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VOLUME XII, NUMBER 13

* INNOVATION ABSTRACTS

PUBLISHED BY THE NATIONAL: INSTITUTE FOR STAFF AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, THE Acne OF TEXAS ed Uy

 

WITH SUPPORT FROM THE W.-K. KELLOGG:FOUNDATION AND THE SID'W. RICHARDSON FOUNDATION

The Maryland Community College Project

“It was like having my brain washed with Windex,”
said a student whose instructor is a participant in the
Towson State University /Maryland Community
Colleges Project to integrate the recent Scholarship on
Women. This colorful expression of the eye-opening
effect of a balanced course epitomizes the experiences of
many students at the five community colleges in the
project sponsored by the Fund for the Improvement of
Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE).

There is a “ripple effect,” too. Since students have
started to challenge professors whose courses are not
gender- and race-balanced, the “FIPSE faculty” know
they are making an impression. Faculty efforts to
balance courses have energized and empowered
students by introducing them to the idea that the
contributions of women and people of color count.

Balancing the college curriculum to ensure that all
courses, not just special courses, include the experiences
of women and men of all races and classes is the goal of
the current “second phase” of Women’s Studies and of
this FIPSE project. The need for an organized and
extended effort to balance the community college
curriculum is particularly acute for several reasons.

To start, more than one-third of all undergraduates
attend community colleges, and the majority of the
student population is female and, frequently, minority.
Even so, relatively few community colleges offer
Women’s Studies courses, and most of their traditional
courses are not gender- and race-balanced.

If they are to make sweeping changes, all faculty
need opportunities to catch up with the explosion in
women’s studies scholarship and time to study and
absorb the complex pedagogical issues it poses. Faculty
development projects aimed at addressing curriculum
transformation have taken place at about 100 four-year
colleges and universities around the nation. In contrast,
at community colleges, where the typical teaching load
is 15 hours, faculty have received little or no release
time and few sabbaticals to begin the process of “inte-
grating the curriculum.”

After a three-year curriculum transformation grant
project involving 70 faculty at their own university,
Towson State University project directors received a

second FIPSE grant to support a two-year curriculum
transformation project at five Maryland community
colleges—Anne Arundel, the Community College of
Baltimore, Catonsville, Montgomery, and Prince
George’s. The Towson/Community College Project has
three co-directors. The community colleges are contrib-
uting, release time for the 45 participating faculty.

This is one of the few multi-college integration
projects dedicated solely to community colleges. It is
also the first multi-college curriculum integration
collaboration between community colleges and a four-
year college. As a model project, it exemplifies the
advantages of bringing together a multiplicity of
experiences and perspectives.

The enrollment patterns at these particular commu-
nity colleges make curriculum integration essential.
Nationwide, approximately 56 percent of all under-
graduates are women; but 60 percent of the approxi-
mately 60,000 credit students at the five colleges partici-
pating in the FIPSE project are female, and 63 percent of
degree recipients are women. Significant numbers of
minorities, especially blacks, Asians, and Hispanics, are
enrolled in most of the colleges; and at the predomi-
nantly black colleges, 72 percent of the students are
women.

The purpose of the project is to help faculty find,
evaluate, and then incorporate the recent scholarship on
women and minorities into their courses. The structure
was established to provide an effective learning context
and a high degree of support for participants. Since
Spring 1988, faculty have responded to consultants’
discussions of gender and racial bias in the curriculum.
Faculty have also been meeting regularly and fre-
quently in discipline-based workshops (Literature and
Composition; History and Philosophy; Fine Arts,
Sociology and Psychology; Biology and Allied Health)
to read and analyze feminist pedagogy and the scholar-
ship on women and minorities; and to discuss strategies
for updating their courses, revising their assignments,
and testing out the changes in their classrooms. Since
each workshop is composed of faculty from all five
colleges, participants have opportunities to exchange
ideas with a variety of colleagues.

 

yess THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STAFF AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (NISOD)

Woy ‘
Set EDB 348. Austin. Texas 78712

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Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin