Community colleges nationwide are experiencing increased enrollment of African American and Latino students. At the same time, these students graduate and transfer at significantly lower rates than their White counterparts. This disparity points to a need to teach and reach marginalized populations more effectively. This webinar elaborates on five ways educators can use restorative and culturally responsive teaching practices to reduce opportunity gaps for Black and Brown students.
People often make assumptions about a person’s gender based on that person’s appearance or name. These assumptions could send a potentially harmful message that people have to look a certain way to resemble their gender. Using someone’s correct personal pronouns is a way to respect them and create an inclusive environment, just as using a person’s preferred name can be a way to respect them. This webinar, intended for academic professionals, including academic advisors, student support services, and administrative support professionals, provides participants with an overview of gender identity and gender expression and their significance for higher education contexts, as well as introductory strategies and resources for integrating preferred names and gender pronouns into daily practices.
Many community college students face a number of barriers that threaten their ability to meet academic goals, including work, competing obligations with family and friends, and bills that make paying for college difficult. Yet, with hope, they enroll at community colleges with a desire to change the trajectory of their lives, only to be met with policies that exacerbate the pressures they already face. Many times, the syllabus paints the class as one more problem they must overcome, lengthening the path to their success rather than providing a roadmap for its attainment. This webinar helps instructors recognize some of the barriers created by the tone and policies in the syllabus and provides strategies for using the syllabus as a tool to create a clearer path to students’ success.
Community college students in the U.S. experience housing insecurity at higher rates than students in four-year colleges. At the same time, homelessness is also a common topic in courses in sociology and other disciplines. This webinar introduces research exploring the pedagogic approaches community college faculty use to teach homelessness in settings where students may be struggling with housing and invites participants to build on these findings to imagine more inclusive, justice-oriented, and supportive pedagogy.
During this webinar, the Research Institute at Dallas College brings together faculty, staff, and administrators to explore how data dashboards can help build a data-informed culture, communicate actionable research results throughout an institution, and guide strategies at every level, from classroom instruction to executive leadership. The facilitators share best practices for dashboard users and creators (no research experience required!) and provide robust tools that participants can use at their own institutions. Within the spotlight topic of an institution’s value proposition to its students, we’ll highlight key findings on academic and career pathways, as well as the financial return on investment to students. We’ll present interactive dashboards that help practitioners easily digest complex data and customize their analyses in a way that is most useful in their work as instructors and/or academic leadership.
This webinar demonstrates the urgent need for enhancing excellence in higher education in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants learn how to outreach more effectively to a diverse array of persons and institutions, including: Students, families, administrators, politicians, businesses, and citizens. Community college educators are highly trained professionals whose expertise enhances the citizen skill base and their understanding of the function and value of democracy in a civil society. It is vital to communicate the urgent need for narrative and funding support to ensure the success of community colleges.
This webinar demonstrates how the free GroupMe app helps engage online students in weekly chat sessions. Students can interact with one another and the instructor through text messaging, a communication format they are comfortable using. The GroupMe app has a polling feature, which can be used to ask students questions about weekly assignments. Using the app, the instructor can post links to a Google Jamboard or a Padlet where students can post written responses to the instructor's questions. Instructors can also post links to Kahoot and Quizizz and encourage students to compete for points by answering multiple-choice questions. Such activities enable students to assess their understanding of course material on a weekly basis and remain engaged in the course.
Recent studies have shown that the opportunity gap persists for students of color in community colleges. Increasingly, students of color are making community colleges their first choice in higher education to seek certification, marketable job skills, or a degree; however, they are not completing their education at the same rate as their White counterparts. While any number of factors may contribute to this gap, we cannot rule out implicit bias as a factor. Biases not only have a negative impact on students’ self-esteem, they can reduce students’ will to try, resulting in inequitable outcomes. This webinar paints a picture of what implicit bias looks like in the classroom and provides strategies for reducing biases that inevitably impact students’ success.
