by Maria Khan
The Fifth Annual NASH TS3 Convening, took place on November 9, 2020 in a pandemic-style highly-interactive virtual format. The three hours spent by 147 registrants across 14 systems and 11 states, were enriched with discussions on closing equity gaps and taking student success to scale.
Dr. Rebecca Martin welcomed and encouraged attendees to think about innovative approaches and tools to ensure student success at their systems in this new environment. This was followed by a reflection on three key national challenges in the post-pandemic world: health, economic and racial justice, by three stellar discussants:
- Nancy Zimpher, The Systems Center, emphasized on the power of systems and systemness, developing a theory of action and using collective impact approaches. She said, “Educating more people, and educating them better has to be the best solution today”. Dr. Zimpher also talked about NASH Board approving “The Big Rethink” to learn from this crisis and rethinking the future of public higher education systems.
- Joann Boughman, University System of Maryland, reminded participants to take into account the local context, size of the system/campus and the relationship between campus and system when setting priorities or making policies. Dr. Boughman stressed that a redesign of public higher education to make it equitable would require an even harder task: changing mindset and ensuring that, “leadership matters and it matters from within.”
- Christina Navia, University of Wisconsin System, acknowledged that the pandemic had been difficult for students, especially harder for students of color. Systems and campus leaders were called to work together, holistically, and to focus on mental health, food insecurity, and practices to dismantle racism in higher education.
Next, the NASH Equity Action Framework was presented by Drs. Rebecca Martin, Dewayne Morgan and Louie Rodriguez, on behalf of the NASH Equity Team. This framework is still in beta version and is freely available to all. It has been designed to help public university systems assess their progress towards equity practices, promote explicit and sustained engagement with equity and encourage dialogue to bring about change. It is organized around nine categories: 1) public commitment, 2) leadership, 3) data, 4) policy, 5) curriculum and co-curriculum, 6) student success interventions and treatment, 7) faculty and staff hiring, retention, promotion, and rewards, 8) professional development, and 9) community engagement.
Recognizing that systems and campuses are all at different stages in this work, time was allocated in breakout sessions for system teams to use the framework and assess their progress toward, and act on the adoption and integration of essential equity practice #6: Student Success Interventions and treatments. I attended the UTAH session and saw the team engaged in a conversation about bringing folks together in teams and agreeing that “more can be done together than apart”. The team members also identified folks for support for change in individual campuses, to effectively move the needle on the equity framework. Questions were raised about identifying, defining and reaching the underserved populations. The team decided to use a google doc as a guide and to continue working on their student success interventions and policies using improvement science.
After a debrief, teams were paired with other systems. I joined the session with colleagues from Southern Illinois and University of North Texas system. The two teams discussed how helpful the framework could be if adopted throughout the system, resulting in conversations and active engagement across campuses at the system level. The teams also noted the importance of aligning system level work with campus work and sharing best practices and turning goals into realization – beyond inspiration to reality.
In the final session of the convening, Dr. Jason Lane applied the equity lens to the issue of transfer and presented the NASH Transfer Commitment which has seven key features: holistic transfer student success model, equity focused dual credit advancing technology transfer analytics, faculty engagement and assessment.
Throughout the convening, it was noted that there existed greater similarities between systems working on these issues albeit minor differences in approaches. This highlighted the need to build relationships beyond meetings to learn lessons from other systems and the role of NASH in being a system of systems. We also want to keep the conversation alive and learn about the important work you will continue to do within your systems. Please engage with us on Twitter (@NASHTS3) and LinkedIn (NASHTS3) when sharing your work!