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Section 4:
Collaborative Leadership

By Lindsay Naggie

Lindsay Naggie was Professor and Chairperson of English Language Learning at BHCC and co-leader of the ELL Design Team from 2018-2021 during the AANAPISI funded ELL Program Reform.  She is currently Interim Director of Learning Communities at BHCC.

In this section, you will read about the steps taken to transform an essentially non-credit program into a program with transferable credit and the leadership and steps required for getting approval from the ELL Department, the General Education Standards Committee, the Curriculum Committee and finally the College Forum.  To the outside world, the process of shepherding a program reform through the college governance process seems like steps that build off one another, but a successful reform proposal requires awareness, knowledge and advocacy from the whole college community in order to be considered and received.  First, I’ll begin with a detailed explanation of the curricular reform process and procedures so that those at similarly governance-structured institutions or those new to the process have a sense of the steps taken.  Then, in the section Identifying Allies and Expertise, I will discuss how we were able to leverage our collaborative assets in order to gain acceptance and approval within the institution. For those of you reading who want to make a collective change, this contains our advice to you alongside student stories and the faculty perspective of working within a large institution.

Internal Processes for Curricular Reform

At BHCC, curricular revision is faculty-driven and requires multiple approval steps through the internal governance of the college.  It is (usually) initiated by a faculty member, with support of the Department Chair and Division, who submits a proposal for a new course or program. The proposal provides a rationale for addition or change, supported by internal and external data. If impacting a whole department or directly affecting other areas of the College, the proposal is reviewed and agreed upon prior to submission to the College’s Curriculum Committee. The Curriculum Committee, a college governance committee consisting of 21 members who are faculty, staff, administrators and two student representatives, meets twice a month to review, discuss, and vote on said proposals. The proposal author is invited to provide an overview of the proposal submitted and answer the committee’s questions. The proposal is then voted upon, and if accepted, moves on to one of two stages. If the proposal is not accepted, the proposal is either revised and resubmitted or tabled. Proposal entry and the committee schedule lines up with the production of the College Catalog. The committee meets during the academic year and proposal acceptance occurs in advance of the four-month deadline for the College Catalog.

If the course is intended for inclusion on the General Education Requirement Menu,  the proposal is also reviewed by a separate College Governance Committee the General Education Standards Committee- another committee comprised of  faculty, staff, and administrators. The General Education Requirement Menu gives options for all degree-seeking students to take courses from seven areas that align with Institutional Outcomes and Mass Transfer. The Curriculum Committee and General Education Standards Committee work in tandem, but the proposal submission, discussion, and vote are separate from one another.

There are two final stages of the approval process: College Forum and Presidential Review. Once the proposal is approved by the Curriculum and General Education Standards Committees, it is brought to the all-college Forum which meets once a month and is a contractual requirement for full-time faculty, administrators, and unit professional staff.  By the time a proposal reaches this stage, it has been vetted by a representative sample of the College. Now, the proposal is distributed to all stakeholders. At the Forum, a representative for the proposal provides a brief rationale answers questions. If satisfactory, a motion is made from the floor and a vote is called. If the proposal is accepted by majority vote at the College Forum, it moves to the President, whose signature of proposal is the final step prior to implementation. The College President maintains veto power.  Approval of proposals are more frequent than not as each stage of the vetting process allows ample opportunities for discussion and editing.

This seemingly straightforward multi-step approval process requires an investment of time and resources on the part of the faculty requestor.  Good proposals require not only a solid, evidence-based rationale grounded in subject area expertise and environmental factors, but also an understanding of how the proposal will fit into the larger goals of the College environment and the institution's mission, vision, and outcomes.

