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1 Quantway 2 Letter from the president 4 Vice Chancellor 5 Competency-based education 6-7 Committee reports

8 Diversity policy 9 Community college councils 10 Applied learning 11 Delegates Matter 12 SUNY Voices

In this issue

By Tina Good, Ph.D. Past President, FCCC Wait! I'm an English professor. Why am I writing an article on MATH remediation? The truth is, math remediation matters to all of SUNY's community college faculty, even English faculty. As we all know, the two SUNY Gen Ed requirements of written communication and mathematics have remained constant. When serving on SUNY’s Remediation Task Force, we verified that the mathematics requirement is the "gatekeeper" requirement for the baccalaureate degree within SUNY. In fact, 30 to 60 percent of our students place into a remedial math course. We can blame the high schools, but where does that get us? We, as faculty of colleges with open-access missions, have the responsibility to provide a curriculum that will provide our students with reasonab le pathways toward academic success and completion. If the math requirement is the number one academic reason why our students do not persist, it seems that we, as faculty, must attend to the math requirement. We know that the longer we keep students in remedial courses, the more likely they are to drop out--

often worse off because they have incurred college debt. In trying to resolve the math remediation quandary, the Carnegie Foundation through a network of faculty, administrators, and researchers developed two course platforms known as Quantway and Statway. This article will focus on Quantway because it is the approach being most used by our colleges. So what is Quantway? According to Professor Kris Baker from Rockland Community College, Quantway (and Statway) are pedagogical approaches to developmental mathematics education that are related to qu ant i t at iv e l i t er ac y an d statistics. Not only do the courses (pathways) tackle the mathematical issues that the learners require, they also address the affective and literacy pieces that help the math l e a r n e r s b e c o m e b e t t e r students. Carnegie's literature shows Quantway 1 has been designed to prepare non-STEM students in need of math remediation for college-level work in just one semester. Quantway 2 is the subsequent college-level credit-bearing course. To participate in Quantway and Statway, campuses join Carnegie’s Network Improvement Community

Continued on page 3

Quantway gives students a pathway to completion

Faculty Council Matters Spring 2016 page 2

The conclusion of “Downton Abbey” a few weeks ago prompts me to think about the valued connections between upstairs and downstairs in the early twentieth century English aristocracy. Downton characters from ‘downstairs’ like Daisy, Mr. Mosely, and Gwen illustrate the value of education in the lives of the servant class. They were dedicated to education as a way to enrich their lives as well as improve their economic well-being. Upstairs characters like Lord and Lady Grantham supported their servants’ pursuit of education, much to the chagrin of more rigid characters like the butler, Mr. Carson. While I hate to invoke the tiers of upstairs and downstairs, I like the analogy of community colleges serving as stairs to a better life for our students. Community colleges educate the majority of our SUNY students, over 260,000, which includes an abundance of first-generation and refugee students, as well as honors students, veterans, under-represented minorities, and students who are parents. Community college faculty meet students where they are when they arrive in our classrooms in 30 open-access institutions. Their needs are different from most traditional residential students at baccalaureate institutions. More than two-thirds of our community college students need developmental education at almost every one of our institutions. In order to meet their students’ needs, community college faculty invest in professional development in sometimes trendy developmental education programs. Even if faculty

do not embrace outs ide developmental education initiatives, they care and nurture their students’ reading, writing and math via “Rise” workshops, accelerated learning, combining credit and non-credit content, or engaging in more one-on-one contact with students. Community college faculty are more nimble in their pedagogy and more committed to their students’ success than they are ever given credit for by education reformers who think they know better. Community college faculty offer integrity in courses and programs so students are prepared as transfer students for upper-division work at SUNY and private institutions of higher education. Faculty extend this quality to our students and communit ies whi le being committed to students’ overall well-being and success. When SUNY introduces new initiatives such as Applied Learning, Quantway, and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy (all discussed in this issue), community college faculty are on the front lines of operationalizing the policies and programs generated by shared governance. Community college faculty have long been engaged in offering service-learning projects, internships and travel abroad experiences, often to the astonishment of our students and the surrounding community. Developmental math, reading, and English faculty at our community colleges are compelled to innovate their instructional and curricular models to reduce the amount of time our students spend in remediation. And the diversity policy is

