CUMU Conference 2017

Challenging, Energizing, and Rewarding! Building collaborative success between an urban state university and an urban public high school invigorates and enriches both institutions. Careful data collection and assessment has driven program development, policy, and procedure to ensure student success and retention while engaging teaching faculties through professional development opportunities. This session will examine the 10 year history and data of this urban collaboration that has successfully provided opportunity for high school students to enroll in on-campus university courses while completing their high school diploma.
Educational goals and objectives, lessons learned, and assessment will be shared along with implementation of best practices.

Cities are complicated places with overlapping issues and problems. Studies and reports help us to glimpse their particular traits, but they do not always help illustrate the interrelationship of issues. Understanding the layers and interactions between them is important because urbanites do not separate their lives into neat boxes as easily as academics when studying them.

For example, millions of urban American children bring to school issues emanating from homes, families, and neighborhoods that have clear impact on their academic achievement. Studies of school performance, however, often stop at the edge of school buildings. Yet, doing research that explores what happens at home and in school, in neighborhoods and on busses, in families and with friends, leads to more textured understanding of urban complexities. Urban universities, particularly public institutions, are well-poised to do this sort of research which will, in turn, yield better and more nuanced decision-making in various urban institutions.

Through a dialogic approach including audience members, this panel looks at inter-related issues in a mid-sized urban area -- Worcester, MA, New England’s second largest city -- and how its public university and area community organizations seek to integrate multiple single-issue studies into a more comprehensive whole for use by policy-makers, researchers, and institutions. Specific research areas include adverse childhood experiences, refugee-related issues, the opiate epidemic, and impact of cultural differences, and the settings in which they collide including schools, hospitals, and City Hall. Panelists will spark fruitful discussion about using community-engaged scholarship for municipal and citizen benefit.

The US has seen an unprecedented growth in the number of Emergent Bilinguals (EBs) enrolled in K-12 schools. Not surprising, the highest concentration of EBs are in urban areas.  This linguistic diversity offers teachers and students rich opportunities to expand worldviews, deepen understandings of culture and identity, and collaboratively develop language and academic knowledge.  To realize this potential, however, takes skills and resources that many mainstream teachers do not have.  Research shows that schools continue to struggle to meet the needs, much less foster the promise, of their multilingual students.

In 2011, Pennsylvania became one of only five states to mandate a stand-alone course be included in all teacher education programs, and currently more states are considering similar requirements.  In support of this effort, this workshop will share how a Philadelphia-based public College of Education, committed to preparing teachers to work in urban schools, has implemented this mandate – and how its transformed since inception. Specifically, I will address the questions, “What do non-ESL teachers need to know and be able to do to include EBs in content area classrooms?” And, “how can teacher educators develop these in a semester’s time?”  In this workshop, I will share the evolution of this required course from its initial design to what it is today, discuss the K-12 school partnerships and learning gained through the field component, and facilitate the exploration of state mandates related to EBs and how other urban universities are preparing teachers to lead linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms.

Buffalo State has a long history of community engagement and has recently reaffirmed its responsibility as an anchor institution in the city of Buffalo as evidenced in both the campus’ recently adopted strategic plan and the collaboration with five other institutions of higher education to develop an anchor institution dashboard. This presentation will focus on the challenges encountered and progress made in addressing what we see as an urban imperative. We will describe how a guiding philosophy of engagement in urban settings with a guiding principle of partnership reciprocity has become manifest across the institution. We will deconstruct the complex and challenging process of translating the philosophy into a plan of action for all sectors of the institution in a manner that results in systemic change. Presenters will explore the role of key community stakeholders, the inevitable expansion of partnerships, the role of long-term relationships that require a continuum of initiatives, and balancing the endless demands of a commitment in times of finite resources.

