in this area. But I will be discouraged if after all the Task Force's work and the contributions we may expect from others our vision remains trained on course configuration only. For I do not believe that an awakening to reading, writing, mathematics, and to course work tied to career choices is a matter only of mastering material. Our students come to Community College of Philadelphia with sound minds and great enthusiasm, but a goodly number also come with a great deal of baggage that interferes with their ability to engage the academic material we present. There is much in the literature that points to the efficacy of the concept of support recommended in McGrath and Van Huskirk's "Cultures of Support for at Risk Students."
We need to recognize that for many of our students the leap from their neighborhoods and previous educational experiences to a much larger and far more complicated social and academic culture is great. To see the content of our courses as our only responsibility is, I believe, to seriously misunderstand the nature of work in Developmental Education. I hope the next academic year will find us exploring this nature.