supported by college faculty who desire to recruit and hire under-represented faculty so our professors look more like our students. They have long been dedicated to a multicultural curriculum as evidenced by women’s studies and minority studies programs that are decades old. If community colleges are the stairs to a better future for our students, then faculty must be viewed as a foundational underpinning for students taking their first, and sometimes second and third steps in their educational journey. It is an honorable endeavor and I am proud to represent the faculty who have devoted their careers to this enterprise.

Nina Tamrowski President, FCCC

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Letter from the president

Faculty Council Matters Spring 2016 page 3

Faculty Council of Community Colleges State University Plaza

Albany, NY 12246 518.320.1651

http://www.fccc.suny.edu

Volume 4 ● Issue 2

Leanne Warshauer………….………..Editor warshal@sunysuffolk.edu

(NIC) to fully benefit from Carnegie’s research, collaborate with other faculty from around the nation, and have access to the Quantway or Statway online platforms. There has been a one-time fee to join NIC, but the amount has decreased over time with the number of campuses joining. What was once a $40,00 fee is now $20,00, but because of their commitment to math education and college completion, SUNY’s administration has agreed to pay that fee on behalf of our campuses during the grant period. (For more information, read Senior Vice Chancellor Johanna Duncan-Poitier’s article found in this issue on page 4.) Many of our colleges are already piloting Quantway and some preliminary results are in. Rockland Community College, one of the first Quantway colleges, reports successes as high as 75 percent per semester. Suffolk Community College, now in its second semester of implementation, reports that they offered 20 sections of Quantway 1 in Fall 2015. Sixty-two percent of the students enrolled in those sections successfully completed their coursework. Based on the completion numbers and student survey results, the math faculty at Suffolk have agreed to move beyond the pilot and submit their Quantway 1 course to the College Curriculum Committee for approval as a permanent course. Faculty can be anxious when using their faculty governance process to institutionalize new ideas, but our programs and courses are at their best when they are the product of informal and formal collaboration. When using the faculty governance process to

develop and authorize innovative courses and programs. Niagara Community College provides us with a model as to how governance processes can support and even motivate new ideas. Professor Christine Tirella reports that while initial interest in Quantway may have begun with the college's administration, it was a Faculty Council plenary presentation that inspired the college's math faculty to investigate further. Through collaboration with their college's administration, SUNY, and Carnegie, the faculty at Niagara agreed to pilot Quantway and is now in the process of seeking faculty governance approval. The process, Tirella reports, is what encouraged faculty to explore and develop the initiative. Professor Baker notes that Rockland's Quantway program is also successful because of its faculty governance process. He reminds us that "faculty involvement is key in the success of any program at institutions of higher learning. SUNY Senior Vice Chancellor Duncan-Poitier states, "SUNY encourages all faculty interested in Quantway to use their faculty governance processes in developing their courses." Quantway, however, is not the only program our community college faculty are developing in order to improve student success in remedial math. According to Nina Tamrowski, president of the Faculty Council, Quantway (and Statway) remedial math programs have been an important development at our community colleges this academic year. The Faculty Council supports math faculty in their quest to offer the best possible math remediation for their s t u d e n t s , w h e t h e r t h a t improvement results from the use

