New Research Scientist Mayra Nunez Martinez

It is with great pleasure that we introduce our newest research scientist, Mayra Nunez Martinez whose research centers on reimagining and transforming postsecondary institutions to better serve historically underserved students and communities. Informed from both personal and professional experiences her research is accountable to examining the racial and spatial inequities that rural Latine/x students face in higher education. She brings a unique lens to CCRI’s work, particularly for our grant on Building Evidence to Increase Rural Learner Success funded by Ascendium Education Group. She understands that it is critical to better support these communities, as rural communities are often excluded from national conversations around education, and there are substantive gaps in the literature for issues in rural higher education.

As a first-generation, DACAmented Mexicana and former college access advisor and high school teacher, she is committed to removing the systemic and structural barriers that exist for underserved communities in accessing higher education. Currently, she is working toward her Ph.D. in School Organization and Education Policy at the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation work examines how institutional and structural factors influence rural Latine/x students’ community college transfer decisions and outcomes.

“As educators and scholars, we must critically analyze policies, programs, and resources to make college accessible for all students by acknowledging the unique needs of students based on their intersectional identities and experiences.”

Through her collaborations on various projects as a graduate student researcher for the California Education Lab and Wheelhouse, she supported data collection, analyses, and dissemination of research related to higher education access and equity issues. For example, she contributed to projects examining factors influencing Latinx community college choice, first-time Latinx students’ and parents’ college choices during the pandemic, and how recruitment and outreach strategies can be more culturally and linguistically inclusive at emerging Hispanic serving institutions. From these experiences she learned the importance of using mixed research methods and centering students’ voices to understand how institutional practices and educational policies should be more responsive to their unique challenges and needs and how academic research utilizing researcher-practitioner partnerships can inform policy and practice.

These opportunities have provided her with invaluable experience that will contribute to CCRI’s research in this and other areas as well as continue to gain more tools for advancing educational equity to postsecondary opportunities for rural Students of Color.

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.

Talking about Transforming Transfer with the Chronicle of Higher Education

In August, Dr. Lia Wetzstein, the director of CCRI, participated in a panel discussion hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The focus of discussion was the need to improve the transfer process to achieve more equitable outcomes in higher education. Lia had the opportunity to highlight CCRI’s STEM Transfer Partnerships, composed of nine teams from two-year and four-year institutions in Washington. These teams have been actively engaging with their students to gather valuable input. This feedback has influenced their initiatives, leading to innovative approaches to enhance the transfer student experience, particularly those from low-income backgrounds.

You can read more about the panel discussion here.

The UW’s Community College Research Initiatives receives $449,535 grant to increase rural educational equity

The University of Washington’s Community College Research Initiatives announced that it received a $449,535 grant from Ascendium Education Group for research to increase rural learner success.

Community College Research Initiatives (CCRI) conducts research to facilitate the advancement of equity in higher education. Ascendium invests in research that helps to build a body of evidence about how to ensure rural learners from low-income backgrounds can achieve their postsecondary education and career goals. Ascendium expects this investment in CCRI’s research will catalyze action affecting policies and practices grounded in high-quality evidence and research.

The CCRI project will address mentorship program gaps through a multisite, three-stage study of mentorship programs at public rural community colleges across the United States. Drawing upon institutional websites, in-depth interviews and student survey responses, this project will benefit both scholars and practitioners by producing a database of mentoring strategies at rural community colleges.

“We at CCRI are excited for the opportunity to learn how rural two-year institutions across the country are supporting students from low-income backgrounds with mentorship programs,” shared CCRI director, Lia Wetzstein, Ph.D. The CCRI data will advance the understanding of how the evidence-based solution of mentoring is being implemented at rural colleges while gauging the student experience with a primary focus on students from low-income backgrounds and racially minoritized students.

“We are grateful to Ascendium Education Group for their support,” Wetzstein continued. Ascendium is interested in generating evidence about practices and programs that increase the completion of high-quality postsecondary education and training and successful transition to high-quality jobs. Through the CCRI analysis of the nationwide landscape of rural community college mentorship and mentorship experiences, this project will produce models of mentorship to specifically address the rural community college context and rural students’ experience.

Last year CCRI was awarded a $1.2 million grant from Ascendium to work toward equity in STEM education for low-income learners across Washington state. CCRI, a program within Undergraduate Academic Affairs at the UW, is an influential contributor in community college and transfer partnership research identifying strategies that help students transfer to four-year institutions and complete their bachelor’s degrees. To learn more about CCRI, visit https://www.washington.edu/ccri/.

Ascendium Education Group is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to helping people reach the education and career goals that matter to them. Ascendium invests in initiatives designed to increase the number of students from low-income backgrounds who complete postsecondary degrees, certificates and workforce training programs, with an emphasis on first-generation students, incarcerated adults, rural community members, students of color and veterans. Ascendium’s work identifies, validates and expands best practices to promote large-scale change at the institutional, system and state levels, with the intention of elevating opportunity for all. For more information, visit https://www.ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

For more information or to get involved, contact CCRI, ccri@uw.edu.

