In the 2021 legislative cycle, multiple bills were passed that were directed at the California Community Colleges system. Of those bills, Assembly Bills 927, 928, and 1111 may have the most widespread and lasting impacts on the colleges in the system. Each bill has a timeline for implementation and the potential for both immediate and long-term effects.
Faculty frequently have the opportunity to guide a student interested in pursuing a career in teaching. Indeed, many faculty members in the profession today owe their success to a helpful mentor at a community college. These informal efforts are critical components of student success and contribute to the gratification of being a community college educator.
The following are two typical stories:
Equivalency processes and policies throughout the California community colleges vary widely, as they are locally determined. However, because a variety of methods of equivalency evaluation practices exist, potential candidates for faculty positions sometimes encounter barriers in navigating the system.
As colleges engage in antiracist, equity-minded, inclusive practices, they must be thoughtful and intentional about using language to avoid labeling, discrimination, and archaic terms that marginalize and disenfranchise communities. Colleges should be honoring the voices of their diverse student and employee populations by shifting to anti-discriminatory language in the same way they seek to be antiracist.
North Carolina State University’s Center for Universal Design—a global movement of inclusive design practice through a working group of architects, product designers, engineers, and environmental design researchers—collaborated to identify seven components of the Principles of Universal Design (Connell et al.,1997):
In January 2022, faculty at one California community college received the following communication:
You may be aware of our lagging enrollments. Like community colleges across the state and country, our enrollments are down significantly. Compared to last spring, we’re down approximately 10%, and last spring we had fallen 10% from Spring of 2020—a loss of approximately 2,200 students from Spring 2021 to Spring 2022.
At its Fall 2017 plenary, the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges approved Resolution 7.03, [1] which highlighted the unique situation of trying to certify and accept a high school language course from a non-regionally accredited home school for the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum (IGETC).
The history of cross-listing spans several decades in post-secondary institutions. Educators and curriculum practitioners have historically used cross-listing to streamline courses with multiple subject appeal to help satisfy students' course completion and degree attainment or to allow faculty in multiple disciplines to teach the same course. In this context, faculty have used cross-listing to develop shared ownership of a particular course and to optimize students’ paths to completion.
California’s community colleges have seen a marked and steady increase in students who identify as Latinx as well as students who are bilingual or for whom Spanish is their first language. While this change is certainly evident on college campuses, data from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office clearly shows the steady increase that started in 2006. The change is a reflection of a similar increase in Spanish-speakers and Latinx in the California workforce and in the number of Latinx entrepreneurs establishing their own businesses.
Note: The following article is not an official statement of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. The article is intended to engender discussion and consideration by local colleges but should not be seen as the endorsement of any position or practice by the ASCCC.