Monday, January 23, 2006
Chinese Job Market Offers Lessons for American Students
"Why would anyone need career counseling in China?"? wondered Kathleen Maisto, Coordinator of Transfer at Greenfield Community College, where she also helps students transferring to a four-year college choose a major and then choose the best college for that major. "After all, jobs are assigned, aren't they?"? Curious, she joined a People to People delegation made up of 20 members of the National Career Development Association to visit China and find out.
"Boy, my eyes were opened!"? says Maisto, who received her Master's degree in Career Development at JFK University in California, and has been a member of the National Career Development Association for nine years.
"The Chinese government wants to get out of the job placement business. That's huge,"? says Maisto. "They want private enterprise to grow."?
That means a new demand and appreciation for career counseling in China. Traditionally, explains Maisto, high school graduates visited a job station, kind of like an employment agency run by the state, and they would assign you a job. For those few who won a coveted seat at a university, family pressures steered them into high-status jobs in engineering and science. With the new emphasis on private enterprise, however, students are beginning to explore their own interests in order to discover their best career fit. At Beijing Normal University, Maisto learned about a group of 400 students who won a nationwide creative challenge award for a new initiative in career counseling: students counseling students.
"I said to myself, "That's something we could do here!"?
Maisto knows that career counseling can be a hard sell. "You have to convince students to undergo a process of discovering who they are, and then translate that into research in the world of work. But for those 400 students at Beijing Normal University, it was happening naturally because the students were helping one another.
"You know, when you teach something, you learn it better yourself. So when you show a student how to use an online resource that shows all the career possibilities in a field that you'd ever want to dream of "" well, what if that student were to sit down with someone else and show them what they know?
"Work study students could become work study career counselors!"?
Maisto also learned about a new trend in Chinese employers to hire job applicants with a passion for their work, another argument in favor of career counseling. "Academics are important,"? notes Maisto, "but they're looking for the person who loves what they do. A lot of students can't convey that because they're not doing what they love."?
Maisto recalls working with an Asian student at GCC who said her parents wanted her to get a high-paying job. "But the more I gently explored her interests, it was in art, and all of a sudden she was showing me a portfolio of incredible art. And when I looked at that, I said to her, 'Wow, why aren't we looking at the multitude of careers in which people can do their art?'"?
I'll be a better transfer coordinator, says Maisto, by helping students at GCC investigate who they are, first, and then tying this personal information to exploring four-year schools and majors.
Career counseling, contends Maisto, is an adventure you can share. "I've always told students, 'Hey, now you'll be a great career counselor to your kids, or a friend. If a friend comes in and says, 'How'd you figure that out?' Tell 'em! Show 'em what you did!"?
"We'll always be there to guide them to resources and how to interpret assessments and meet professionals in their fields of interest. But, the key is to get students active and excited in the discovery of work they will love."?
GCC Library Relocated for Renovations
Come visit the GCC library in its new, temporary location in the North Building of the GCC main campus. The library will be open for service as of today. Follow the signs to the fourth floor.
Services to the college and to the larger community will be offered from this new location for at least the next two years, the amount of time required for refurbishing the original location. The new library location includes a computer lab, which will be available for class visits to the library and for individual use.
During the Spring semester, the library will begin providing a wireless environment for college and community users. A wireless connection is currently available in the East Building. With the addition of the library wireless service, students in both buildings will have access to a wireless environment.
In March, the Peer Tutoring program will also be relocated in the North Building, bringing both the tutoring and library services together in the same space. The college has made closer coordination of all academic support services a priority.
Survey Results Strengthen Student Connection to College
GCC asks students, staff: 'How are we doing?'
"From a national perspective, GCC is a jewel,"? says research specialist Pam Matheson. She knows, because Greenfield Community College made the gutsy move last spring of participating in the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE), the results of which are there for all the world to see at www.ccsse.org (click on "Survey Results and then click on "College Profiles"?). That's noteworthy because the results of a similar annual survey of four-year colleges and universities are for their eyes only. But GCC is committed to helping students achieve their higher education goals, and it needs hard data to build upon.
"It's all about understanding what's going on,"? says Matheson, "what our students are experiencing and what our faculty needs in order to promote improvement in learning and (student) retention."?