The word “Immigrant” is saddled with negative connotations as they continue to flood into the U.S. relocating in various cities across the nation. In 1990, Nebraska predicted a 14.4 % minority ratio by the year 2025 (DHHS 2009) – however, it reached 14.6 % in 2005 – exceeding the anticipated percentage twenty years ahead of its projected date. The growth of immigration will not decrease as we continue to see more minority children in public schools. Thus the need to educate the children and family will rise and public schools will become a necessary haven for the non-native speakers.
Using P-16 Service Learning components as part of the language curriculum is beneficial to bridging relationships in the urban community as students of immigrants’ partner with international university students and a non-profit organization. As a result, students will begin to feel comfortable in an unfamiliar community as they improve their language skills during the partnership. This connection provides resources to the culturally diverse students that will enhance learning about their new world and allow them to see future possibilities, like attending college in the U.S.
We will discuss how Service Learning has become a vehicle that has impacted elementary ELL students culturally, academically, and personally. There are many success stories that have risen out of a having Service Learning as a component of an educational curriculum that we would like to share with the urban community. Though Service Learning is still an experiential method of teaching, our results have been successful.

The 30,000 Degrees initiative brings together a private, practical liberal arts college, the branch campus of a major metropolitan Catholic university, and the public university system of New York City, to increase the number of baccalaureate degree graduates by 30,000 between 2015-2025 within their shared geographic region in Staten Island, NY. Inspired by 55,000 Degrees, this collaboration between Wagner College, St. John’s University/Staten Island Campus, and the College of Staten Island/CUNY was shaped by the 2013 CUMU conference in Louisville. 30,000 Degrees uses a neighborhood model to fill the gaps within Pre-K–16 pipelines as a means of increasing student success and college completion. This initiative builds upon the existing assets and cross-sectoral community network of each Pre-K–16 anchor institution to: 1) better understand the needs of our target students, families, and schools, and 2) to align programs and resources within the pipeline for mutually beneficial, authentic collaborations. Following the 2015 CUMU Engagement Academy and Conference in Omaha, efforts to institutionalize 30,000 Degrees were enhanced with strategies to leverage the legacy of each campus in relation to the shared objectives with each pipeline. The outcome has helped to:
• Improve urban teacher preparation, practicum internship placements, and civic engagement programs
• Increase credit-bearing courses as well as opportunities for entrepreneurship and workforce development for high school students
• Create unique, evidence-based cohort models at the high school and middle school level, which align school and student needs with collaborative faculty research opportunities and the strategic vision of each campus community

The University of Denver’s graduate and professional schools have profound influence on the metro Denver area and beyond. The University has a decades-long legacy of offering clinics to members of the community, partnering with local organizations for internships and community-based coursework, and engaging students in the community in ways that enhance their classroom learning.

As Denver experiences explosive growth in combination with the increasing need for mental and behavioral health expertise, the University’s Schools of Education, Social Work and Professional Psychology decided to collaborate in new and interdisciplinary ways. The deans of each school will discuss the opportunities and challenges that such substantial community engagement presents—from structural and capacity issues to data tracking and outcome measurement to quality control.

This presentation discusses a new Indiana University initiative that addresses the issue of population health and the need for creating a new generation of health care professionals. The “IU Regional Health Consortium” is a collaborative protocol offering two new health care programs, a medical humanities minor and an allied health practitioners credentialing program. The consortium aims to provide IU students with additional educational opportunities in STEM fields, contribute to a culture that focuses on health, enhance the current economic and developmental value to regional communities, and prepare a new generation of health practitioners to respond to a growing health care labor market. The consortium stems from an internal collaboration (within each campus) and an effective inter-campus recruitment and collaboration. In addition, the consortium expands the collaboration between each campus involved in the protocol and the community at large, targeting various local and state agencies to develop internships, practicum programs, and service learning opportunities for all students.

If you deal with an immigrant population you may have noticed a slight drawback in participation this year following the election of our now president. I work primarily in a large Hispanic community. Parent University is the program I run which offers free classes to parents under these four categories: health and wellness, effective parenting, navigating the education system, and personal growth and development. This is a relatively new program that experienced a quick reduction in parent participation. In my community Hispanic families have lined up for hours just to see a notary that could write a note for their child not to be given away to social services in the case they are deported. So what do we do now? My topic is to foster the discussion of ways to re-engage community participation that involves trust and meaningful experiences that they may find helpful and beneficial.