of Quantway, Statway, other national remedial programs, better placement practices, "brush-up" workshops prior to placement, or more intrusive advising. For example, at Erie Community College, Professor David Usinski reports the establishment of a non- S T E M p a t h w a y u s i n g developmental math courses. They have also rearranged the order of the placement test so that algebra is tested first. Early numbers indicate that nearly 90 percent more students are enrolling in non-STEM credit-bearing math courses while the STEM numbers have decreased only slightly. Recently they have also added a pilot to include a non-STEM statistics course using Statway-like materials. Clearly, SUNY and our community college faculty are confronting student retention and math education head on. President T a m r o w s k i r e m a r k s h o w impressed (though not surprised) she is at how thoughtful and committed our faculty are. We are dedicated to improving student learning outcomes in many ways. Perhaps one day, mathematics will no longer be the gatekeeper course but, instead, will serve as a model for other disciplines to emulate.

Quantway Continued from page 1

Faculty Council Matters Spring 2016 page 4

By Johanna Duncan-Poitier SUNY Senior Vice Chancellor for Community Colleges and the Education Pipeline Student success and faculty leadership go hand in hand. It’s just that simple. As we move forward with our completion agenda we are excited about the possibilities associated with a new evidence based math model being implemented at SUNY. The national research-based model developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching at Stanford University, called Quantway/Statway, is being driven by our faculty’s leadership, guidance and counsel. Our faculty know firsthand the pedagogical approaches that make a difference

for our students — students who often face some of the greatest challenges of our time. Your guidance, your voice and your leadership have been critical from the very beginning and continue to be essential to examining whether this national model is right for SUNY, determining what is necessary to implement it on our campuses, and ensuring fac u l t y go v er na nc e i s a fundamental part of this scale-up. Since we last spoke about this new initiative, we now have 20 community college campuses involved in this work. Eighty-two SUNY math faculty members are currently teaching, or receiving professional development to teach, Quantway in the fall or spring of 2017. Similarly, we have others who are exploring whether

this option is right for their campuses. At the same time we have faculty who have gone above and beyond to support their colleagues who want to learn more about teaching these courses. This includes opening their classrooms to share their work and discuss the impact on students. This comradery is so typical of our excellent and supportive SUNY faculty. Chancellor Zimpher is committed to SUNY’s adoption of evidence-based practices and scale-up strategies that will harness the collective impact of our campuses. National data provides evidence that Quantway/Statway is a successful program. This impact has been further demonstrated on our campuses so SUNY has boosted its funding and support of professional development for faculty who are interested in exploring and/or teaching these courses. In addition to the $1.8 million provided through a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant to support SUNY’s faculty with spread and scale-up of this pedagogical approach, we are so pleased that the chancellor has dedicated an additional $1.5 million to support the work of our interested faculty. This additional fund ing w i l l h e lp c ov er professional development, travel, faculty release time, our membership in Carnegie’s Network Improvement Community at Stanford and other expenses to bring this pedagogical approach to scale — at no cost to you. In an article in this issue Dr. Tina Good mentions the successful results on some of our campuses. SUNY has moved beyond the national metric of twice the success rate in half the time to close to three times that success

Faculty leadership is essential to student success

SUNY faculty met in Saratoga in November to attend the first ever SUNY Carnegie Quantway/Statway Professional Development Institute in New York State. Pictured left to right are Mary Crawford-Mohat, Nina Tamrowski, Johanna Duncan-Poitier, and Kris Baker.

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Faculty Council Matters Spring 2016 page 5

By Patrick Woomer A s s i s t a n t P r o f e s s o r o f Engineering, SUNY Adirondack In her 2016 State of the University address, SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher announced her plan to take online teaching and learning initiatives to the next level. The Open SUNY 2.0 program will include “new strategies such as prior learning assessment, adaptive learning platforms, competency-based education, and stackable micro-credentials that can be recognized for credit.” The Education Initiatives Committee (EIC) of the Faculty Council is attempting to investigate each of those issues and address faculty concerns. One of the ways we are moving to educate community college faculty is through a list-serve including all community college EICs and other interested members of our community. Each month we will be looking at a different topic and sharing resources, discussing concerns, and trying to spread best-practices. In April we will be discussing Competency-Based Education (CBE). This is not a new practice, but it is being looked at for much broader use. CBE involves alternate methods of assessing the education/learning of students for individual programs or courses. The assessment will involve demonstration of mastery or proficiency of skills or specific competencies which are smaller parts of larger objectives. For any of the alternate methods of CBE, the course and/or program learning objectives will need to be split into smaller,

