The Butte College English Department focuses on teaching critical reading, thinking, and writing to better prepare our students for success in college, work, and life.
The English Department’s primary focus is teaching transfer-level composition.
In response to the overwhelming statistics that all students have a better chance of succeeding in their college-level composition course and in college if they are placed immediately in that transfer-level course, we have developed a co-requisite model composition course for students we identify as possibly needing extra support to have the best chance of success in English 2. Ultimately we expect that this course will serve almost all students who, in the past, may have been considered below transfer in English.
Based on statewide data from a basic skills cohort analysis between 2009 and 2011, students with high school GPAs between 1.9 and 2.6 still had a 49% success rate when allowed to take the transfer level class directly; currently these students' multiple measures placement puts them into courses 1-3 levels below transfer, where their chance of passing a transfer level course drops far below 49%.
Students of color are disproportionately placed into these levels, even under current multiple measures rules. For example, analysis of recent placement data from Butte showed that African American students are three times more likely to be placed 2 or more levels below transfer in English. For each additional developmental course they are required to take, students' chance of completing the transferable course drops.
The most interesting data are for students with high school GPAs below 1.9. Currently, unless their test score grants them access, students with GPAs below 1.9 are placed 3 or 4 levels below transfer in English. Yet the statewide analysis shows that these students still had a 43% success rate when allowed to start directly in transfer English. If these students start 1-level-below, 13% complete transfer-level in one year. If they start 2 levels below, 2% finish transfer-level in one year.
These data match our own internal SLO assessment work completed in 2011 in conjunction with the LEAD department. We normed and holistically scored essays from students at all levels of our writing program, without knowing students' course level when we were assessing their essays. This assessment showed that students from all levels were producing very similar work, with the exception of students in English 215. (However, it should also be noted that a large proportion of students who assess into English 215 never enroll in the course, which means that we can't look at 215 students and make generalizations about students who assess at that level.)
Given the preponderance of statewide and internal evidence that students are better off when given access to transfer-level coursework, and given our strategic initiatives' emphasis on data, completion, and equity, and all of this as the clear underlying principle beneath AB 705, we remain perplexed by the resistance to placing all students in transfer-level courses with extra support for those traditionally placed one or more levels below transfer to bring those 43/49 percent success rates up to the same level or better than those traditionally placed in the transfer level. We need support from our colleagues and leaders if we want to see success rates in our English 3 co-requisite course that are on par with or even exceed our success rates for English 2, but even without that support, just putting students in transfer level courses will mean more students completeing English 2.
At San Diego Mesa College, where students placing one or more levels below transfer were given the opportunity to take a 5 unit co-requisite course, much like the English 3 we've developed in our department and which would be in place next fall if it hadn't been stalled an extra year, their success rates for all of these levels jumped to 74%. And that's what we're going for as a department, to see a 70-plus percent success rate in our co-requisite course (English 3) that should be five units with a 25 student ped. cap, IA support, and access to laptop carts. We also need funding to provide and incentivize necessary professional development for the 40 associate faculty and soon to be 16 full-time faculty (counting LEAD) who will be teaching English 3 and/or English 2 starting fall 19.
These programs may include the English 3 community of practice, the online teaching community of practice, and other professional development opportunities that will help all transfer-level English teachers better support the increase in diversity, especially historically and institutionally disadvantaged populations, that we expect to see in all transfer-level English courses.
In fact, given our current situation, we are facing obstacles getting people to participate in the community of practice for the co-requisite model because courses like 218 (2 and 3 levels below transfer) and 118 (1 and 2 levels below transfer) are more appealing for instructors to teach. We're hoping that AB 705 will mean an end to this confusing process that statistically doesn't serve students well, and that regardless of how the Chancellor's office decides to enforce AB 705, all English teachers in both English and LEAD departments will be brought together under strong, transparent, and clear leadership to create a model for student success and completion of English like that of the San Diego Mesa College English Department.
Our desire to pilot English 3 in 2018/19 was not met, and we have to train and prepare for English 3 using the fast track English 119/2 in one semester model for one more year. This model has proven unwieldy and unappealing for students and instructors due to a variety of factors. Nevertheless, the success rate for students assessing one-level below transfer in terms of completing their transfer-level course still increased by 13 percentage points. Of the 139 students enrolled in a fast track English 119 at census, 73% passed English 119. 53% passed English 2. For comparison, from Fall 2013-Fall 2015, English 119 success rates ranged from 59-65%, eight percentage points lower than the fast track 119 pass rate of 73%. Just 40% of students who started in 119 in fall 2016 completed English 2 within a year, 13 percentage points lower than the 53% English 2 completion rate for students in the fast track 119s. And in Fall 2017, one in eight sections of English 2 had course success rates that were lower than the 53% English 2 completion rate achieved by students in the fast track 119/2 courses.