This panel discussion will encompass community outreach issues from varying perspectives. Panel members have positions that involve community outreach for their university; their experiences range from 1-3 years to over 16 years and somewhere in between. Some of their corresponding universities already have Carnegie designation and others are working towards it. They will converge to hold a frank discussion about a variety of issues that impact community engagement and forward motion such as: the challenges of outreach, sustainability, endowments, funding and funding structures; university org charts-who reports to whom, number of staff, role of the president, the provost; communication strategies, evaluation and measuring impact; engaging faculty and students (i.e., traditional, non-traditional, commuters, online students); managing leadership change on campus and/or in the community; and more. Discussion will also touch on lessons learned, forward planning and dealing with naysayers, both on campus and in the community. There will be plenty of time for Q & A and shared best practices for all those who are charged with connecting campus and community. Come to listen, learn and share.

The Environmental Resources Center, or ERC, is one of the Centers of Excellence at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. The mission of the ERC is to promote the understanding and conservation of the natural resources of the region through scientific research, educational opportunities, and outreach. The Center provides a platform for enhancing the visibility of the university in the community; a tangible resource for the public on topics of ecology, the environment and sustainability; and increased opportunities for collaboration among faculty and students from different disciplines within the university. The ERC has had many successes and also challenges, and in my presentation I will explore both in the context of community engagement. Opportunities and challenges can be intertwined. The bulk of support for ERC activity comes from contracts and awards for applied research and technical services. Consequently, staff time and resources are largely dedicated to completing projects, and thus discretionary funds and time are limited. Growth and expansion into new areas requires resources and risk, and there may be delays in tangible benefits to the university, so administration must decide how to apply limited resources to such enterprises. Staffing in the form student internships and graduate student projects builds team size and provides wonderful opportunities for the students, but students are not yet polished in their professions, particularly in realms of political interaction, and so need more time to accomplish tasks and possibly close supervision to avoid stepping on toes. Reaching collaboratively across academic silos continues to be challenging.

The presenters, university instructor and kindergarten teacher, will describe their experiences in a university-school partnership that involves a yearlong clinical residency. The scholar-practitioners in this study were brought into a collaborative student-teaching residency program through a grant that established district partnerships with an urban university. The university presenter took on the role of site-coordinator for the partner district located 20 miles from the urban campus. In that setting, she supports emerging teachers in either a two-day a week field experience or a five-day a week final student teaching experience. This case study will provide an overview of the program and the core elements that include shared governance meetings, observation data from walkthroughs and performance assessments, co-teaching, mentor teacher monthly professional development meetings, and data collection and analysis for decision making at the university and K-6 campus. The case study will include lessons learned by emerging teachers and mentor teachers during implementation of the pilot. The long range goal is to collect data over five years to determine the value of a residency program for the K-6 students, mentor teachers, and emerging teachers as compared to a traditional one-semester student teaching experience.

Since 2013, St. John’s University’s Staten Island campus has successfully adopted an urban extension branch campus strategy that has significantly increased local high school students’ access to private higher education. Leveraging the metropolitan history of St. John’s as a pathway to professions, Early Start Academy has broken down academic and financial barriers to college readiness for underrepresented groups by bringing high school cohorts to campus for college courses in their future major. St. John’s Early Start program makes a distinctive contribution to the NYC DOE’s pre-college credit initiative by connecting high school students to their future major and career. Guiding the intervention in select schools is a class-room based guidance counselor placement that uses the career development curricula of M. S. School Counselling students to measure the effectiveness of career goal-setting on high school students' pre-college credits.

For 2017, St. John’s Staten Island campus Early Start Academy is paired with "Difference Makers," adding civic engagement to career development and academic preparedness as college readiness measures. Difference Makers matches Early Start Academy high school cohorts with St. John’s University’s community partner, Central Family Life Center, for capacity building projects that build St. John’s Catholic social justice mission and award winning academic service learning program into high school students’ academic preparedness. Together Early Start Academy and Difference Makers represent a distinctive approach to higher education college readiness initiatives that use the value-added outcomes of academics—career development and civic engagement—to engage St. John’s traditional constituency, underrepresented groups and first-generation college students.

