Using Professional Development Funds

CMC's Professional Development Funds Advances Community College Scholarship

Using CMC’s professional development funding, I connected with a national network of higher education professionals who are addressing current and emerging issues faced by the growing community college movement. I also hoped to contribute to the understanding of the critical role that community colleges play in embracing the diverse perspectives and cultures of our learning communities.

In April 2008, I attended the 50th annual conference for the Council for the Study of Community Colleges (CSCC), which is an affiliate of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). CSCC members include university-based researchers and community college practitioners who further scholarship on the community college enterprise. The Council contributes to the development of community college professionals and conducts and disseminates research pertaining to community colleges.

In addition, I presented my research on the lived experiences of community college educators who teach college in prison. My co-presenters were my dissertation advisors from Colorado State University’s School of Education, Community College Leadership Program. My research interest grew from my initial involvement in a college program in which CMC hired adjunct instructors to teach transfer level general education courses to incarcerated learners at the Buena Vista Correctional Complex.

Through this innovative educational partnership with the Colorado Department of Corrections, CMC offered a rewarding and challenging experience that our instructors used to develop professionally. Our full-time and part-time faculty members increasingly deal with issues of race, gender, class, national origin, and sexual orientation and they strive to equalize the educational opportunities for all students. I believe we may gain some insight into a teaching practice based on caring, community, and social justice from exploring what drives educators who teach college in prison.

Furthermore, my research may have implications for understanding the adjunct teaching experience in general. College-wide, we have a large number of part-time instructors whose role is becoming increasingly important. Adjunct faculty members often feel isolated from the college community and we frequently do not reward them for keeping up with best teaching practices. In order to provide appropriate support for our part-time instructors, I believe that we need to understand the adjunct teaching experience, which may be further illuminated by the experiences of those adjunct instructors who teach in prison.

The themes that I discovered of working in borderlands, negotiating hierarchical relationships, and making personal transformations may be generative. Therefore, these themes could be applied to the adjunct experience of teaching in a regular classroom. This deeper understanding might help us find ways to support the professional growth of our part-time instructors who infuse real world perspectives into many of their courses. This approach coincides with the premise in the 1993 book, The Invisible Faculty, which explores the role of adjunct teaching and offers ways to improve our support of our part-time instructors.

I am grateful that CMC funded this opportunity for me to develop professionally. Interfacing with researchers whose work I had studied exhilarated me: Arthur Cohen and Florence Brawer (The American Community College), Marilyn Amy (Breaking Out of the Box: Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Faculty Work), Barbara Townsend and Susan Twombly (Community College: Policy in the Future Context). I was honored when Barbara Townsend attended my session and was interested in my research on teaching college in prison and its implications for community colleges.

Now in this blog, I am please to share my experience presenting at a professional conference and the results of my research. I’ve attached the program from the 2008 Conference of the Council for the Study of Community Colleges and the PowerPoint slides that I used in my presentation at the conference. Please contact me if you have questions or what more information at sspaulding@coloradomtn.edu.

Attachments:

2008 CSCC Conference Program: 2008%20CSCC%20Conference%20Program.pdf
Spaulding CSCC PowerPoint Presentation:
Teaching%20College%20Inside%20Prison%20Walls.ppt