“It brings you out of the cornfield,” Ken Ingersoll said of the way MentorLinks enhanced not only the law enforcement program he teaches, but improved several other programs at Kaskaskia College in Illinois. The rural college is using an Advanced Technological Education (ATE) project grant to add geospatial technology instruction across several disciplines.
Bart Gledhill, deputy director of Bio-Link at City College of San Francisco, chats with Lianna Zhao, dean of math, sciences and engineering at Irvine Valley College (California), at last month’s MentorLinks meeting in Washington, D.C.
Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series profiling community colleges joining the MentorLinks program this fall and the challenges they aim to tackle.
Ten new MentorLinks colleges embarked this fall on the exciting possibilities of refreshing their technician education programs with help of community college experts in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
The faculty member and administrator on each MentorLinks team recently met their mentor and then got to work refining their project plans during a two-day planning session in Washington, D.C. The annual MentorLinks work sessions are held prior to the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Principal Investigators Conference in order for mentees to learn from and network with educators who have received ATE grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Kaskaskia College, Eastern Shore Community College (ESCC) and Joliet Junior College.