While new programs are developed and created by full-time faculty in a short window of time (approximately one academic year), a program modification often requires a longer time frame.  When the College has identified a need for a new program, the approval process is quick, but the build of the program (after approval) takes time.  However, to modify an existing program takes longer on the front end. Changing a curriculum, course offerings, and internal processes requires time to introduce a new mindset, retrain faculty and staff, pilot models, collect data and adapt. Sometime after I became Department Chairperson, I began to get the question, “When will the ESL Department be ready to present the new curriculum?” and I had to respond with, “not yet.” I remember feeling particularly dispirited due to slow progress despite a grueling amount of work.  It was then that Lori Catallozzi, the Dean of Humanities and Learning Communities quoted a known saying in the field of education: “Real curriculum reform in higher education is one of the most difficult things to accomplish because it necessitates culture change.” At that time, I remember feeling not particularly comforted by this imparted wisdom, but can appreciate it now that I have had years to think about it and live through it.

For other institutions considering a significant change, there are a number of strategies that can be employed to be successful, but the one that ultimately worked for the ELL Department during its reform process was a collaborative leadership model that included transformational leadership practices which built on an existing knowledge of institutional history, established a goal-driven framework, utilized existing partnerships and expertise, and created opportunities for agency and advocacy.

Identifying Expertise and Allies

Collaborative leadership comes with the fundamental understanding that expertise can be found in many forms. When diffused across an institute, that expertise can be gathered for a greater purpose. Utilizing expertise provides opportunity to both challenge the present circumstances and create allyship.

Firstly, a discussion of ELL faculty expertise and their contribution to collaborative change is warranted. The small but active roster of full-time faculty in the ELL department is noteworthy.  While contractual requirements state a minimum of college service performed through serving on a governance committee or in other college-wide initiatives, the ELL full-time faculty often exceed these obligations. At any given college community function, whether it be an institute, day of service, or ceremonial exercise, the majority of full-time faculty from the Department are participants or serve as facilitators. In many cases, ELL faculty are asked to present or co-facilitate. This likely is due to the fact that the ELL faculty are area experts in teaching and learning; most, if not all, have degrees in education and are committed to the ideology of lifelong learning.  Most, if not all, welcome the opportunity to discuss pedagogy and practices, especially with other content area faculty around the College. In any given class, they are committed to reaching each student where they are at regardless of the student’s prior educational history or aspirations. ELL faculty are willing to learn, understand, and serve the students they have. So, it is not surprising that the ELL faculty create their own cultural and intellectual contacts with other faculty and staff at the institution and utilize those contacts to broaden their own horizons as well as those of their students. These college-wide collaborative relationships have led to field study, guest speakers, co-teaching opportunities, continually updated culturally-relevant curriculum, and job opportunities for students.

By the time that the ELL Department agreed to submit the Program Modification Proposal to the College governance, we already had a healthy understanding of how the proposal would be perceived and what questions would be raised. This was due to our long-standing service on college governance committees, participation in cultural events, and deep relationships with colleagues from other departments and divisions. We anticipated what questions would be raised and prepared at length to speak directly to any objections. In the weeks preceding our presentation at the College governance meetings, we prepared the community by reaching out to deans and department heads as well as professors and staff.  Through these individual conversations, we were able to prepare and answer lingering questions on the impact of the reform.

That is the process-oriented picture of the reform, but in actuality it was messier, more complex, and also exciting. The preparation for what I had perceived would be the final challenge of presenting at the College Forum was actually the easiest (!) while the preceding years were much more difficult. A colleague often said that we were driving a car a hundred miles an hour while building the engine.

Humphreys (2013) in peer review of Deploying Collaborative Leadership to Reinvent Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century notes the following:

Collaborative efforts in any setting cannot be successful if they are built on purely voluntary efforts by the early-adopters and the “true believers.” Educational leaders must enable “full-time” individuals to include collaboration as part of their “day jobs.” Even though it is powerful and necessary, collaboration is also messy and time consuming. We must find ways to stop doing other things that may no longer be necessary in order to “support, nurture, and feed the collaboration (paras 14).

In order to tell you about how we utilized expertise and allies in and out of the department, I want to speak honestly about the ‘messiness’ and ‘time consuming’ parts of collaboration.  That involves telling you a little more about the years preceding the reform that you have previously read through Alan Shute, Jeff Ellenbird, and Maria Puente’s perspectives. I also affirm that in addition to taking time, the messiness is equal parts practical and emotional.  Faculty commitment to change means having the intellectual and emotional energy to sustain the work while continuing to teach and keep our students as a priority. It’s a lot to ask.