To that end, GCC is using both a national and an in-house survey as part of a college-wide focus on "fostering a culture of inquiry and improvement,"? according to Larry Dean, director of the Title III grant for advising. The results will be used to strengthen the tentacles of engagement that keep a student on track toward achieving his or her higher education goal.
"'Engagement' has a variety of meanings,"? explains Dean. "Students may be engaged by conversation in class, by participating in class, by doing assignments that require them to be participants, by working with other students in the class, by having conversations with a faculty member outside of class.
"Likewise, students can be engaged outside of the classroom in a number of ways, with student activities, student services, and in computer labs.
"We care about whether students are engaged or not,"? continues Dean, "because the literature tells us that students who are more engaged with their college experience are more likely to achieve their goals. That's what we're interested in as an institution, and as part of our (Title III) grant, our goals are to increase the retention and graduation rates of students."?
The national survey rates two-year colleges on five benchmarks, or standards, that are believed to be critical ingredients of student engagement. Those are: student-faculty interaction, support for learners, academic challenge, active and collaborative learning and student effort. Using these benchmarks, GCC can then compare its results with other groups, such as other small colleges or other rural community colleges.
"One measure that we do spectacularly well on is faculty-student interaction, where we achieve the 80th percentile,"? says Matheson, "which means that only 20% of other community colleges in the survey did better than us. It's not surprising that we do so well there: We're a small, one-on-one environment and this relates to the connections between faculty and students.
"Areas where we score in the 70th percentile are academic challenge and support for learners. Students feel we're cultivating positive working and social relationships with them and they say that they find this environment challenging.
"Active and collaborative examines whether students have opportunities to think about and apply what they are learning in different settings. At 60%,"? continues Matheson, "we're still above the midpoint.
"One area where we fall below, when compared to other small colleges, is student effort,"? says Matheson. "That's what students bring to their experience. Here we fall below the national average due to one of eight line items, and that is the frequency of use of computer labs. What we know, and what CCSSE fails to ask, is that 95% of our students have computers and internet access at home; they're just not using it here."?
The CCSSE survey by itself does not promote any improvement in learning and retention, of course. It's what you do with the information garnered. And here, according to Matheson, GCC stands out by its willingness to use the data.
"Having come from a very large institution prior to this,"? says Matheson, "I was amazed by two things: First, that GCC participated in this survey. They didn't have to do it, but they joined an elite group that was really interested in what their students were learning. Secondly, that they""the President, the faculty, the staff ""were interested in the results, and they were most interested in the areas where they can make improvements.
"It's all about improvement. It's all about understanding what's going on, what our students are experiencing, what our faculty needs in order to provide even better services."?
In a separate, home-grown survey of faculty and students, GCC recently delved into the area of student advising.
"The very narrow definition of advising,"? explains Dean, "is helping students select courses for their next semester. But we think advising goes way beyond that. We think advising involves longer-term planning for students, planning around career goals as well as education goals, and an assessment of their life experience and how that might intersect with school. Some students may not even have goals, so some of that is helping students to form goals. Students without clear goals are more likely to drop out of school and not persist to graduation. So student advising plays a crucial role in student engagement,"? says Dean.
Community colleges rely heavily on faculty advisers, according to advising specialist Diane O'Hearn. "Every student is assigned a faculty adviser based on their major, but then you have a whole group of students who don't even know what they want to do."?
With that kind of challenge, it's not surprising that the feedback from the survey was mixed.
"We learned that our students are very satisfied with advising here,"? says O'Hearn. "Overall, about 85% rated their academic advising experience as excellent or good."?
The faculty members who provide that advising, on the other hand, saw lots of room for improvement. "They want more training around advising and we're going to get them more,"? says O'Hearn, who is already scheduling focus groups of students to examine advising needs more closely.
Greenfield Community College plans to conduct the CCSSE survey again this spring. Over time, the college can compare results with not just other colleges, but with itself over time, to look for improvements in student retention and graduation rates.
"You have to ask questions, you have to get the answers, and then you have to act on them,"? sums up Matheson.
Monday, January 16, 2006
GCC Living the Dream Award
GCC honors Mistinguette Y. Smith and Ali Urban at MLK Jr. Day Observance
"It doesn't matter who we are or where we are, we all have something to give and we just have to have the courage to give it,"? said Northampton resident Mistinguette Y. Smith. "Dr. King did that in a big way and he had a big impact on the history of this country. I'm pleased that other people feel like my smaller contributions are a reflection of that same spirit."?