d e m o n s t r a b l e s k i l l s o r proficiencies. These can be assessed using alternate methods which move away from the tradition of seat-time in a classroom. Methods can include p o r t fo l io s , p r o j ec t s , a nd presentations, as well as kinesthetic or skill-based learning activities. CBE can lead to changing the role of faculty from lecturer to that of facilitator. CBE can be more flexible and result in reduced time-to-completion. Students who need more time can be offered tutoring and alternative activities to help learn the required objectives. Currently, students who pass a course with a C might be expected to have an 80 percent mastery of the subject content. This might mean a much higher percentage of some learning objectives and little to no mastery of other learning objectives. These same students would then move on to higher-level courses without ever learning some of the pre-requisite objectives or skills. CBE, if done correctly, could lead to an 80 percent or better mastery of every learning objective or skill. So in addition to the possibly reduced time-to-completion, the student would be better prepared for follow-on classes or jobs after graduation. A recent Gallup poll of business leaders showed that only 11 percent “strongly believed” that graduates were well prepared for work. As beneficial as this all seems, there are some potential pitfalls. Faculty may be concerned about their changing role which could lead to reduced load, reduced faculty members required for a given program. There is also some concern about the perceived move

away from the traditional liberal-arts educational model of college degrees. Join us in our discussions.

Contact your Faculty Council delegate and/or join the new Education Initiatives Committee

on your campus.

Looking at competency-based education

rate for some of our earliest adopter campuses. What is equally i m p r e s s i v e i s h o w t h i s contextual ized pedagogical approach that integrates productive persistence and confidence in our students is also appearing to positively impact retention and student performance in other courses. In the next few weeks, you will see an announcement about our upcoming professional development series with our Carnegie partners in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in June. We look forward to seeing many of you there. Your leadership, your commitment to success and your approach to innovative evidence-based practices make me so proud to be a part of the SUNY family. Thank you all so very much. If math faculty are interested in Quantway or Statway, they should email Jennifer Miller in SUNY's Office of Community Colleges at jennifer.miller@suny.edu. She can provide details on the no-cost p r o f e s s i o n a l d e v e l o p m e n t opportunities for exploring Quantway as well as suggest faculty to whom they can speak about the Pathways.

Faculty leadership Continued from page 4

Faculty Council Matters Spring 2016 page 6

By Leanne Warshauer, Ph.D. Press Officer, FCCC Roughly 40 people attended the Faculty Council committee planning meetings held at the Desmond Hotel in Albany this March. Attendees included Faculty Council officers and committee chairs, vice chairs, delegates, and liaisons from SUNY and the Student Assembly. Delegates and alternate delegates to the Faculty Council serve on one of the Council’s five standing committees. Some of the committee work takes place at the plenaries or via email or conference call, but, as Tina Good, chair of the Education Initiatives Committee said, “With so much work to be done, I’m grateful that we have these face-to-face meetings to support our efforts.” The meetings preceded a SUNY Voices workshop, “Working Together to Improve Campus Climate,” which also took place in Albany. (See page 12 for more on SUNY Voices.)

The Awards Committee has selected the 2015-2016 Distinguished Service Award recipient, Hank Dullea of the SUNY board of trustees, a great candidate. He will receive the award at our fall plenary in October. We are also in the process of reviewing the guidelines for the SUNY Chancellor’s Excellence awards, the SUNY Shared Governance Award and the Distinguished Faculty nominations. We ask all campuses to participate in all of the awards. Our good people deserve to be recognized. Yvette Roberts from SUNY Central attended our meeting and will be the liaison from SUNY, along with Jason Lane, vice provost for academic planning and strategic leadership and senior associate vice chancellor for SUNY, Bruce Leslie from the UFS Programs and Awards committee, and Jessica Accardia, Student Assembly treasurer.

