Building a Pathway to Cultural Competence Through Academic Service Learning
As colleges and universities seek to prepare students for professional careers in a diverse, global society, the attainment of cultural competence is an essential capacity that can no longer be overlooked. Cultural competence involves the awareness, knowledge, and skills needed to engage and collaborate meaningfully across differences through interactions that are characterized by mutuality, reciprocity, and respect. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), for example, has recognized the importance of global competence as part of a coherent approach to general education requirements. The AAC&U’s General Education Maps and Markers initiative emphasizes global engagement and the enhancement of cultural awareness that promotes the potential for students’ active citizenship and greater career fulfillment.
Service learning provides an important bridge to cultural competence in the undergraduate experience. Yet it is often viewed as a co-curricular activity, to be pursued outside the classroom and at the student’s own initiative. By contrast, course-based, academic service learning is a form of experiential education that takes place in credit-bearing courses guided by faculty. It is part of the academic curriculum in which structured activities in the community give rise to reflective activities, such as in journals, discussions, and papers. Such curricula can have significant diversity-related outcomes, such as increased understanding of social stratification, privilege, and the impact of differential access to opportunity.
Core Curriculum Improves Academic Rigor, Identity, and Retention
Concordia University Irvine recently adopted a core curriculum as a way to increase academic rigor, strengthen the university’s identity, and improve student retention. In May, the university graduated its first students to experience the core. In an interview with Academic Leader, Scott Ashmon, director of the core curriculum, explained the core’s design, implementation, and outcomes.
Paired courses
The core uses an interdisciplinary approach to “help students cultivate an understanding of comprehensive knowledge, and what we came up with was to pair certain courses,” Ashmon says. “The reason that that’s helpful is because you don’t have to go to certain departments and disciplines and say, ‘Can we borrow your faculty to create and staff some other course that is nondisciplinary?’ Rather, we can say, ‘We want disciplinary courses because we want students to be able to think in disciplined ways.’ That’s the ideal. It’s also easier to get departments and disciplines engaging in this kind of conversation if they can do it from within their disciplines.”
Concerning Competency-Based Education
Competency-based education (CBE) is currently touted as an important innovation in higher education that has the potential to disrupt the traditional model and to radically transform the way students receive a postsecondary education. CBE is characterized by an individualized approach to education in which students learn at their own pace and demonstrate the attainment of predetermined competencies, typically through performance assessments. CBE is a system that challenges the course-sequenced, credit-based college degree program that has been criticized for high cost, inefficiency, and failing to prepare students for job placement. In recent years, CBE proponents have cited numerous advantages to this approach including the benefits of self-directed learning, flexibility (“anytime, anywhere” learning), and a focus on experiential learning through real-world activities.
Why Alternative Credentials Are Critical to Institutional Success
Anyone who has ever attended a program advisory committee meeting knows that it can be a mix of exciting inspiration and terrifying fear that one’s programs are not doing enough to prepare one’s graduates. While members of the business community will often give helpful, positive commentary on the knowledge the institution’s graduates bring to the professional environment, they may also pose a problem that the traditional university was never designed to handle: teaching skills in the first or second year of study that will still be cutting-edge and desired by industry at the time of graduation.
At the same time, institutions are increasingly being contacted by working professionals who want to “retool” or update their skills to be more attractive for promotion or increases in responsibility. These working professionals often do not want or need to complete an entire degree to get the value they want from a program, but they do need course options geared to their professional and scheduling needs.
Welcome to the world of alternative credentials. According to “Demographic Shifts in Educational Demand and the Rise of Alternative Credentials,” a report by educational company Pearson and the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA), alternative credentials are defined as “competencies, skills, and learning outcomes derived from assessment-based, non-degree activities [that] align to specific, timely needs in the workforce.”
Supporting International Students
English language proficiency does not eliminate all the special challenges that international students face. Cultural differences—particularly among students from non-Western countries—can create additional burdens. For example, international students may experience difficulty understanding spoken English or an instructor’s use of humor, slang, or cultural references; they may experience a type of “academic culture shock” in which the instructor’s expectations are unclear or significantly different from what the students are used to. All these factors can negatively affect academic performance and increase the likelihood that these students will cheat.