The fact is, being awarded the grant took us all by surprise in 2016. The two faculty who showed up to the unveiling became two of the design team leaders and stayed true to hope until the end -- they are my colleagues Jeff Ellenbird and Alan Shute, whom I will forever be grateful to for the collaboration and support. There were two non-ELL faculty appointed as Project Director and Activities Coordinator who, bless them, sought equity for AAPIs and had enough diverse past experiences at the College to know what they were getting into (and still voluntarily said ‘yes’).  The remainder of the Department, by all accounts, were wary of how much needed to be done and how it would be done. We continued to teach and went about our duties slightly mystified at the news. Some were recruited to join working teams within the grant and those teams shifted like sand in the first two years. Some recruits claimed institution initiative fatigue. Others just didn’t know how we could possibly transform ourselves from a pedagogically split and siloed department. So, in the beginning, the grant was a curse on our tongues instead of manna from heaven. We couldn’t imagine what money could do to fix what we hadn’t ourselves yet figured out how to fix.  For me, these factors were the primary motivations to go outside of our Department and the institution--while we were a group of truly dedicated educators who all believed that we were doing our best to put our students first, we would need outside help to bridge the divide. 

Having spent the previous three years developing the acceleration process to extend from within ELL to the English Department, I was one of those who dragged their feet when the news of the grant was announced.  Although I was strongly in favor of the grant’s goals, I could not see myself in a leadership position as the acceleration project left me feeling like I was barely keeping my head above water (and I am a strong swimmer). When I was approached to take a leadership role within the grant, I initially declined because I did not see a structure in place to support the leaders to succeed at making drastic changes.  I was worn out by the conflict over pedagogy in the department and  burned out by a contested acceleration process and the demands of serving on multiple college initiatives. But those who approached me are very intelligent in their ways and kept including me in conversations about the grant.  I could no longer resist being part of what I knew was best...to be the change. So after a semester sabbatical, I applied and was elected to be the Department Chairperson, and when I accepted that, I said that I would serve until we had seen through the changes outlined in the grant.

When I returned at the end of Spring 2018, I learned that eight sections of the integrated pilot courses had been successful, but there were confusion and communication issues over what was to happen or be done next.  I could sense that three things needed to happen very quickly so that the traction that had been gained wasn’t lost. We needed to accept that we (the ESL Department) were in charge of the grant and the grant was not in charge of us. There needed to be detailed plans and steps to bring each year’s goals into fruition. Lastly, we needed as much help we could get from colleagues outside our department and even outside of the institution in order to make it happen. I could see that the two previous years were already starting to feel like a burden on the “true believers” and we had a long and difficult road still ahead of us. While our administrators stood firm in the sentiment that the reform needed to be faculty-led (and, absolutely they were right), I finally understood that that didn’t mean we were on our own. We just needed to ask specifically for the support we did need. That support most often came in the form of faculty and staff from across the institution.

While you have previously read about the work the ELL faculty did in partnership with others around the institution on redeveloping the curriculum, this next section will focus on how the members of the Department strengthened existing relationships within the College with the English Department, The Language Lab, and the Learning Communities Program to support the reform.  These three collaborative relationships helped propel our acceptance among the greater college community, but they are not the only ones. We also extend our gratitude towards the ELL Success Coaches (advisors) and the ACE Mentor (student peer mentor) Program whose efforts not only changed how students received support but changed how the College perceived ELL students.  I encourage you to read a more focused piece on that work by Lambert, Lim, and Istamul-Olivia in this issue.