Faculty Council committee meetings March 2016

The Academic and Student Affairs Committee will bring our statement of curriculum evaluation to the spring plenary. The statement deals with issues like Quantway/Statway. We are also conducting further OER research and creating an annotated bibliography. The P-TECH schools in N.Y. also generated some questions so we are going to look further into the P-TECH schools as well.

Faculty Council Matters Spring 2016 page 7

The Education Initiatives Committee is committed to facilitating collaboration among our campuses as they seek to address ever-increasing emerging issues in higher education. The EIC has decided to better facilitate cross-campus conversations by actively engaging our Emerging Education Initiatives Committees (EEIC) listserv. To launch the listserv, the Faculty Council EIC and Campus EICs discussed March Madness and

Microcredentialing. In April, competency-based education (CBE) is on deck. PLA will be discussed in May, with Applied Learning following in June. March's microcredentialing discussion has already raised awareness and questions about what microdentials are and when/how, if at all, they should be developed. CBE promises to be an equally engaging conversation.

Faculty Council committee meetings March 2016

The Governance Committee, with Ken Vennette leading the effort, created a survey for campus governance leaders related to community college contingent faculty participation in shared governance. The survey was adapted from a University Faculty Senate (UFS) survey, and results will be discussed at the spring plenary and then reported to the UFS. The committee also reviewed the proposed questionnaire and list of campus participants for SUNY presidential evaluations. The notes, suggested revisions, and questions/concerns were forwarded to Nina Tamrowski to convey to SUNY. The committee will also serve its annual role as nominations committee for Faculty Council officers; elections will be held at the spring plenary. At this point, the committee has completed almost of all its scheduled initiatives for the year.

The Communication and

Professional Development

Committee has been working on setting

up four regional orientation sessions for

the faculty members serving on the new

regional Community College Councils.

These orientation sessions will discuss the

role of faculty on these councils,

specifically advocating for faculty purview

over curricula and standards, shared

governance processes, and the academic

integrity of courses and programs.

CPD continues to work on the Faculty

Council Campus Governance Leaders'

Handbook. We will also be revising the

Faculty Council Delegate Handbook.

We have another in our series of one-day

regional faculty workshops scheduled at

Rockland Community College on April 30.

We will continue to provide our delegates

with a PowerPoint presentation for each

of our plenaries, reporting on plenary

activities, presentations and resolutions.

Faculty Council Matters Spring 2016 page 8

By H. Carl McCall Chairman, SUNY Board of Trustees In the midst of a very challenging time for higher education, with constantly shifting demographics, innovative teaching and learning trends and racially charged incidents around the country – the State University of New York has been focused on building on our history of access by developing a new diversity, equity and inclusion policy to address some of the most pressing issues. With guidance from a SUNY Diversity Task Force led by SUNY’s Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Alexander Cartwright and including the system chief diversity officer, campus faculty, administrators and students, we researched history and background for the policy and identified the key areas that need ed more concentrated efforts. During this process, it became evident that the very foundation of the SUNY system was born out of a desire to serve students who would not have had opportunities at any other institution – because of their race, because of their religion, or because of their socio-economic status. SUNY has always celebrated and encouraged diversity, but still, we find ourselves, as so many of our nation’s campuses do, struggling to meet our goals or to fully prepare ourselves to serve the rapidly changing student body. We now know that as a percent of SUNY’s total enrollment, under-represented minority (URM) enrollment has grown from 14.7 percent to 23.8 percent in the past ten years. But at the same time, URM students and Pell recipients

