Breakout Session #4: Developing Inclusive Student Services SERS Project Title: Office of Inclusion

1. Breakout Session #4: Developing Inclusive Student ServicesSERS Project Title: Office of Inclusion

2. Breakout Session #4: Developing Inclusive student Services • Primary Purpose: • Northeast State, like the majority of TBR colleges does not employ a staff member who is devoted to 100% to campus diversity efforts. • An integral component of this project is to increase the hours of a part-time Inclusion professional to develop and direct project activities while interfacing with other areas of the college. • The NeSCC Inclusion Project is designed to enhance the enrollment and retention of Black or African-American students enrolled at NESCC through intentional and targeted programs coordinated by the Office of Inclusion.

3. Breakout Session #4: Developing Inclusive student Services • TASK: • Build and Develop Inclusion Office • Focus on African American Student Retention • Northeast State six-year graduation rate for African American student is 4.8%, ranking last in the 4th quartile of all 13 TBR community colleges.

4. Breakout Session #4: Developing Inclusive student Services • Approach: • We have decided to take a comprehensive approach to diversity and inclusion efforts. • This is not the job of one individual or office but belongs to the entire campus. • One of the main goals we have adopted as the Inclusion office is to: cultivate diversity and inclusion as an institutional and educational asset.

5. High Impact Practice • Diversity/Global Learning is an high impact practice that we focus on through this comprehensive approach. • We are seeking to support our campus in becoming a learning community of faculty, staff, and administrators that lead our students in creatively engaging with a culturally diverse, demographically shifting, globally connected world. ( Our own campus transformation acts as a impetus for learning). • According to the AAC& U,“ Many colleges and universities now emphasize courses and programs that help students explore cultures, life experiences, and worldviews different from their own. These studies—which may address U.S. diversity, world cultures, or both—often explore “difficult differences” such as racial, ethnic, and gender inequality, or continuing struggles around the globe for human rights, freedom, and power…” • High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter, by George D. Kuh (AAC&U, 2008).

6. 21st Century Diversity and Inclusion Challenge/Opportunity • Challenge: The 21st century with its rapidly growing technology, saturation of information, demographic shifts, and increasing cultural diversity requires that individuals and communities come together to build creative, life-giving, and sustainable communities and cities. This requires that everyone be invited to the table. • Opportunity: Cultural diversity expressed through the creativity, imagination, artistic abilities, emotional intelligences, other intellectual capacities, and faith and spiritual traditions of diverse individuals and communities are assets that will help us educate our students and collectively seek the welfare of our communities, cities, and regions in the 21st century.

7. Strategic Diversity Leadership and Higher Education • Diversity and Inclusion is central to the success of a higher education institution in the 21st century , but for diversity to succeed necessitates “strategy”– it does not just happen organically.

8. Diversity Challenge/Opportunity • Diversity and Inclusion challenge provide us with the opportunity to transform our institutions in ways that allow us to: • Provide access and promote success among historically excluded minority students and low income students. • Better educate our students to live and work in a demographically change, culturally diverse, global connected knowledge-based society. • Pursue our public mission to engage and serve the community • Renew and rebuild our cities for sustainability • Transform our region for the common good

9. Higher Education: Up for the Challenge • To take advantage of the clear intellectual and competitive benefits that a more diverse learning environment fosters, academic leaders need to become simultaneously more strategic and proactive in implementing diversity policies and program.

10. Our Strategy: Transforming NSCC to better serve our students, communities, and region in a globally connected, culturally diverse, knowledge- Based society by engaging and activating diversity as A community asset, academic Asset, organizational asset, faculty development/staff development asset

11. Recruitment and Retention Strategies: Historically Underrepresented and Low-Income Students • The powerful effects of racism, segregation, and discrimination in the U.S. education are apparent in disparities in enrollment, retention, and graduation rates of historically marginalized groups (Bonilla-Silva, 2009). • Historical events rooted in systems of power, privilege, and oppression have both shaped institutional structures and attitudes in a way that impacts both the access and experience of underrepresented students in higher education.

12. Approach • The practices and activities directed toward historically underrepresented students seeks to create welcoming environments where all students thrive.

13. Practices/Activities • This includes the following: • Recruiting strategies specifically designed and directed toward historically underrepresented students • Retention strategies specifically designed to to remove barriers that negatively impact the academic success, retention, graduation rates, and engagement of students of color and low income students. • Supporting cultural or identity based student organizations • Creating a safe community of care for underrepresented students. • Engagement with and service to the local community.

14. Community Engagement • American colleges and universities have always included among their core purposes responding to society’s most pressing issues and preparing graduates for responsible citizenship. This includes educating student’s for civic engagement and global leadership • Higher education experts and critics, government and business leaders, civil society, and the public are more loudly and more frequently calling on colleges and universities to focus sharply on addressing community problems.