The English Department

I will begin this section about our partnership with the English Department with a glimpse at the  process of accelerating students from ELL.  The Acceleration Program (formerly known as ESL exemptions) ramped up in Fall 2009 when my predecessor, a visionary educator, got a group of us to co-teach a course called ESL First Year Seminar. We co-taught 109 students in an auditorium and many of those who enrolled were Generation 1.5. The story of this course is a whole different story and not solely mine to tell, but it helped us collect a lot of data on the new ELLs we were seeing and pave the way for students to begin to see their instructors as advocates to get them out of single skill stand-alone courses in the existing 36-credit program. That course was truly eye-opening, and I can still picture those students' faces staring out from the tiered seats. One of those faces belonged to Ildo.*  Ildo was not the “all-star student” like his friend who sat next to him posed ready to answer every question, but he wasn’t the traditional “I’m going to take things slow and learn perfectly” student like many traditional immigrants, either. Ildo needed a little more focus on some areas, less on others, and the extrinsic motivation of learning content. It was hard for him to stay afloat in four classes with four different instructors.  Although Ildo got exempted from a number of ESL courses, he ultimately wasn’t a good candidate “on paper” to get into College Writing I from Level 1 ESL via the Department exit tests.  But I also knew that his development was far beyond the course work in English 095 and that two additional levels of a 3-credit writing course in ESL might not make a significant impact on what he could produce (especially if it were during the confines of a timed assessment). 

Early in my career at BHCC, I was mostly assigned to teach the lower-level ESL writing courses. One semester, I had the opportunity to teach a section of College Composition l which brought me into contact with the English Department faculty. I later requested the upper-level ESL writing courses so I could pilot an acceleration project.  I knew what the learning outcomes were for college composition and I knew what our ELLs were capable of—even in Level 1. I knew some faculty in the English Department willing to start some small fires with me.  After all, the default path to take yet another developmental writing course after 36 credits seemed egregious.

Since I was an added position at a time the College enrollment soared, my office was a half cubicle on an open tier with other newer faculty and staff rotating in and out.  It was away from the other ESL faculty offices and that was one of the best things to happen to me as an introvert—not because of the quiet, but because over the years I met faculty from many other departments and I got to talk to and listen to them about their teaching.  If they were staff, I learned how things worked (really worked) at the College. I found ways to ask questions about their perspectives on ELLs, and I also had opportunities to advocate for change.  Since I also had a long walk from my office through many buildings to where I taught my classes, I had many opportunities to walk with faculty from different disciplines, bump into others in the hall, and drop in on the student support services offices. The discussions in these in-between class meeting times built a map of faculty and staff across the institution who were like- minded practitioners. Those conversations as well as an intentionally-designed Learning Community sponsored faculty professional development series in 2011 created a collage of allies and advocates across the institution. Many of those faculty members were change-makers in our reform and others became vocal supporters of the work.

While I was working late one night on this open tier in Fall 2011, a former ESL student dropped by to say hello.  Wilmer* was from the Dominican Republic and he had a degree from a technical college back home which did not transfer to the U.S. system. He had done well in my low-intermediate classes. He was cheerful and willing to pair up with anyone in class. Although he worked long hours, he was driven by the promise of economic uplift. But when he came to see me that night, something had shifted in him. He looked tired and world-weary. He had taken a number of ESL courses and was exempted from others, but now, after three semesters of ESL, was enrolled in the developmental English course that focused solely on paragraph and sentence-level writing. He could only manage to take 3-6 credits each semester while working full-time to support his family, and this course was preventing him from starting on his degree work. In this developmental English course, he encountered course outcomes that represented skills that he had mastered years before. He told me it was like taking a big step backwards.  He asked me why. Why was he required to take this English class?  And in that ‘why’ there was anger, sadness, and disbelief. I knew that I could not bear to try to explain it away, so I told him the only thing that I thought was truthful: that I did not know and that it was not my department. He looked at me long and hard. He was not the only one who left that conversation feeling worse than when it began. 