have the lowest retention rate and lowest graduation rates among SUNY students. We know that in the next decade, the number of Hispanic public high school graduates is expected to increase by 13 percent and the number of Asian/Pacific Islanders by nearly 40 percent. And we know that to begin to mirror the composition of our largest constituency, the students, SUNY has to increase much more than the 1 percent we saw from 2007 to 2013 in SUNY employees who identify as URM. And so, with that goal of serving our student population in the best way possible, the task force laid out a set of bold recommendations (see box, right) that have become the basis for transforming the diversity equity and inclusion landscape across SUNY and outlined steps to take that will move those changes forward. After much review and discussion, the SUNY Board of Trustees officially adopted the new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policy at the September 2015 meeting. Further, Gov. Cuomo issued a press release that day, announcing the adoption, detailing the policy and praising the efforts of SUNY and the state for sending such a strong message lifting up our commitment to this critical subject. Although we have a ways to go before fully realizing all of our goals, we now have a roadmap that will guide us through the next steps and beyond while we remain steadfast in our pursuit to be the

most inclusive system of higher education in the county.

New diversity policy offers roadmap for inclusion

Recommendations of the SUNY Diversity Task Force ▪ A chief diversity officer for every campus who will collaborate as a system-wide network to inform, support, and implement system initiatives. ▪ Comprehensive strategic diversity plans for campuses and SUNY’s administrative headquarters. Campus plans will address student recruitment, retention, and completion strategies; administrative, faculty, and staff recruitment and retention strategies; and an evaluation/assessment component. ▪ Added emphasis on using leadership search firms that have demonstrated that they value diversity. ▪ Customized cultural competency training for SUNY and campus staff. ▪ Annual reporting on policy progress that is tied to the leadership evaluation process. ▪ Dedicated faculty researchers in the areas of diversity, equity and inclusion who will support the SUNY chief diversity officer network and evaluate the policy for effectiveness and continuous improvement.

Faculty Council Matters Spring 2016 page 9

By Nina Tamrowski President, FCCC The community college councils are a feature of the 2015/2016 budget passed last April. These councils are supposed to be linked to the regional economic development councils that were developed about four years ago by the Cuomo administration. The c o u n c i l m e m b e r s h i p i s determined by the chancellor, and each community college council will be chaired by a community college president from each corresponding region. The councils’ charge may include setting program development, enrollment, and transfer goals for the region; coordinating regional education and training program offerings; and establishing goals to improve student outcomes. In fall 2015, Senior Vice Chancellor of Community Colleges and the Education Pipeline J o h a n n a D u n c a n - P o i t i e r convened several sessions with community college stakeholders to help inform the chancellor about desired membership on the councils. The vice chancellor convened the presidents, local trustees, Faculty Council executive committee, and Student Assembly executive committee at different times in order to collect input on membership structure and the council charge. The draft charge was reviewed in December and January by each stakeholder group. In January 2016, the SUNY board of trustees approved the official charge and council structure. The Faculty Council executive committee quickly determined f a c u l t y c o u n c i l m e m b e r qualifications and developed a

process by which members would be selected for service on the councils. Campus governance leaders or faculty executive committees were asked to nominate from one to three faculty members per campus, and the Faculty Council executive c o m m i t t e e s e l e c t e d o n e candidate’s name to move forward for formal nomination to the senior vice chancellor and chancellor. Other council members include from each campus in the region: one president; one trustee; one

student; and local community leaders. The Faculty Council is planning

four orientation sessions in April

and May to prepare faculty and

student members for their

upcoming roles on the councils.

The first community college

council meeting of the mid-

Hudson region is scheduled to

meet on March 31.

