SoCTL

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at CTL

Student Success in a Multicultural Minnesota

Here at CTL, as we prepare for our upcoming annual conference, Realizing Student Potential/ITeach, focused this year on “the first-year student in the 21 st century ,” we’re thinking a lot about student transitions to college life. Even more particularly, in the middle of, Black History Month and on the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, we’re thinking about issues related to realizing the potential of all students. Our campuses, like those all over the United States, are increasingly multicultural, diverse places, and not all students find it easy to make the adaptations needed to successfully complete a freshman year, much less fully realize their potential for a college education.

The dismaying truth in higher education, as in K-12, is that there is an “achievement gap” between the program completion and graduation rates of students of color and White students (Carey, 2004, e.g.). At our own system’s universities, for example, as late as 2004 (the latest date for common published data), there were gaps that ranged from 13.8% to 30.4%. At one university, for example, 50.6% of all students graduated within 6 years, while 36.8% of under-represented minorities had. At another, 48.6% of all students had graduated, as compared to 18.2% of under-represented minority students (College Results Online, 2007).

Numbers like these deserve campuswide and systemwide discussion—by students as well as faculty and administrators. Presumably, all of our students, whether in career and technical, professional, or liberal arts programs, want an education that prepares them to succeed in their future lives—as thinkers and problem-solvers, as workers and citizens, as collaborators with other adults and as teachers of children. Most students come intending to graduate, and most intend to continue living in Minnesota after graduation.

There is growing evidence that the best preparation for graduation as well as for life in a diverse, increasingly international, 21 st -century America, happens at colleges and universities that welcome and enrich themselves through diversity (Hurtado, 2006). Psychologist Patricia Gurin has found in a review of national data, for example, that students benefit from interaction with students from diverse backgrounds in increased complexity of thinking during college, and in increased “cross-racial interactions five years from college.” (Gurin, 1999)

At the classroom level, faculty in every discipline can take multicultural approaches to the curriculum; they can work to engage all students in active and deep learning activities; and they can join students and colleagues in multicultural extracurricular and cocurricular activities, in order to demonstrate a commitment to the intercultural world of the 21 st century—and help to realize the potential of all students.

-Lynda Milne

Carey, K. (2005). A matter of degrees: Improving graduation rates at four-year colleges and universities. Washington, DC: Education Trust.

Gurin, P.  (1999).  New research on the benefits of diversity in college and beyond:  An empirical analysis.  Diversity Digest, 3(3), 5, 15. Available at www.diversityweb.org/Digest/w01/alternative.html 

Hurtado, S. (2006). How diversity affects teaching and learning: Climate of inclusion has a positive effect on learning outcomes. Available at http://www.diversityweb.org/research_and_trends/.

College Results Online is an interactive Web site, maintained by that allows any user to xamine overall graduation rates and see how those rates have changed over time;learn about universities' records graduating diverse groups of students;compare the graduation rates of similar colleges and universities that share many characteristics and serve similar student populations.

 

Dates to Remember

CTL Instructional Development Grants
Deadline is February 23!
This week, write up your ideas and submit them to: http://www.ctl.mnscu.edu/programs/grants/funds.html

MAR 1-3: REALIZING STUDENT POTENTIAL / ITEACH 2007 CONFERENCE
Minneapolis Community & Technical College / Metropolitan State University, Minneapolis Campus
Join over 1200 of your colleagues coming to this event!

CTL Resources for Faculty

Success for First-year, Introductory, and Gen-Ed Courses

The theme for CTL’s RSP/ITeach conference on March 1 through March 3 is “ The First-Year Student in the 21st Century.” CTL has other resources to supplement those from the conference. Here are two, both from CTL’s online reading packet (www.ctl.mnscu.edu/iteach/resources/pod/Packet8) about teaching introductory and general education courses.

In “What did I do right in one freshman seminar? What did I do wrong in another? What will I do next time?” Richard Schoenwald, from Carnegie Mellon University, compares two first-year seminar classes that he taught—with very different outcomes. Schoenwald’s essay analyzes his role in organizing and teaching the two seminars and offers practical tips to ensure success and alleviate failure.

North Carolina State ’s Virginia S. Lee highlights the importance of inquiry-guided learning (IGL), which is especially useful in large-enrollment or introductory classes. In her article, “Promoting Learning Through Inquiry,” she discusses IGL and gives examples of practices with increasingly more independent investigation of concepts, problems, and issues in the classroom. She writes that students “are like amateur scientists whose cognitive development advances through continuous interaction with and exploration of the environment.”

-Thomas Wortman