So that was it. I felt fed up. I felt like I was always going to have to answer to the English Department and like we were not equals. I felt extremely discouraged. I felt as if students saw my classes (essentially me) as if I were another broken cog in a wheel. I added up all the students I had taught by then (hundreds) and tried to count how many were still there (not many) or had made it to graduation (fewer still). Okay, maybe that wasn’t it…there were many fits and starts-- pilot projects that didn’t gain traction and a discernable pedagogical divide in the English Department that resembled the same divide in the ESL program. But that’s the point I remember feeling like I wasn’t going to wait around for a blessing and that I couldn’t continue to observe and be complicit in what happened to the Ildos and Wilmers in my courses.  I took advantage of any opportunity to get to know and work with English faculty, got myself invited to some English -faculty-only PDs, and piloted some experiments with another like-minded colleague in the English Department.  When new English faculty members were hired, I made it a point to introduce myself to them and find out about their interests. Eventually, with the support of department chairpersons and the division dean, we built up an acceleration system which now has the support of an acceleration coordinator, multiple faculty scoring teams from both departments, and most importantly an understanding that acceleration is a process of evaluating student work using a common framework that promotes equity. One result of this project is that it removed that developmental English course from our students’ paths.

Although acceleration and alignment between two departments are different entities, the Acceleration Program was a catalyst in the reform.  It allowed a couple of key things to happen. We made space for really important and difficult conversations with faculty from both departments which we later turned into a professional development series. We also identified more allies and invited them into our reform, while tracking the accelerations over a period of years provided us with some outstanding and robust data which helped sell the reform. ELLs who were accelerated into College Writing I have the highest success rate of any of their peers. The general population at BHCC completes College Composition 1 at a 70-74% success rate, whereas all ELLs have a completion rate 80-84% and accelerated ELLs succeed at the highest completion rate—in the 90’s. The data in Figure 4 speaks for itself.

Figure 4

ENG-111 Success Rates for Students Who Took ESL vs. Those Who Did Not Take ESL Prior to ENG-111. 
Source: BHCC Office of Institutional Research and Assessment.

Language Lab

When I am grappling with a difficulty that I just can’t totally parse out-whether it be something that happened in my classroom, with a student, or at the institution, I take a walk from the solitary confines of my office to the Language Lab. Whomever I encounter there, whether it be a former student or a multilingual staff member, I know I will always be welcomed and I will walk away with a new perspective.  Under the Division of Academic Support and College Pathway Programs, the Language Lab is one of three student-focused tutoring centers for BHCC students and is the service most frequented by ELLs. Data collected by the Language Lab in 2019-2020 recorded nearly 7,000 student visits[1]. “The Bunker Hill Community College Language Lab provides students a high-tech learning environment and a knowledgeable tutoring staff to guide them with any aspect of language learning: from speaking, listening, and pronunciation to reading, writing, grammar, and punctuation. The Lab’s objective is to help students enrolled in language courses improve their language skills.”  The Language Lab Coordinator and staff members were significant co-collaborators in the ELL Reform process.

The Language Lab is more than a physical space; it is a community of staff, student workers, student users and faculty who embody the institution’s goal of identifying and addressing disparities in academic achievement among student groups and implementing learner-centered curricular and co-curricular practices.  An initial visit to the Lab may seem chaotic to the uninitiated, but it is actually an elegant dance serving many persons and multiple needs at the same time. You may see a whole language class of 22 students engaged in a workshop while multiple private tutoring sessions are happening in pockets around the room, students making appointments, students working independently, the director consulting with students and faculty on needs, and the lab staff flowing between all these entities.

To me, the Lab feels like home. It’s the first place I felt truly welcomed as an adjunct faculty member in a large, often disorienting institution and I know it is the same for many of our learners. It is more than a place to work and be supported, the Lab and its staff also tend to the emotional well-being of students, faculty, and staff.  All who work there embrace the pedagogy of wholeness.

Estherline* was my student twice in the stand-alone skills program. In 12 non-cumulative semesters at BHCC, she accumulated the equivalent of 15 credits of Basic English as As a Second Language (BESL) in the Division of Community Education and Workforce Development  and 30 credits of Academic ESL, and then withdrew during the first semester in which she would have made actual progress in her major.  Estherline had lots of systems figured out—she had two young children that she was raising mostly on her own. She worked and made her classes as much of a priority as she was able.  Having lived for many years as a working adult in the U.S., she was orally fluent and needed more support with literacy.  In my visits to the Language Lab, years after she was my student, I would often see her there and we’d get to chat.  I would see her finishing up her assignments after class because it was the narrow window of time she had to complete them and could call upon the staff for support. For students like Estherline, much more happens in that room than academic support.