Smith, who is director of programs at The Food Bank, was honored today with the Living the Dream Award presented by Greenfield Community College President Dr. Robert L. Pura at The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Observance Ceremony at Greenfield Community College. Sixteen-year-old Ali Urban of Millers Falls was honored with the Bright Lights Award, which recognizes young people who espouse the ideals of peace and justice in their lives.
"Today we are here not only to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. the man, his dream and values,"? President Pura told an audience of all ages crowded into the GCC Café, "we are also here to celebrate you and this community. Because of you, his life's dream, his life's work continues. It is because of you, and especially the children in this room, that I have great hopes for the future. How appropriate it is, therefore to acknowledge these two individuals in our community. Day after they, they live their lives and they go about their business embodying the values and the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"A lifelong community activist, Mistinguette Smith has taken on such societal challenges as domestic violence, reproductive rights for women, AIDS and HIV awareness and, now, hunger using the tool in which she has total faith, and that is the power of people working together to make things better. 'We have all the knowledge, all the power and all the resources we need to make the kind of communities in which we want to live,' says Smith, 'but we do not have them when we are alone.'
"At The Food Bank, Smith confronted hunger in western Massachusetts by attacking the underlying problem as well as the immediate response to it. Her response was the creation of an entirely new program direction for The Food Bank called " Target: Hunger."? Target: Hunger takes a public health/community organizing approach to measurably reducing hunger in specific communities.
"'Target: Hunger' is being launched in two communities, one urban and one rural, with the goal of reducing the number of people who are hungry and in need of a meal from a meal site or pantry by 10 percent in four years.
"Hunger, for Smith, is a metaphor for her life's mission of community activism. 'There is a hunger among all of us,' she says. 'For some of us, it is a hunger for food; for others, it is a hunger for community; for others, it is a hunger to be connected with one another, which cannot happen when there is injustice in the world.'
"As a member of the American Friends Service Committee in Western Massachusetts, Smith became a playwright in order to introduce the ideals of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to young people. Her play, "Freedom in the Air,"? portrays heroines like Claudette Colvin who, at 16, was, in fact, the first person to refuse to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala.
"Smith notes that young people have often been at the very cutting edge of every social movement that has made the country and the community in which we enjoy living and her play offers a powerful message to them. 'We need to tell our young folks these stories so that they remember that they are powerful, not powerless,' says Smith, 'and that change is possible when we act together in community. We only feel overwhelmed and sad and defeated and dispirited when we're alone.'"?
In her acceptance remarks to those assembled, Smith paraphrased a song she heard as a youngster in church, "Walking the king's highway"?: "There's joy in knowing, with you I'm going, walking Dr. King's highway."?
Today's winner of Greenfield Community College's Bright Lights Award, 16-year-old Ali Urban of Millers Falls, exemplifies the future of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy, says President Pura, who established the youth award last year:
"A sophomore at Turners Falls High School, Ali has discovered the path espoused by Mistinguette Smith of 'acting together in community,' by helping out at the Community Meals program, volunteering at Historic Deerfield to teach families the lessons of history, teaching children at the Y and at summer Bible camp, raising money for the Gill-Montague Education Fund, and more.
"'In my life I've had many blessings,' says Ali, 'and I hope to, as a way of expressing gratitude for that, to be involved in different activities that an allow me to give back to our community.'
"A Community Meals volunteer since the second grade, Ali says, 'I've seen really good people who just are down on their luck. They're very grateful, and it really is a moving experience to meet people who I may not encounter otherwise. I've seen people pass up a meal for themselves so they can bring it to someone else who they know could use it more.'
"Ali's mother, Corinne Urban, says of her daughter, 'She sees the injustice in the world that breeds ill will and hinders peace "¦ and she wants to do something about it.'
"Ali says she admires Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for 'his desire for justice. Through different experiences in my life, I've seen that even when people have done wrong, that they need to be treated with justice and mercy, and how the kindness of others and others' demonstration of good values can really impact people and make them perhaps live those values as well.'
"Ali says her goal is to become a lawyer so that she can help families and single mothers, especially."?
The Observance Ceremony included poetry readings and musical selections by Greenfield Center School students, and an open microphone at which members of the large and enthusiastic audience honored the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with favorite quotes, artwork, a Yiddish song and other tributes.