Institutional coaching publication in New Directions for Community Colleges

CCRI (Community College Research Initiatives) had the privilege of working for several years with Student Success Center (SSC) partners and Jobs for the Future (JFF) on coaching programs to facilitate institutional change. The result of that work was several briefs and tools to support coaching and state coaching programs. A recent article, authored by Jennifer Miller (NY SSC), Lia Wetzstein (CCRI), and Amy Girardi (formerly JFF) in New Directions for Community Colleges titled Creating a culture of student success innovation through institutional coaching, discusses this work. It describes how coaches support institutional reform efforts, the history of coaching support of guided pathways implementation, and how CCRI supported the Student Success Center Network Coaching Program.

The article discusses the multiple ways coaching supported institutional leaders’ change efforts. These include coaches being resource hubs by providing information, strategies, and professional development; fostering collaboration; providing external perspectives; moving ideas into actions with knowledge of best practices; and being thought partners (p. 85). It also shares resources that exist for coach professional development and different state examples of how coaches are trained and utilized.

We invite you to use this shareable link to access a free copy available to the first 100! https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/BKIGTXWA5WYXPIHAEFUP?target=10.1002/cc.20562

This link to the article gives access to the abstract and to access a paid copy: https://doi.org/10.1002/cc.20562.

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 publications on coaching for institutional transformation

The Student Success Center Network (SSCN) Coaching Program, in its second phase, has three new publications to share on the contributions institutional coaching is making to transform student success in higher education. The CCRI team in partnership with Jobs for the Future (JFF) sought to uncover how coaches facilitate incremental change over time that supports momentum and builds towards larger milestone goals. This phase of the project engaged 72 colleges, 69 coaches, and 4 states, ultimately finding that coaches help Student Success Centers (Centers) propel institutional and systemic change by facilitating the information flow from the Centers to the institutions and inversely from institutions to the Centers, while also serving to create professional connections within and between institutions.

In the first of three publications released this fall, we distilled overarching lessons learned and case studies with coaching design elements for each of the four participating states in the SSCN Coaching Program: Facilitating Institutional Transformation report authored by CCRI’s Lia Wetzstein and Katie Kovacich and our JFF partners, Tara Smith, Jessica Soja, Alexandra Waugh, and Hector Torres. We found that coaches are pivotal in extending Centers’ capacity to facilitate institutional change and discuss the distinctions between coaching programs in systems and association states. Another important learning from this research is how continuous professional development is an essential component of a coaching program. The trainings enhance coaches’ knowledge and skills and provide opportunities to practice with one another which builds confidence in their coaching abilities while sustaining peer learning networks.

How Tools Support and Student Success Center Coaching Programs authored by Katie Kovacich and Lia Wetzstein from CCRI gives an overview of tool use by coaches. Beginning with the background and evolution of the SSCN Coaching Program Coaching Toolbox, this brief was created to describe the usefulness of the many tools generated to support the complex process of institutional change for Student Success Centers, coaches, and colleges. We discuss how three tools in particular produced by CCRI were consistently used in coaching skills development and how they were intentionally designed to train coaches to apply their craft using an equity-minded lens. Learn more about the tools in the brief and all of the tools are actively accessible in the SSCN Toolbox.

Through interviews with college leadership, coaches, and Student Success Center leadership, the brief Ten Ways Institutional Coaching Makes a Difference, describes inspiring examples and stories from those engaged in supporting guided pathways and other student success initiatives. Our CCRI team was integral to the data-gathering process offering our expertise in qualitative research methods. Authors Tara Smith and Hector Torres from JFF explain how coaching helps to keep reform efforts student-centered, supports the implementation of state-mandated education initiatives like guided pathways, and develops leaders that can support transformation at their own colleges and at colleges across the state.

Whether you are interested in learning more about state-based coaching, developing a coaching program, or continuing to expand and sustain a current one, these briefs contain valuable information and ideas to support institutional coaching for change.

IDEAL Fellowship Program

With excitement, CCRI is looking forward to providing the Washington State Board for Community and Technical College’s evaluation of cohort 4 of the Initiative in Diversity, Equity, Antiracism & Leadership (IDEAL) fellowship program. The IDEAL fellowship program is designed to empower community college students with knowledge, critical discussions, and experience doing research to advance equity projects on their own campuses.

IDEAL provides fellows a place to learn about racial justice and share their own stories while being paid a $1000 stipend. Participants learn how to use tools to research equity issues on their campus and provide their community colleges with suggestions about how the institutions can increase educational access and supports to move them toward a more equitable education environment.