15. Approach: Activating Diversity through Community Engagement • Building on the increasing cultural diversity and the existing cultural traditions of the Tri-cities, surrounding areas and Appalachia we seek to engage students and diverse individuals and communities as creative problem solvers of community based issues who have the capacity to be catalyst for city development and transformation as well as agents of cultural renewal.

16. Approach: Activating Diversity through Community Engagement • We will focus on building and supporting culturally diverse community based leaders in order to activate(diversity) diverse individuals and communities as a resource for educating our students and addressing community, city, regional, and global problems. This will provide a diversity rich learning environments for our students. • Specifically, Involving our students in this work will allow us to draw upon the increasing cultural diversity and existing cultural traditions within our community to provide opportunities for civic learning, global learning, integrative learning, and spiritual learning. • We believe that as we “reach out” to diverse individuals and communities through community based outreach and education and commitment to community cultural leadership development they will begin to “reach in” to make their families a part of the Northeast family.

17. Practices/Activities • Community Based Leadership Development • Community Partnerships • Engaged Scholarship • Community Organizing • Community Based Research

18. Community Based Programs

19. Community Based Programs

20. Academic Engagement • Increasingly in recent years, researchers have demonstrated conclusively that more diverse learning environments lead to improved creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking(P.Gurin, Dey, Hurtado, & Gurin, 2002;P.Gurin,Lehman, & Lewis,2004;Hurtado,2007). • Thus, diversity helps establish a powerful learning context for students to achieve outcomes such as integrative learning, inquiry learning, global learning, and civic learning.

21. Approach: Activating Diversity as an Academic ASSET • We will support faculty and student development staff in using a community learning problem-based approach to education that encourages holistic growth and development and integrates academic learning goals with student development goals. • The overarching question that will guide our approach is How do we wisely and creatively engage a diverse society that is globally connected, demographically shifting, culturally diverse and knowledge based. • This “Big Question” allows us to address academic topics that requires an interdisciplinary approach and involve • We will support this approach in various ways to help faculty educate students who will be scientifically literate, civically engaged, spiritually centered whole leaders that creatively steward the globally connected, culturally diverse, knowledge-based society in a way that seeks and promotes the common good.

22. Practices • We will support staff and faculty in developing curriculum and co-curricular activities that engage with the "Big Question” • Curriculum Development Workshops • Community Based Education Support/Consultations • We will support students using transformative pedagogy and instructional methods that engage with diversity • CBSL Opportunities • Introduction to Cultural Leadership • Student Sponsored Research • Student Projects Include other high impact practices and how they impact student learning

23. Organizational Development • Institutional excellence in the 21st century demand institutional commitment to diversity and global learning. Two year institutions with an open-door admissions process attracts diverse populations in increasing numbers, yet many fail to use such diversity as an asset, and no one suffers as result more than students. • Transformational leadership is required to promote organizational change that moves diversity and global learning from the margins to center of our 21st century educational institutions. Transformational leaders must lead through the challenges that frequently hinder incorporation of diversity and global learning within the academy. • Driving Change Through Diversity and Globalization: Transformational Leadership in the Academy

24. Organizational Leadership for the Common Good • Colleges in the 21st century bear significant responsibility for leadership in the advancement of knowledge and inclusiveness of learning environment. • College’s role as a leader in the quest for truth and knowledge and its commitment to it public mission of bettering communities, cities, and society at large makes it a natural space to promote collaboration among various entities (public schools systems, city governments, non-profits, health care institutions, small-businesses, etc.) for the common good. • The readiness of a college to confront 21st century responsibilities and to lead in the quest for truth and knowledge is directly correlated with the degree to which it has embedded diversity and global learning into the basic philosophy and infrastructure of the institution.

25. Approach: Activating Organizational Development as an Asset • Organizational Asset: • We seek to build a multicultural community of engaged student, staff, and faculty scholars and transformational leaders that work collaboratively across disciplines, departments, and other boundaries as they seek to engage students the surrounding communities, cities, and regions for the common good. • Administrators and organizational unit leaders will be challenge to lead our organization in activating diversity in such a way that allows us to help our students, communities, cities, and region to more creatively engage a globally-connected, culturally diverse, demographically shifting, knowledge-based society. 