The ceremony concluded with a reception featuring a huge birthday cake.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
GCC Appoints Associate Dean of Student Affairs
Greenfield Community College announces the appointment of Shane Hammond of Bernardston as Associate Dean of Student Affairs. Hammond attended Greenfield Community College and went on to earn a bachelor of science degree in business administration from the University of Massachusetts, and a master's degree in Educational Policy, Research and Administration, also from UMass Amherst. He has worked in student services at UMass Amherst and at American University in Washington, D.C. Most recently, Hammond was sales and marketing manager with GBI Marketing, helping schools and nonprofits to raise money. Hammond brings this fundraising experience to the GCC Foundation as this year's chairman of the annual fund campaign. He serves as a director of the GCC Foundation.
As associate dean of student affairs, Hammond looks forward to working with students directly. "GCC is a special place for students because of its commitment to both access and excellence,"? says Hammond, "and the one-on-one attention that's given to our students by faculty and staff. There's an energy on a college campus that's unmatched anywhere else, and I'm happy to be a part of this campus."?
For more information, please call Liz Carroll at (413) 775-1420.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Financial Support Available for Childcare Providers
Higher education help available for childcare providers.
Workshop on Jan. 11 tells about grant, scholarship opportunities.
"Anybody working with kids, including family childcare providers, preschool staff or school-age staff, can get financial support for higher education,"? says Kim Audette, Academic Advisor at Greenfield Community College.
On Jan. 11, from 6 to 8 p.m., at the GCC Downtown Center (270 Main St., Greenfield), Greenfield Community College and the Franklin County Community Partnership for Children Councils are bringing together representatives from area colleges and universities who will share information about higher education programs and new grant and scholarship opportunities in early childhood education. "It is a chance for people who work with children to figure out their next steps in their educational development plan,"? says Audette.
Participating colleges include Elms College, GCC, UMass/University without Walls, and others offering associates and bachelors degree programs. Participants will learn how to begin, or continue, their educational journey from a career planning expert. Refreshments will be served.
For information, please contact Kim Audette at (413) 775-1270 or audettek@gcc.mass.edu
Practical Nursing Program Reopens Admissions
New requirements explained at Jan. 9 Open House
For the first time since July 1st, the Practical Nursing program at Greenfield Community College has reopened its applications process to prospective students, with new requirements in mathematics and English. Since the program fills up quickly, it is recommended that interested applicants begin the process as soon as possible. It often takes one to two semesters to complete the pre-requisite courses.
An informational Open House is scheduled for Monday, Jan. 9 at 4 p.m., at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Leeds. Please call (413) 582-3055 or (413) 775-1802 for directions and further information.
Demand for Licensed Practical Nurses has exceeded supply for several years, says Virginia Wahl, Professor and Coordinator of the Practical Nursing Certificate Program, and the demand is only expected to increase due to changes in the health care system. "As an LPN,"? says Wahl, "you can be sure of a rewarding career with a good salary and have the option of a variety of job opportunities, as well as the chance to continue your education as an RN."?
LPNs are the backbone of the nursing staff in long-term care facilities, notes Wahl. About 80 percent of graduates work in this area, with the rest working in physicians' offices and medical clinics.
"About 30 to 50 percent of our graduates continue their nursing education, eventually becoming registered nurses,"? says Wahl. "Others choose to remain LPNs because of the flexible hours, good benefits and pay, and rewarding work."?
Unique to Greenfield Community College is the Practical Nursing program's "rolling admissions"? process which ensures that students who meet the requirements obtain the next available place. "The admissions requirements form is essentially a checklist,'"? says Wahl. "Once they check off that they meet the academic requirements, they send it in to the Health Occupations admissions office and get what I call the 'deli ticket number' because, after that, it's first come, first served, on a space available basis."?
Professor Wahl is eager to let prospective students know about the new requirements in mathematics and English so that they can take steps to meet them in order to submit an application as soon as possible. "It can take people quite a long time to finish these requirements,"? says Wahl, "and if they wait, they may never get in. We are now taking applications for the class starting in Fall of 2007, and it's not too soon to apply."?
Interested applicants are encouraged to attend the information session to be held at the V.A. in Leeds on Jan. 9th at 4 p.m. General program information is available on the GCC Web site: www.gcc.mass.edu.
Greenfield Community College | One College Drive | Greenfield, MA 01301-5129 | (413) 775-1000 (tel) | (413) 775-5129 (fax)