Community college council work to begin this spring

Capital region Adirondack Community College, Luke Musto Columbia-Greene Community College, Mike Phippen Hudson Valley Community College, Rachel Bornn Schenectady County Community College, Eileen Abrahams Southern tier region Broome Community College, Gian Roma Corning Community College, Barbara Squires Tompkins-Cortland Community College, Taylor Reid Central region Cayuga Community College, Mark Montgomery Onondaga Community College, John (JT) Ryan Tompkins-Cortland Community College, Janet Swinnich North Country region Clinton Community College, Chris Ford Jefferson Community College, Kim Sell North Country Community College, Stacey Mascia-Susice Long Island region Nassau Community College, David Stern Suffolk County Community College, MaryPat Takacs

Western region Erie County Community College, Patricia Kaiser Jamestown Community College, Cindy Hinz Niagara County Community College, Gail Tylec Mid-Hudson region Dutchess Community College, Kevin Cavanaugh Orange County Community College, Michelle Tubbs Rockland Community College, Bill Baker Sullivan County Community College, Anne Ruszkiewicz Ulster County Community College, Jim Truitt Westchester Community College, Christolyn Williams Finger Lakes region Finger Lakes Community College, Milton Johnson Genesee Community College, Amy Conley Monroe Community College, Mark Erntshausen Mohawk Valley region Fulton-Montgomery Community College, Laurie Freeman Herkimer County Community College, MaryJo Kelley Mohawk Valley Community College, Joyce Baumann

Our community college council faculty members

Faculty Council Matters Spring 2016 page 10

By Elise Newkirk Director of Applied Learning, SUNY The chancellor and provost of SUNY are committed to applied learning and seek to ensure that every one of SUNY’s 465,000 students have the opportunity to take part in one form of applied learning before they graduate. Applied learning refers to an educational approach whereby students learn by engaging in direct application of skills, theories and models. Students apply knowledge and skills gained from traditional classroom learning to hands-on and/or real-world settings, creative projects or independent or directed research, and in turn apply what is gained from the applied experience to academic learning. The applied learning activity can occur outside of the traditional classroom experience and/or be embedded as part of a course. All manner of experiences including high-impact practices and traditional applied learning education can be considered approved applied learning activities if, and only if, they meet the criteria SUNY has provided. The applied learning initiative is formally housed in the provost’s office and run by a steering committee that has representation from SUNY’s Faculty Council of Community Colleges, University Faculty Senate, Student Assembly and Distinguished Academy. Every campus in the system has an applied learning liaison that was designated by their chief academic officer, and that person leads an applied learning campus team. In response to enacted state

legislation, SUNY is in the process of developing a state-wide plan for how to offer approved applied learning opportunities to enrolled students. The applied learning steering committee and System Provost Alexander Cartwright have developed and shared guidance to help campuses develop individual plans for applied learning. Between now and May of 2017, campuses are being asked to consider what types of opportunities they currently have on the books, how they currently engage with different stakeholders on the campus and in partnership as they develop opportunities, and whether or not making applied learning a local graduation requirement would be feasible. The legislation and board of trustees resolution that led to the development of the SUNY applied learning definition, criteria and s t eer i ng c o mmit t e e w er e developed in 2015, but SUNY’s focus on experiential education and various types of high impact practices has a longer history. In 2012 SUNY won a grant from Lumina Foundation which was later matched by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The goal of the grant was to determine whether cooperative education and internships could be used to decrease time-to-degree for non-traditionally aged and returning students (students over 25). SUNY developed awards for 20 pilot campuses, 13 of which were community colleges. Much of the research to date and materials produced have been as a result of this funded project. Additionally, SUNY and the vibrant community is one of the

