Attending college, for many immigrant families, is a critical step in achieving the American Dream. This essay, written as a reflection and response between professor and student, explores the conflicting messages young community college students negotiate and process as they move through the City, revealing how knowledge learned in the college…

In this article, the author shares his fear that students will become accustomed to an educational experience that lacks joy and fun as a result of the changes made to education due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He and his teaching colleagues have noticed that when students are learning virtually, they act much more as receivers of knowledge than…

Facing a cutthroat academic job market, many doctoral students are now willing to explore the possibility of a community-college career. And they have many questions. In Part 1 of this series, the author focused on the hiring process at two-year colleges and answered some common questions like "Do I have to have a Ph.D. to teach in that sector?"…

Christine McPhail formerly served as president at Cypress College in California and is founder and professor emeritus of the Community College Leadership Doctoral Program at Morgan State University in Maryland. She is the Managing Partner for The McPhail Group LLC and currently serves as a Leadership Coach for more than a dozen community colleges…

This interview took place in several meetings over a period of two weeks in late spring, 2008. Carl Ehmann had spent the past five months working with multiple California community college districts to resolve numerous, and multilevel, shortages in senior leadership positions. Robert A. Frost and Ehmann had come into contact through Frost's…

To explore current and future implications of the economic downturn, "EDUCAUSE Review" assembled a panel of senior IT leaders: (1) Bruce Maas, CIO, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; (2) Fredrick Miller, CIO, Furman University; (3) Pattie Orr, Vice President for IT and Dean of University Libraries, Baylor University; (4) Julie Ouska, CIO…

Faculty members take pride in the great diversity of students attending LaGuardia Community College. Their students self-identify with various nationalities, races, religions, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. Not only do students adopt diverse identity markers, but they also come to their classroom with variant skill levels. It is difficult…

In this essay, the authors argue that only by sharing their mistakes and uncertainty can they fully reflect on their own process as teachers, only by understanding their process can they begin to identify the many factors that contribute to classroom messes in the first place, and only by acknowledging the perpetual messiness of their practice can…

The author writes that for too many low-income students the open door to American higher education has become a revolving door. In examining what can be done, he recognizes the centrality of the classroom to student success.

Changing an institution's culture so that everyone at the college is focused wholeheartedly on learning is neither easy nor insignificant, and it cannot occur overnight. For some colleges, it means introducing a whole new way of life. The evolution to an institutional environment that both supports student learning and measures learning outcomes…

As a writer who teaches and a teacher who writes, this author offers creative ways of producing a positive first impression on the first day of school. The key is finding a way to surprise one's students and creating first impressions that somehow introduces the tone a teacher wants his or her class to have. The author has learned that if he can…

This position statement was inspired by the "Position Statement on Graduate Students in Writing Center Administration" (endorsed by the International Writing Center Association on November 17, 2001). A purpose of the document, to borrow language from the graduate student position statement, is to "[suggest] an ideal set of conditions," and it is…

Every year the college rankings in "U.S. News & World Report" raise voices disparaging the rankings' methods, validity and contribution to status-driven consumerism. Now, voices are rising against a September 2002 "Worth" magazine article, which ranks preparatory schools not according to the quality of education, but merely on which schools appear…

American educators have a mindset about learners and the learning process. Although all educators do not have the same mindset, many see teaching in terms of controlling: what students learn, how they learn, and how the learning is measured. This mindset focusing on teaching--rather than on learners and the learning process--seems to be fairly…

Feminist analyses of the "chilly climate" have documented the ways in which women have been and continue to be marginalized within institutions of higher education. Yet there has been little attention to the relationship between the "chilly climate" and the lived experiences of particular populations in specific educational…