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NASH TS3Our Recent Blog Posts
From Napkin to Reality: UNT Career Connect and the Scaling of HIPs
I believe many ideas start on napkins and scrap paper. Most people have napkins or post-it notes or pieces of paper around your office that represent your ideas. The image you see below is our original napkin sketch of the UNT Career Connect project. The sketch conceptualizes various elements of the university experiences that ideally result in well-educated and career ready students. Fortunately for us, the University of North Texas bought into this napkin concept and we were able to evolve into what is known as Career Connect.
Informing the Big ReThink
In an earlier post on this blog, Nancy Zimpher outlined the NASH proposal for a radical reconception of public higher education systems in the United States, called The Big ReThink. She isn’t shy: “NASH will develop a transformation agenda to help these important systems (a) respond to the health care crisis, calls for racial justice, and the need for economic recovery in the short term; and (b) transform themselves to ensure enhanced success for their students and the states they serve for the long term.”
Notes on Pedagogy
NASH’s Equity Action Framework is a generative tool for sparking discussions at the system
level. It is an especially good follow-up to USC’s Equity Scorecard which all 13 universities in the University of Wisconsin System completed and which inspires the framework.
Collaborative Equity Mindedness: The Benefits of “Systemness”
Despite the differences among the UT System member institutions, we are all committed to collaborating within our campus communities and with UT System to ensure all Texans access to high-quality education. We strive to achieve this through aligned, equity-oriented policies and practices that strengthen our broader educational outcomes.
Collective Impact and High-Impact Practices
The field has spent much of its young life in a struggle for equity. Immersive, highly engaging experiences like internships, undergraduate research, and service learning are ubiquitous, but also resource intensive for the student as well as the institution. Making them available to the students who most stand to benefit means accommodating – and leveraging – the student’s life beyond the classroom.
Maryland’s Mathematics Reform Initiative: A Promising Experiment
Building on the research and creativity of UT Austin’s Dana Center, and with guidance from Uri Treisman, our new statistics pathway was designed collaboratively by mathematics faculty from 12 Maryland higher education institutions and tested over five years to see if we could flip the switch, get more students enrolled in mathematics courses that would support their majors and result in greater success rates.
Transfer Student Success: Higher Education Systems’ Five Top Policy Levers
We contend that lack of success in the reform efforts is due to a fundamental failure of past efforts based on how higher education institutions think students should move through higher education rather than how they actually do move through higher education. Recent research has demonstrated that students actually move multi-directionally (with many transferring to community colleges) and that a vast majority of transfer never complete an associate’s degree before transferring to a four-year institution. Yet, most efforts to “fix” transfer focus on developing static and rigid 2+2 articulation agreements between a single dyad of two institutions.
Working Toward Equity: Lessons Learned From the Great Shift to Remote Learning
As we move forward through the spring semester and begin planning for a summer and fall that will not yet be back to normal, we can apply some lessons learned over the last ten months to better serve all our students, including our most vulnerable, whether they be learning in-person, remotely, or fully online. More of us now than ever before can bear witness to the importance of equitable access to digital tools and the Internet, of embracing inclusive design and design justice principles, of student-centric teaching practices. The broadly shared remote learning experiences brought about by pandemic have readied us to transform our teaching and learning enterprises.
UNIVERSITY SYSTEMS IN THE POST-PANDEMIC WORLD: A VIEW FROM THE BALCONY
That big picture, for university systems, assumes that we continue to internalize the profound effects of COVID-19 in exposing the limited access of vulnerable communities to quality health care; the overwhelming effects of deep and systemic injustices; and the severe gap in economic opportunity experienced by so many. Thus this crisis represents a major opportunity for us to get “on the balcony” and imagine a post-pandemic “new normal” for public higher education systems. We are referring to this consequential agenda-setting initiative as “The Big ReThink.”
Equity in Transfer: How Higher Education Systems Matter
Transfer is a common phenomenon in higher education and the problems associated with it are well known – loss of credits, lack of clear transfer paths, inadequate advising, and extended time to degree. What is often less discussed is that these problems unduly affect students from underserved and underrepresented backgrounds.