For these reasons and more, the Lab staff and the Lab itself have been able to contribute meaningfully to all stages of the reform.Because of the diverse encounters they have with students and faculty members, they were able to help the ELL faculty see a whole spectrum of the student experience…from the most vulnerable students who take refuge there while working on class assignments to the students who return for support and community long after their language classes are over. Probably the single most significant issue the Lab staff continued to bring to the Department’s attention was the impact of the number of remedial credits on students’ financial aid packages. Although I do not know the precipitating details that prompted Estherline to drop out of BHCC, one can surmise that her pace towards completing language requirements and the credit impact on her financial aid package were likely factors.

Even as amazing and as student-centered as the Language Lab was, the structure of the previous ESL program which primarily offered the Lab as additional support only impacted the retention of a portion of the whole population. It’s not that students like Estherline don’t want to persist; it’s that they can’t. It’s difficult to move out of a deficit-based structure even with targeted support.  While the Language Lab continues to offer beneficial programming (tutoring, conversation groups, workshops) to meet the diverse needs of BHCC students, its services also evolved due to partnership in the reform. As the integrated pilot classes began to strategically embed language support during class time, the Lab shifted to align its outcomes with the new course outcomes.

The staff at the Language Lab also keenly recognized the need to support faculty from different departments around the College.  While ELL was familiar with how to deflect the attitude from the English Department about ESL students needing to be “fixed” before they entered content courses, the Language Lab staff regularly heard or saw other departments dropping students off at their door expecting that the student would emerge from the space polished and fluent.  The coordinator of the Language Lab, Carmen Magaña, presented the concept of ELL Across the Curriculum which is now an ELL faculty-led professional development series for a cohort of content area faculty who are primed to apply the concepts of Universal Design and learn about how to adapt existing curriculum to reflect the research and best practices of working with ELLs.

Learning Communities

ESL Learning Communities predate the existence of the BHCC Office of Learning Communities. They go back decades, and prior to the reform, notably, the ESL Department had n Learning Community model with an Electronics Certificate in 1984.  During the past few decades, the Department predominantly offered only ESL Learning Community Clusters at the highest level of ESL coursework. Two faculty, one ELL and one content area faculty, codesign and collaboratively teach 6-9 credits following these grounding principles: Each learning community is grounded in a set of core academic and student development outcomes that include reflection and self-assessment, critical thinking, integrated communication, intercultural knowledge and competence, and teamwork.  Prior to the reform, data on the Clusters’ effectiveness superseded the stand-alone course data which is one of the reasons, in addition to outside research, the Department was willing to pilot more six-credit courses within ELL with thematic content and expand the interdisciplinary Cluster model.

Data[1] collected by the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment from Fall 2015 to Spring 2018, summarized three major findings on Learning Community clusters . BHCC offers Learning Community Clusters for Accelerated Math and English, ELL, Developmental Reading and Writing, and Interdisciplinary Clusters.Below is a summary prepared by Institutional Effectiveness on Cluster data (which includes ESL Clusters):

• Overall, students who enroll in any Learning Community Cluster their first semester at BHCC are more likely to persist from the Fall to Spring semester than students who take these courses in their first semester as a stand-alone option.

• Students enrolled in a Cluster their first semester are also more likely to be retained than their peers who enroll in these courses as a stand-alone option in their first semester.

• Persistence rates for part-time students are consistently higher (by seven to nine percentage points) for those enrolled in a Cluster than those who are enrolled in stand-alone courses.

