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Reflecting on ASHE and Looking Ahead to DREAM 2025

In November, our team had the privilege of presenting at the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) conference in Minneapolis, MN. The event offered a great opportunity to share our work, connect with fellow grantees from the Rural Learner Success (RLS) Initiative supported by Ascendium Education Group, and reflect on how to better communicate our research through storytelling.

Presenting Our Work and Connecting with Fellow Grantees

A key highlight of the conference was sharing the progress of our Mapping Effective Mentorship for Rural Community College Students project. We found that mentorship programs that incorporated at least one critical mentoring element in their website description varied in the degree to which their approaches reflected critical mentorship practices such as empowerment, cultural connection, and critical awareness of systemic barriers. Presenting our insights and receiving feedback from scholars helped refine our approach, leading to the development of our second RLS data note which focused on critical mentorship practices supporting student success in rural community colleges. The conference also provided a valuable opportunity for collaboration, where we learned from other grantees tackling similar challenges in different contexts. It was energizing to see the diverse approaches to disseminating research, which sparked new ideas for how we can share our own findings more effectively.

Incorporating Storytelling Insights into Our Work

The storytelling workshop, put together by Ascendium and the American Institutes for Research (AIR), equipped us with valuable strategic and pragmatic approaches for sharing our research. The workshop walked us through applying key techniques for effective storytelling that move research communications from simply presenting data to making them more actionable and meaningful for practitioners in the field. The following are key insights from the session and how we have incorporated them into our most recent data note: 

  1. Shifting our audience: We further shifted from an academic lens for the purpose of this data note by centering: “Why does this matter to practitioners?” This helped us more closely focus on how mentorship can directly address the challenges faced by those working with rural community college students using a critical lens. 
  2. Providing mentoring strategies for practice: We provided clear and actionable mentoring strategies that practitioners can implement right away.
  3. Streamlining for impact: We streamlined our content, focusing on key takeaways for easier application by practitioners using bullet points.
  4. Focusing on core themes: We narrowed our focus to two central themes, emphasizing the “so what” and “now what” of our research with the goal of driving change.
  5. Creating space for reflection: We included reflective questions to encourage readers to connect our findings with their own experiences.

Looking Ahead to DREAM 2025

We are excited to continue applying these insights at DREAM 2025, where we’ll be presenting our session titled “Exploring Critical Mentorship in Rural Community Colleges: A National Overview” in Philadelphia, PA. Our session will explore the current landscape of critical mentorship in rural community colleges, systemic influences on its implementation, and ongoing insights shared by mentors and mentees through our interviews. Our goal is not only to share our findings but also to foster a collaborative space where participants can reflect on their own mentoring experiences and learn from one another.

As we continue to refine and expand our work, we remain committed to grappling with the following questions:

  • Who are the storytellers, and are there situations when we, as researchers, might not be the best ones to tell these stories?
  • How can we create meaningful space and opportunities for students and practitioners to share their own stories, positioning them as co-creators of the narrative?
  • In what ways are we making sure that the communities we serve are actively involved in shaping our research and its outcomes?

We look forward to continuing this work and deepening its impact on rural community college students.

CCRI Team Attending November Rural Learners Convening in Minneapolis!


In November, our CCRI team will be attending an in-person convening in advance of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, hosted by Ascendium and the American Institutes of Research. We look forward to meeting with other grantees who are part of the Building Evidence to Increase Rural Learner Success Initiative! To learn more about fellow grantees and their projects, click here. 

CCRI research scientist Mayra Nunez Martinez will also be presenting her work that examines how geography impacts transfer rates for rural Latinx students in California on Saturday, November 18th, at 2:00 p.m. Browse sessions by person via the ASHE Conference Portal or view the conference schedule.

 Transformative partnership praxis for equitable STEM transfer 

As the STEM Transfer Partnership (STP) program approaches the one-year mark, we are able to reflect on the strategies for success that our two-year and four-year institutional partners have developed in their work to advance their partnerships and increase STEM transfer success for low income students. In our second data note on the STP program, we describe the ways STP partnership teams are dismantling barriers through networks of transformative partnership praxis, building multi-layered and flexibly structured communities. 

 Over the course of 12 months, CCRI has supported the progress of STP teams and their plans of action aimed at improving STEM transfer for students at their institutions. Teams have engaged in two full-community gatherings as well as monthly coaching sessions. Throughout, CCRI has collected data on their experiences through participant observation, survey, and document analysis. Examining this data, we find that teams often experience similar barriers in their efforts to implement systemic change in STEM transfer processes, most notably low-income student recruitment and long term program sustainability. In our recent data note, we look at how partnering institutions respond to these challenges. We find that taking steps toward institutional transformation requires participants to build flexible and multi-layered communities, networks that draw upon resources and expertise from beyond the team membership.  

 At this intermediate stage of the program, many STP teams are working on the big problems that make the work of expanding STEM access and supporting transfer students so challenging. One central challenge is the question of how to recruit students from low-income backgrounds to STEM fields and how best to support them through transfer and degree completion. What are the best ways to reach out to these students in the early years of their college education? How can support programs engage these students as they juggle the competing priorities of school, family, and work schedules? In tackling these questions, teams are often prompted to expand the boundaries of their networks of praxis, connecting with programs such as TRIO and MESA that have a well-established set of strategies for engaging and supporting low-income students. Rather than trying to ‘reinvent the wheel’ as several participants phrased it, teams are joining forces with partners across their institutions in collaborations that benefit low-income students in many ways. Teams are also extending their networks to engage institutional leaders, finding ways to engage college and university administrators in ways that broaden the impact of their work. 

 STP teams are not limiting their outreach to their respective institutions but, rather, reaching beyond the college and university of their partnership to include not only other institutions but also policymakers, students and families, and professional networks. The STP program is designed to embed the work of partnerships within a community of practice, invested professionals committed to interventions to improve STEM transfer. The purpose of the biannual convenings is to foster cross-community collaboration and learning. The most recent data note describes how these kinds of connections are helping teams identify resources and solve complex problems. As they look to the future to map out a plan for long term sustainability, they draw upon ideas from other teams, using those ideas to connect with policymakers, industry partners, and others in ways that support programs and interventions that will continue to improve STEM transfer success beyond the life of the STP grant. 

 Each reconfiguration and expansion of community creates new opportunities for equitable STEM access. While the data reported here demonstrate how networks of praxis support problem solving for STP teams, the impact of expanding the community goes beyond finding solutions to specific problems. Teams are learning new skills, developing new partnerships, and incorporating new resources into their work in ways that create benefits for the college and university beyond STEM programs. 

New America

Hear from our Director about how community colleges can help their communities recover from COVID-19. As well as why the US government should assist them to do so based on lessons learned from the TAACCCT grant!

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