At Patrick Henry Community College (PHCC) in Virginia, the buzz about its Developmental Education Initiative (DEI) has people actually humming “I’ll Take You There.”
The Staple Singers’ 1972 hit tune is the theme song for PHCC’s messaging campaign for developmental education’s power to propel people to new places.
“There are people who don’t feel good about developmental education. They see it in a negative light,” said Kris Landrum, PHCC’s public relations director.
So she and the three other people serving on the initiative’s marketing committee opted for an upbeat messaging campaign to engage faculty, staff and students in the new initiative’s goal of getting more people through developmental education courses faster.
“In order to get buy-in, we needed to make it a positive experience for folks,” Landrum said.
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The 37 people serving on the working groups represent a cross section of the nation’s community colleges with experienced leaders from rural, suburban and urban community colleges.
“Our goal is to make VFA a compilation of measures
by community colleges
forcommunity colleges,” Kent Phillippe, associate vice president of research and student success at the
American Association of Community Colleges(AACC), said at the groups’ first meeting recently. Phillippe is directing the second phase of VFA for AACC.
Adhering to the advice of their assigned mentors, coupled with the confidence they get from contacts in the field and among peers, nine
community colleges participating in the national
MentorLinks program are making significant strides in improving or creating their technician education programs.
Advanced Technological Education (ATE) principal investigators got another charge at their recent annual meeting: Leverage their knowledge
and professional networks to help address the nation’s environmental and energy issues.
The principal investigators, who are mostly community college educators, are considered catalysts for change in technical education by virtue of their grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for innovative programs in advanced technology fields.
NSF Director Arden Bement urged them to join the process “to reorganize our intellectual capacity” to address energy and environment problems. He said priorities include obtaining more accurate information on climate change, reducing the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels and maintaining the nation’s prosperity as it deals with higher energy costs.
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