The effective data speaks to the intentional design of Learning Communities. The former Director of Learning Communities, Jenne Powers, often began our professional development meetings by reminding us that “a Learning Community is more than the structure of pairing two courses together. It is the intentional use of Learning Communities pedagogy to center student voices, integrate academic and career planning resources, and build a culturally responsive community.”

The data, which represents good design and great pedagogy, is just one of the reasons why I approached the Office of Learning Communities to create a more formalized relationship with the ELL program and replace the previous model of instructor-initiated design and proposal.  The Office of Learning Communities already had an existing model of professional development that I thought would be beneficial to tap into. It also has a faculty-led Think Tank. The Think Tank is composed of faculty around the institution with long experience with Learning Communities. Think Tank members review new Learning Communities proposals and provide support to faculty who propose. They also serve as facilitators during professional development opportunities.  Even with the research and work happening within the ELL Department to write outcomes and design curriculum, bringing to scale the content based model would be a challenge especially considering that 75% of the ELL instructors were adjunct faculty who worked a number of jobs. The time that adjunct faculty members could devote to developing new courses was different from the full-time faculty members who are charged with curriculum development as part of their duties. In addition, the pedagogical divide discussed earlier was also a challenge among adjuncts. The experiences of Learning Community faculty members outside of the ELL Department allowed more perspectives in the room, which helped move the discussion beyond the divided camps. The Think Tank review and support of any new integrated course proposal also added more room for equity and equality in terms of which courses were accepted. The peer-review process by the Think Tank reduced the question of unfair influence by the Department Chair and Design Team, who as PD contributors and leaders of the reform were openly vested in the move to the integrated skills model. Through our partnership with the Office of Learning Communities, the ELL Department and the ELL Design Team/AANAPISI Leadership were able to consistently offer professional development opportunities throughout the five years of reform.

I have one more student story to tell and that is from my own previously inconsistent relationship with Learning Communities prior to the reform. This, I hope, will illustrate why not just one change needed to happen, but a million of decisions led to the whole scale reform. One of the ELL Learning Communities I have taught is a visual arts themed course. A multilingual Professor of VMA and myself have taught many iterations for our Cluster targeted for arts-interested students, most of whom have been first generation college students, generation 1.5 language learners, and identify as Asian or Asian American. One of these students who  enrolled in our LCC prior to the reform was Jinhai*.  In this third semester at BHCC, one year after he graduated from a local high school where he took many courses in studio arts, he was in our Cluster and he straight out told me that he pretty much hated school, hated reading, and just wanted to get out of BHCC as fast as he could and transfer into an arts college.  I didn’t see this as an affront. I understood what he was getting at, so I said, “Okay, tell me what I can do to keep you motivated and get you through.” He had already spent two full-time semesters in ESL and was impatient to begin courses for his major. He knew he made a lot of mistakes and outright said that studying grammar was not for him. Despite his protestions, all I could see were positives. He had intercultural communication skills, cultural capital, intrapersonal skills, and design skills that far exceeded many of his peers.

Jinhai had many talents and that the system of language and language education had not leveraged his assets enough up to this point (although he had some great teachers which he enjoyed interacting with).  The Learning Community Cluster allowed him to earn credit in his major and connected him with other visual media arts students and faculty.  This was the motivation he needed to persist.  Successfully completion of our LCC VMA cluster allowed him to take another VMA course his next semester while facing the “dreaded” (his words) gatekeeping English course. I felt pretty awful when his recommendation to accelerate him directly to College Composition (based on a single in-class writing sample) was denied, but he told me (!) not to worry and he’d be fine to survive another English language dominant semester.  He was fine and he did survive, but I worried because of all the other students like him who have never made it through that final gate. If Jinhai were to apply to BHCC today, more than likely his high school GPA would place him out of ELL. However, that is not always the case for all Generation 1.5 students, so we need to have more options and support for students like Jinhai other than a Learning Community Cluster offered at the highest level of ELL. Students like Jinhai also have the option to demonstrate readiness for College Writing through multiple measures of assessment in lieu of a single timed writing sample.

[1] Duplicated student headcount. Data collected in the Year 4 Language Lab report for the AANAPISI grant noted that student visits increased 29.6% from the preceding year.