This pioneering student empowerment program was created by the IDEAL facilitators and educators Dr. Jeremiah and Rachel Sims. CCRI has had the privilege of talking to students from the first 3 cohorts and learning about the unique experience of being in a space anchored in openness, acceptance, and transparency, where they felt safe to share their personal narratives, listen actively to others, create friendships, learn, and gain confidence in how to be advocates for social justice. In interviews, participants shared how the Sims’ provide knowledge and understanding of systemic structures that perpetuate racial, social, and economic inequity while also creating a safe space for tough conversations. These conversations helped create community, increased participants’ equity focus within their academic journeys and careers, and helped to create change agents.

The structure of each cohort has changed to continue to support students and their projects to create institutional change. Cohorts 2 and 3 accepted students at 4-5 participating colleges and added Senior Fellows, alumni of the program, who helped students work on their institutional projects and final presentations. Cohort 3 also added institutional representatives, to provide fellows with an insider perspective of organizational change efforts, where to find data, and to help move the proposed work forward. In our most recent evaluation effort, we describe what we learned from cohort 3 students and the potential for institutional change.

Cohort 4 will begin in February 2023 and will consist of students from Yakima Valley College, Lake Washington Institute of Technology, Bellevue College, South Puget Sound Community College, and Grays Harbor College. We look forward to learning about the experiences of the newest IDEAL fellows and how participating in IDEAL affects their education journeys and their institutions.

CCRI welcomes student assistant Krista Roekelle Castro Orejudos

Krista is a current sophomore at the University of Washington who is majoring in English: Creative Writing and minoring in Digital Textual Studies. She is also the current student assistant for CCRI and shared that,

when looking through CCRI’s mission statement and vision, I felt compelled to work for an organization that is dedicated to serving underserved students in community college and to helping them achieve their higher education objectives. I felt like their goals align with mine, and I wanted to do my best as their student assistant to assist them in any way possible.

She finds that supporting CCRI’s outreach, to help build its social media presence on Twitter and LinkedIn is a way to actualize her values and share this organization’s message.

When asked about her experience so far with CCRI,

Krista shared that working with CCRI has allowed her to further explore her passion for creative design. She is responsible for our online posts as well as our STEM Transfer Partnership fall convening poster. When she is not designing, she contributes to keeping information up to date on the website.

Moreover, working with CCRI has given Krista her first opportunity to work remotely. She has learned how to navigate personal strengths and weaknesses when it comes to remote working. She started her position in August of this year and believes she has grown confident in her interpersonal communication skills and her ability to design on a deadline.

STEM Transfer Partnership: Advancing our Community

As we embark on the second year of the STEM Transfer Partnership (STP) initiative, we finally got our first chance to come together in person at our October convening in Ellensburg, Washington. Because our first convening had to be held remotely due to continuing pandemic precautions, we were thrilled to be able to finally meet everyone in person and make our community stronger through the informal exchanges that are difficult to facilitate in virtual settings.

The October event built upon all the previous work of the STP teams. It included celebrating progress since the April convening and moving forward within each partnership to advance interventions to engage and support low-income students and create innovative, durable transfer pathways. The teams presented a variety of different interventions they were working on. Many institutional pairs discussed new curricular structures while others described the steps they had taken in establishing undergraduate research experiences, creating transfer maps, mentorship networks, and inter-institutional student engagement programs.

Highlights of the day included roundtable discussions across topics such as curriculum, data sharing, low-income student support, and gathering student input. We also learned about STEM communities of transformation from our guest speaker, Dr. Sean Gehrke, Director of the Office of Educational Assessment at the University of Washington. Working in their teams, partnerships had opportunities to identify and dissect current barriers to their work and develop strategies to garner external support for their programs. Each team produced a poster that summarized and motivated their partnership initiatives, articulating an “elevator pitch” designed to engage stakeholders outside their partnership. We concluded the day with a lively ‘gallery walk,’ where teams shared their posters and their elevator pitch among all the convening participants.

One of the key goals of this convening was to foster a cross-partnership exchange of ideas and community building. To that end, the convening agenda balanced sessions dedicated to work within teams and in ones that involved interaction with other teams. Teams had opportunities to brainstorm creative solutions with other teams and learn about the many different strategies for low-income student support and enhanced transfer processes. For many participants, this dynamic was the key benefit of the convening. One post-event survey respondent commented, “It was really nice just to meet people who are interested in similar things across the state and feel like we have allies.” Another respondent identified their key benefit from the convening, “Having a community to consult with and bounce ideas off of – we are able to streamline a bit more, not everyone re-inventing the wheel. Having engaging discussions about why this is important and creating that community culture.” We were excited to see and later hear about these productive exchanges and will continue to strengthen and expand our community of practice.

We are so gratified to be a part of this process, working with dedicated professionals who took time out of their overcrowded schedules to come together in community with us. Together we are advancing equity by expanding STEM education opportunities for low-income students across the state.