Colleges and Universities share the responsibility of transmitting and producing knowledge. Higher education creates environments that inform our future citizenry, and serve as an influential institution in the promotion of civil society. However, higher education is also space where prevailing social, political, cultural and economic ideologies are contested. The validation of knowledge is among the most contested ideas, especially as we consider how certain groups cultural and indigenous insights are marginalized, by Western constructs of knowledge validation. In this session, the presenters will share their experiences teaching a graduate leadership course. The course explored the classic paradox, "Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?” to make clear the mutual and recursive connections between leadership, art, and community, by exploring the metropolitan artistic mediums of graffiti, car culture and prison art. Flipping the classroom in our context required the students to take advantage of the de-professional knowledge and other ways of knowing found in urban and metropolitan areas. The students surrounding communities were situated as critical geographic spaces for analysis, inquiry and the praxis of leadership, as well as the ongoing production of intersectional identities. Presenters will share elements of their syllabus, excerpts from student journals, examples of individual cajita (sacred box) projects, as well an original piece of art the students produced as a part of their group presentation.

Denver Public Schools (DPS) and the University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver) School of Education and Human Development (SEHD) formalized a research collaborative in fall 2010, modeled loosely after the successful collaborative Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR). A key lesson from CCSR was that the partnership had to be equally beneficial to both institutions. As the DPS school district sought assistance in carrying out studies of importance to the district, sharing technical expertise, knowledge leading to improved outcomes for students, and visibility as a district engaged in important research, CU Denver sought access to data and research sites, strong relationships with schools and educational leaders, and opportunities to impact practice through significant research. Partnership work in 2010 through 2012 resulted in a number of useful studies, with a focus on success of English language learners and research on novice teacher preparation and early career development.

Inspired partly by successful research-and-practice partnerships such as SERP, Collective Impact, and STRIVE, SEHD expanded the model piloted by CCSR to develop the Center for Practice Engaged Education Research. C-PEER develops and supports university/practice site partnerships to co-design and conduct applied research. Studies are designed in iterative cycles to maximize early value of the research while serving original partnership goals of linking technical expertise and data access in service of research helping to improve problems of practice. C-PEER supports both faculty and student researchers in a variety of research partnerships.

Community College Transfer Students can and do SUCCEED! Learn some of the best practices of the top 4-year institutions for Colorado community college transfers. As the only tri-institutional campus in the country, there is potential for contention and leaving students isolated to find their own way. MSU Denver, CU Denver, and the Community College of Denver transfer team will discuss how they implement transfer guides, admissions promise agreements, recruitment, articulation agreements, and other innovative collaborative methods to help their Transfer Students thrive and SUCCEED.

This presentation builds on research presented in 2016 based on experiential learning activities used by teacher preparation faculty in an urban setting. The experiential learning activities included activities in elementary classrooms, an activity is in a museum, and one activity at a zoo. Experiential learning activities are designed to engage pre-service teachers with practical experience for assessing students, designing curriculum and instructional plans, and implementing intervention instruction or presenting general lessons. The current presentation will focus on two subsequent experiential learning practices implemented in an urban setting. One practice is a yearlong residence model that includes one semester of co-teaching on Mondays and Wednesday the semester before a full-time, semester student-teaching experience. The observation data is coded by areas of reinforcement and areas of refinement, which provide the faculty with evidence of how well students transfer theory to practice. This new development in teacher preparation provides data beyond determining the knowledge and skills that emerging teachers perceive they gain from participating in experiential learning activities in community and K-12 settings to actually observing emerging teachers in the classroom setting. Finally, the presentation will introduce a new experiential project that will begin in the summer 2017 to advance the teaching of science in the urban setting. Similar experiential practices will be used in the new practice.