[2] Overview of Learning Community Courses and Persistence/Retention by Student PartTime/Full-Time Status updated June 2018

ELL Department Faculty Leadership/Structure

So how did we pull it off? I don’t know exactly. There are too many conversations and details to remember precisely. During years 3, four, and five of the reform, we established subteams and defined leadership roles so that there would be less confusion as to the who and how.  Jeff Ellenbird and Alan Shute led the integrated pilot faculty meetings, Alan Shute led the work on the in-take processes reform and later facilitated the adjunct faculty meetings for those who taught the evening and weekend sections.  The three of us, along with the AANAPISI Activities Coordinator, Professor Aurora Bautista, made up the ELL Design Team.  Aurora Bautista has worked at the institution for 17 years and has served on every committee and nearly every initiative. “No” is not in her vocabulary, so her expertise and can-do spirit were invaluable to us.  We, the Design Team, met twice a month to organize our work, plan agendas, and pull resources. We often consulted with the Project Director, the Dean of our Academic Division, and the Director of Learning Communities, especially when we needed to troubleshoot anticipated issues.

We worked from a backward design model. Since each year of reporting for the grant began and ended in October, we met each June to plan out all the professional development, collaborative decision-making meetings, and resources we would need for the upcoming academic year to make progress on the stated yearly grant goals.  We also were sensitive to balance for our collaborators, so we consulted with the institution’s calendar to determine meeting days and times that would be most productive for our team members.  For us, that often meant Friday afternoon meetings when faculty and staff could breathe and relax into the work. That also meant whole Saturday professional development and evening meetings. That work was always compensated . When we were in-person, food helped us with community building.

As Department Chair, I had to be strategic.  Although we were fiscally healthy, the resource I knew we had to be discerning about was human capital. When I came into the role, it seemed that we were at a perceptible standstill and unsure of next steps.  I talked to everyone who had been involved in the work during the semester I was on sabbatical.  While listening, I noted strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.  This allowed me to develop a strategy to tackle outcomes listed in the grant and break those larger yearly goals down into achievable outcomes for each year, semester, and month.  Those goals required defining leadership tasks which I could delegate to my co-leaders, Jeff and Alan, as well as other colleagues who offered support. It was never easy, but I never felt I was alone. I was able to call on established allies at the institution to address the tasks which needed input from outside the Department.  Institutional Effectiveness continued to supply us with independently collected data on the inventions that kept getting better and there was a sense of camaraderie and investment among those involved.   My role at the integrated faculty and department meetings, aside from being a contributing faculty member, was to help keep us all focused on the goals we had set out for that month and semester so that we would reach our year-end goal. Just as Jeff or others would often refer back to the anchoring research, my voice drew us back to the big picture when we got too far into the weeds.

Shawna Shapiro (2011) writes in Stuck in the Remedial Rut that students in the remedial ESL program that she studied commented favorably on their individual ESL instructors but were dissatisfied with the program and coursework (p. 31). The disconnect between an instructor’s positive interaction with a student and the student’s progress and lack of autonomy is a significant issue that is often misunderstood and overlooked in the hierarchical structure of an institution.  For Wilmer, Ildo, Estherline, and Jintao, I know that this was their experience. I know that it is too late to change their experience as language learners, but I also believe that they are out there continuing to learn, be, grow, and flourish in the world.  The reality is that they will likely never return to the institution that made them feel less than.  I also know that their stories are representative of many. Too many. For that, I am deeply sorry. I am sorry that I could not find a way for them at the time they needed it.

The student stories viewed together hint at some of the complexities in language learning and first generation community college students, but their language learning was really not the barrier. The barriers were broad, deep, and interwoven structures at an institution which told students to ‘imagine the possibilities’.For this group and too many more, dreaming was all they could do.Breaking down these barriers required not one single strategy, but a wholesale reform of everything we knew, had practiced, and hadsaid and done. This required the work of many and the unfailing dedication of those who believe that together we can accomplish a better tomorrow.