six big ideas Chancellor Zimpher put forth in her strategic plan. This included service-learning, community service and civic engagement as indicators of campus engagement with service and surrounding communities. Also starting in 2012, multiple working groups were formed and events were held to start a system-wide conversation about these models of engaging and learning. In 2014 these disparate initiatives were combined to form applied learning. That combination started with a facilitated conversation which all campuses were invited to attend. An inaugural conference was held to discuss models of collaboration. Afterward the provost reached out to develop the campus teams that still exist today. Although there are many more types of applied learning, the ones that SUNY has historically collected data on are: • SUNY Works: internships, clinical placements, in which more than 20,000 SUNY students are already enrolled; and cooperative education programs (“co-ops”), in which SUNY faculty and area employers have jointly developed curricula that integrate classroom instruction and on-the-job experience. Approximately 1,740 students are currently enrolled in co-ops across SUNY. • SUNY Serves: service-learning, c ommunit y s erv ice , c iv ic engagement and volunteerism. More than 30,000 SUNY students are currently engaged in formal service-learning programs for which they earn college credit,

Learn more about applied learning

Continued on page 11

Faculty Council Matters Spring 2016 page 11

Delegates Matter By Leanne Warshauer, Ph.D. Press Officer, FCCC Ken Vennette is a true Renaissance man. Not only is he chair of the humanities division and assistant professor of English and humanities at Fulton-Montgomery Community College, he is also a cabinet maker, a carpenter, a former deputy mayor, a painter, and a poet who knows how to fish. Vennette’s story parallels many of our students’ stories who find their way to college later in life. He began college at age 38 when he had to quit his job as a carpenter following an injury. “I got injured and laid there with no income,” he said. “I needed to do something less strenuous. I started in fisheries and wildlife but decided English was more fun.” A published poet, Vennette still has a full woodshop and is always working on a project. “Funky coffee tables” are currently in the works. Vennette has been at Fulton-Montgomery for 11 years. For six of those years he has served on the Faculty Council. “I like to be a part of something that I think

makes a difference in the lives of faculty and students across the state,” Vennette said. He said he was inspired by Fulton-Montgomery President Dusty Swanger to embrace the idea of shared governance. Swanger, who serves as the NYCCAP liaison to the Faculty Council, said, “Ken is a faculty member who understands his students and their struggles. He shares with many the path his life has taken and his entrance into higher education; it was not a traditional one. Ken is always

open and honest with me and his colleagues and it is my pleasure to work with him.” Vennette is especially grateful to the Faculty Council because it led him to the love of his life. Three years ago he married Melanie Klein of Dutchess Community College, who he met at a Faculty Council plenary. He described the past three years as the happiest years of [his] life. “We’re as happy as the day we met,” he said. Vennette also has a son who is the editor of his local paper, a daughter who teaches and four grandchildren. Vennette’s advice to new members of the Faculty Council is, “Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Unless you figure out what people are talking about, you’ll be in the dark.” In two years Vennette plans to retire and “do more creative stuff” like the Ken Vennette original, below.

Meet Ken Vennette, Fulton Montgomery Community College

while tens of thousands more participate in community service and volunteer locally, nationally a n d a r o u n d t h e g l o b e . • SUNY Discovers: study abroad,

student research, entrepreneurial ventures and field study. While SUNY research has a proud history of breakthrough discoveries, inventions and startups, our increased focus on applied learning has led to an unprecedented level of collaboration between SUNY students, faculty and industry experts to enable commercialization of the best ideas

and innovations born at our campuses. Moving forward, SUNY is excited to continue working with faculty and student governance to determine how to best support the myriad of offerings that are considered applied learning.

Applied learning Continued from page 10

Faculty Council Matters Spring 2016 page 12

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Save the Date!

Campus Governance

Leadership Institute

May 22-23, 2016

The program will start with dinner on Sunday, May 22nd

and conclude around 4pm on Monday, May 23rd.

The Desmond Hotel

660 Albany-Shaker Road

Albany, New York 12211

At a SUNY Voices workshop in March, faculty and students discussed strategies for improving campus climate. Panels and presentations were particularly focused on improving the climate for students from diverse backgrounds, cultivating inclusive leadership, and exploring the tensions between freedom of speech and academic freedom. The workshop was held in Albany and was part of the ongoing SUNY Voices initiative, which provides support for strengthening shared governance across the system. ‌