“A lot of faculty and administrators assume that if a student passes a language proficiency exam, then the student is prepared to be in the classroom, and that’s not the case. These exams do not test for how to use the language,” says Rory Senerchia, associate professor and chair of the ESL department at Johnson & Wales University Providence, who has conducted surveys of international students to better understand how faculty and institutions can better support these students.
Working with Complaining Students—and Their Parents
Frequently, academic administrators encounter students who appeal grades, lodge academic complaints, ask for exceptions to academic policies, or otherwise voice dissatisfaction with their academic experience. Frequently, their parents or other family members accompany them, advocate for them, or even request meetings. These encounters force administrators to balance student interests with institutional policies and for that reason often prove stressful and time-consuming. A handful of principles, if consistently applied, can reduce headaches while promoting student success and upholding institutional integrity.
Understanding the Fisher Decision
Two months ago, in Fisher v. University of Texas, the United States Supreme Court gave a lukewarm endorsement of the University of Texas’ affirmative action program geared to attracting more students of color. Suffice it to say that the Court’s decision is limited to student admissions and the very specific facts of that case.
Of course, the country is in the midst of an intense national conversation on race and systemic discrimination, and as last year’s turmoil at the University of Missouri made plain, higher education is certainly not immune from this discussion. Facing demands from students and faculty members to address the lack of racial minorities within their faculty ranks, university deans and department heads are struggling to address those concerns while not violating the law (which remains somewhat murky). This article outlines the law regarding the consideration of race in employment and provides straightforward, legally permissible suggestions to enhance diversity.
Freedom of Speech Issues: A Legal Primer for Academic Leaders
Today’s college campus is a laboratory for the US Constitution’s First Amendment provision declaring that government may not “abridge” a citizen’s individual rights with respect to five related freedoms: religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. Public colleges and universities must honor these rights and protect them, but private institutions are not so obligated—unless they commit to them by way of recruiting materials, mission statements, catalogues, or faculty and student handbooks.
Free speech, however, must be balanced by the institution’s concern for civility and respect for human welfare. The search for truth in an open and vibrant democracy requires that controversial issues be discussed on campus—in classrooms, special forums, clubs, and elsewhere—with viewpoints that often result in uncomfortable conflicts among diverse groups of students and faculty with different political agendas, personal values, and religious commitments. However, there are limits to acceptable free speech. As US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said in a 1913 ruling, no one can legally yell “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater. Free speech but with restrictions—no easy balance for academic leaders in our time.
The Administrative Role in Managing Difficult Students: A Look at the Literature
Community college administrators are responsible for many areas of the institutions they serve. Presidents, directors of student services, those in academic support, and deans and chairs of academic units are all charged with managing institution resources, administrating mandates from legislation, and responding to internal and external constituencies. Much of the scholarly literature that discusses community college administration focuses on those elements.
Higher education and community college administrators are also faced with the tedious and delicate challenges of managing difficult students with effective policy and protocol that are also sensitive to the needs of the students while creating a safe scholarly environment. Whatever student difficulty is exhibited, the administration is tasked with creating and evolving policies that address and serve the needs of the students. Although working with difficult students is one of those many areas that administrators are assigned as a responsibility, a definitive role for administrators appears to be elusive in the scholarly literature. What the literature does reveal are some broad categories of difficulty and suggestions to administrators for how to work with students who exhibit difficulty in those areas. The following is a summary of those findings and our suggestions of the administrative roles we found to be most prevalent.
Evaluating Online Teaching: Implementing Best Practices
More than a decade ago, Thomas Tobin, coauthor of the new book, Evaluating Online Teaching: Implementing Best Practices, was hired to teach a business English and communications class in a hybrid format. When the time came for evaluation, he received a very thorough evaluation based on the chair’s observation of the face-to-face portion of his class, but the section of the evaluation instrument meant for the online component was left completely blank. “The department chair eventually confessed that because he had not himself taught using the institution’s LMS, he didn’t feel qualified to rate Tom’s use of its tools,” the book explains. Evaluation of the online component of the class was not something the administrator was equipped to do.
The problems inherent in evaluating online teaching arise understandably. “Deans, department chairs, faculty members, and students rate and evaluate teaching at their institutions mostly through home-grown processes and forms,” write the authors. “Although these are often constructed to help observers and raters to provide meaningful information, it is often the case that even now [years after Tobin’s experience], little training is provided for those using the evaluation instruments.” Many institutions find that one size cannot fit all.