26. Practices/Activities • We will support administrators and organizational leaders as they provide transformational leadership in the area of diversity and global learning in the following ways: • Visioning • Rethinking the role of diversity and global learning in 21st century educational institutions • Strategic Planning • Assessment Research • Capacity Building • Becoming a leader in the city and region for learning city development and planning

27. Faculty/Staff Development • Diversity and global learning is linked to teaching, learning, and student development through the changes that occur in the curricular(classroom) and co-curricular(student activities) as faculty and student affairs staff help move the institutional focus from teaching‐centered to student‐centered learning, from evaluation to assessment, from discipline‐centered knowledge transmission to the holistic growth of students. • Bridging the Diversity Divide: Globalization and Reciprocal Empowerment in Higher Education, EDNA CHUN, ALVIN EVANS

28. Approach: Activating diversity as Faculty/Staff Development Asset • Faculty and Staff will be invited to engage with the question of diversity in the 21st century by being called upon to build an organizational structure with teaching, learning, and service practices that transforms the institution in a multicultural learning institution that successfully activates diversity and global learning.

29. Practices/Activities • Faculty/Staff Empowerment Workshops • Faculty/Staff Cultural Workers Training • Faculty/Staff Holistic Development Plan • Socio-emotional Training

30. IGNITE 21 Ignite 21 is the way we are seeking to implement this comprehensive approach Purpose: NESCC is committed to preparing 21st century cultural leaders. Cultural leaders draw from their unique social and cultural backgrounds to lead and serve in every sector of society. Cultural leadership is especially necessary as communities are challenged to determine how to creatively engage with a world that is increasingly diverse and interconnected and characterized by growing technology, saturation of information, and demographic shifts. Ignite 21, an initiative of NESCC, supports high school students, traditional age college students, and adult college students as they become cultural leaders that are actively seeking to become a creative workforce and act as creative change agents that transform their communities, cities, region, and state into creative, thriving, life- giving places.

31. IGNITE21 Educational programs are launching pads for these cultural leaders. Ignite 21 supports the holistic student development of these cultural leaders as they draw upon their unique social and cultural backgrounds to find inspiration and build leadership capacity that will allow them to lead in promoting the welfare of their communities and cities. Ignite21 supports cultural leadership that emerges from Appalachia and the surrounding region but especially focuses on igniting the cultural leadership expressed through those students who have been historically underserved by our institution. These groups include, but are not limited to Alaskan Native, American Indian, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.

32. IGNITE 21

33. Cultural Leadership Framework • Cultural leaders bring together their community connections, social and cultural heritages, creativity, and multiple intelligences to provide leadership. Cultural leaders in the 21st century must be scientifically literate, culturally competent, civically engaged, and spiritually centered. Cultural leaders must be able to engage their communities, cities, and region as storytellers, prophets, creators of culture (community) and creative practitioners.

34. Primary Initiative Ignite Initiatives: The primary initiative that we will focus on with the SERS grant funding is our summer boot camp. This initiative falls under our retention and recruitment focus. IGNITE 21 SCHOLARS Ignite scholars are participants in our summer boot camp. They will be invited to share their community connections, social and cultural heritages, unique creativity, and academic excellence with our campus. They are celebrated and supported as they develop their capacities to be agents of cultural renewal and change in the 21st century. As an organization we believe these scholars have the potential to help transform our institution into a 21st century multicultural organization that better serves our communities, cities, and region. Ignite Scholars will be provided with academic support through holistic advising, academic counseling, etc. They are provided with opportunities to lead and grow in their leadership capacities through leaderships development, community outreach and engagement opportunities, they are also provide with group support through our faculty, staff, and peer support partners. Finally, they will be provided with an opportunity to connect with and learn from as well as teach and collaborate with other cultural leaders in various fields and industries such as business, the arts, technology, education, religion, and more. We hope these cultural leaders will build networks that will continue beyond their time at NESCC. High Impact Practices: Learning Community, Service Learrning

35. Other Initiatives • Classroom Engagement: • Transforming classrooms to embrace cultural leadership as educational goal • Restructure Course • Connect students with cultural leaders • Service Learning, Learning Community, Undergraduate research • Holistic Student Mentoring: • Relationship Building • Career Vocation Visioning • Integrating Course work with lived experience • Common Learning Experience

36. Other Initiatives • Faculty-Staff Engagement • Creating Dialogue around issues of equity • Ignite 21 Classroom Engagement workshop • Common Learning Experiences

37. High Impact Practice: Global Diversity /Learning • Organizational and Institutional Engagement • Ignite 21 allows us to frame the entire college community as a learning community seeking to engage with the challenge/ and opportunity of diversity in the 21st century. • Ignite 21 is designed to address both the comprehensive vision of the Inclusion Office and the specific goals of the SERS Grant.  The rationale is that when we address cultural leadership as a vital goal for 21st educational institutions we also embrace diversity and inclusion as an educational and institutional asset. Furthermore, we value the community connections, cultural heritages, social and cultural identities, and creativity that our students bring with them to the institutions. • This calls for us to address inequity that are barriers to preparing 21st century cultural leaders from all backgrounds, but especially students from communities and cultural backgrounds that have been historically underserved in our institutions.