Benjamin Franklin's American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania House of Representatives collaborated to create the University of Pennsylvania, whose stated purpose was to make advancements in agriculture, science and medicine available to the public.

Today, there are urgent, compelling educational and financial reasons to accelerate development of public-private partnerships among universities and their communities.
The definition of evolution can be summed up in a single, pithy phrase from the 2012 film Moneyball—Adapt or Die. The 21st century is throwing challenges at institutions of higher education at an accelerating pace, and if we can't find ways to adapt, we will be forced to shut our doors.

Discover how MSU Denver has always been a bit out-of-the-box, taking the essence of its entrepreneurial spirit, couple it with the adapt or die statement, and embed in our culture through public-private partnerships with entities such as Lockheed Martin, Detroit Institute of Music Education (DIME) Denver and more.

Boston is a highly-educated city with world-class colleges and universities who boast impressive retention and graduation rates. Despite the success, Boston higher education institutions continue to struggle with recruiting, retaining and graduating a diverse student body. Based on 2015 data from the National Center for Education Statistics, only 16.1% of 4-year undergraduate enrollment at Boston-based colleges and universities were Black or Hispanic students. At Boston Public Schools, in 2015-2016, 73.9% of students classified themselves as Black or Hispanic. Yet, with such opportunities in our backyard, college and universities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, etc., recruit students from all over the country to meet their diversity goals, usually targeting and developing programming for high-achieving students, while failing to create an equitable opportunity for all students to achieve life-long success. In the current environment, where higher education and industry seek creative responses to the changing demographics, the most dedicated staff and faculty of institutions are uniquely positioned to help guide women and underrepresented minorities from Boston and other urban areas into the 21st century workforce.

This comprehensive session will focus on creating a body of knowledge about the opportunities and challenges colleges and universities face in developing extensive college access and success partnerships, programming, financial aid opportunities, and support services for local, low-income and/or underrepresented minority students. At the end of the session, all materials will be collected by the facilitators to document the conversations and compile a report that will be emailed to attendees with follow-up opportunities.

Widely known through the work of the Harlem Children’s Zone and the federal government’s Promise and Choice Neighborhood programs, geographically specific initiatives have the potential to positively address the challenge of concentrated poverty. While we may be familiar with these types of initiatives based out of non-profit organizations or governmental grants, less is known about this type of strategy in higher education.

Recently, some universities have also taken on this geographically specific strategy. This session will explore a newer type of initiative: place-based community engagement (PBCE). PBCE is unique in that such initiatives are an institution-wide strategy that’s geographically concentrated with a long-term engagement plan with the target community (Koth, 2013). Drawing from four campuses from the Northwest (Seattle University), West (University of San Diego, and Mid Atlantic (Loyola University Maryland and Drexel University), our panelists will engage in a conversation to share lessons learned and promising practices as their campuses have engaged in this strategy. We will do this by engaging panelists in a discussion on how campuses began their exploring and planning process for their initiative. Panelists will then share what implementation has looked like. Lastly, the panelists will share what they are doing to sustain such initiatives in a climate of political and economic uncertainty.

The impetus behind this presentation is to provide practitioners the transparency of executing a Black Male Initiative and Fellows Program. The Black Male Initiative & Fellows Program (BMI) is a first-year retention program at the University of Central Oklahoma that provides curricular and co-curricular experiences for black males that ensures their success academically, professionally, and socially. During the three years of its existence, BMI has reported a 68% retention rate for first-time, full-time Black male students, a 20% retention increase, as well as a grade point increase of 12% compared to students who are not in the program.

By focusing on the areas of messaging, monitoring, ministering/mentoring and money, The University of Central Oklahoma has created a framework for institutions of higher learning – specifically predominantly white, metropolitan institutions – that could be implemented to combat the social and cultural barriers that African-American males encounter during or before their college experience.

Using Critical Race Theory and Dr. Shaun Harper’s anti-deficit framework as the theoretical structure for the Black Male Initiative program, this presentation will further report the planning for the program, illustrate the significance of recruiting, retaining and graduating Black males and the transformative implications of African-American male success.