Discussion and Recommendations:
How can adjuncts treat students as whole people?
Difficult with adjuncts because they are on campus and off
- PC requires adjuncts to participate in general orientation
- Gateway is offering more training but may not be high participation
- Main incentive for adjuncts to participate in training is future full-time employment
How can we deal with students as whole people?
- learning communities including counselor
- special programs for at-risk students,
- educating faculty that counselors are also faculty, offering workshops and other training to faculty on counseling students
- use service learning to engage students in more holistic training
- leadership training for students
- Scholastic Academic System - monitors student athletes to see if they are attending class and progressing properly; also have faculty mentors for particular teams
- early alert system for students who are not progressing properly, students identified by faculty; do adjuncts use system?
- different campuses have different combinations of advisors/counselors, creates confusion about who counselors are, often viewed as advisors.
- need stronger ties between job placement and disciplinary faculty.
- PC merged counseling and job placement.
- for technical, industrial programs, have community advisory committees that include business people who are aware of employment trends and issues.
- dedicated advisors are not faculty.
- need adequate faculty training for advising.
- lots of career info. on WWW, companies have web pages that detail job opportunities, tutorials on employment issues, etc.
- need universal (mandatory?) advising, counseling.
- student services as the center of a learning community.
What Next?
Help to share the holistic activities that take on our campuses.
Help to foster more learning-centered activities.
Work with Mike Rooney's area to have mandatory placement throughout the district.
Jesse Chanley will develop a list of the opportunities for participating in learning dialogue at different campuses. This should help determine if opportunities are sufficient.
Mike Rooney and Jesse Chanley are participating in discussions of learning and student services at PVCC, PC, and EMCC in the next month.
Student Services and Learning - Individuals/Learners/Teachers need to be seen holistically. Fragmentation/disconnect can be corrected/healed by further dialogue and by doing activities which bring people together. I commit to helping people to connect.
Student Services - I can continue to present my ideas for change regarding student services. This will be done by dialoguing with our Deans, Dean of Student Services, Dean of Instruction...As a department, we can present our ideas to the faculty senate for discussion in hopes of moving toward change - focus on the emotional/social domain. As faculty, we need to commit to coming together for better understanding of a team effort for a learning community to better serve our students as well as taking better care of ourselves and one another.