So, even in the unwieldy fast track model, English 119 pass rates rose by eight percentage points, completion of English 2 was 13 percentage points higher in half the time, and English 2 completion rates were comparable to rates for many regular sections of English 2.
However, we hope to do even better once instructors become more adept with this population and the fast track model is replaced with English 3. Continuing support for professional development will be crucial. Unfortunately, due to the previously mentioned hold-ups in the curriculum approval process, we have not been able to take full advantage of the Transformation Grant funds we received to train teachers for our corequisite model, and we will be doing our biggest professional development push in spring 2019, the last semester of the grant.
We also continue to provide rigorous transfer-focused instruction in writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking and communicating through our English 2, which is required for an AA or for transfer. Our English 11 meets the Critical Thinking (CSU A3) GE Requirement for transfer. Per semester, we offer:
between 43 (Spring) and 61 (Fall up from 39 and 61 respectively last year) sections of English 2 even with declining enrollment college wide;
15 (Fall) and 18 (Spring) sections of English 11, Critical Thinking;
5 (Fall) and 3 (Spring) sections of 119 that will increase to 8 and 4 (or more) based on need in 2018/19;
and 12 literature and creative writing sections per semester.
Depending on how AB 705 is enforced, we could be looking at a dramatic increase in both English 3 and English 2 offerings in 2019/20. We should prepare for that possibility, and focus on professional development for current and potential new instructors teaching those courses.
Fall 2017, we piloted an athletes-only section of English 2, which every enrolled student passed, and we piloted an athletes-only English 119/2 in 2017/18 to improve the success rates for athletes and students of color coming in one level below transfer. However, we did not get enough athletes to enroll and had to open the class to the general population. We think athletes did not enroll because of the inconvenience of the fast track model for scheduling, most likely. Many of these students are being forced to complete their English 2 requirement in 2 or more semesters as a result, but coaches did not seem interested in pursuing this conversation about how this might impact their athletes academically. They see the 118 as the better model for athletes. It is not clear on what data or other factors might be informing their decision, since only about 40% of English 118 students complete English 2 within a year.
As a supplement to the critical reading, thinking, and writing skills and practices students acquire in English 119, 2, and 11, we offer a wide range of literature classes, including courses in creative writing.
We developed a two-year cycle for offering literature courses to reduce the number of elective class cancellations. In Fall 2011 and then again Fall 2017, we revised this cycle which is now based almost exclusively on articulated offerings and offerings that meet CSU, Chico's U.S. Diversity or Global Cultures requirements ("Native American Literature," "Cross-Cultural Film and Literature," and "Queer Film and Literature"), thus providing students and Counseling Services with a consistent schedule and helping to streamline the transfer process. We now offer "Queer Film and Literature" every year since currently this is the only Butte College course focused primarily on issues relevant to the LGBT*Q+ population.
We also have two "Introduction to Literature" courses offered at the Willows High Schools. Looking toward a guided pathway through our programs and since CSU, Chico is in the process of revising their program, we intend to revisit our literature cycle to work out a schedule that would be even more beneficial and clearer for our students and counselors, and we're maintaining consistent contact with the CSU, Chico English Department about where they are at in their process.
In Fall 2012, we began offering an AA-T degree in English and were one of the first departments on campus to offer an AA-T. We also offer an AA-T in Journalism, and our courses are part of the Language Arts degree as well.
Currently we have 169 students working toward the AA-T in English and 8 students working toward toward our AA-T in Journalism.
Besides course offerings, the English Department supports and promotes the literary arts by making provocative, diverse, and renowned writers available to students and the community at least twice per year. Our creative writing conference, WordSpring, is the second largest campus event that brings community members together with Butte College students, faculty and staff, supporting the college's strategic initiative to reach out to the community. In 2017, over 20 high school students from five area high schools attended the event.
The Journalism program consists of a newswriting course that has a 35-student cap, along with a series of newspaper production courses responsible for producing the campus newspaper, The Roadrunner. We have seen enrollment steadily decline in our journalism courses, and we are working with the instructor to recruit more students and revive that program. The student newspaper continues to be published and circulated three times per semester, however, empowering student voices on our campus.
In all, we are an energetic and hard-working department dedicated to improving our program for students' sake. It is unofrtunate that we have had to spend the past few years dealing with overt animosity of other faculty leaders who seem to have bent administration's ear, as shown by a board policy proposal that would raise pedagogical caps in English 2, among other effects it would have campus-wide. This policy was developed without our input or consent as well as the input and consent of other departments it will most egregiously affect.
A more collaborative and inclusive approach to campus leadership would have asked us to contribute our insight before any proposal was distributed. Had we been asked, we may have been able to dispel many of the reasons for resentment underlying the opposition to our corequisite course being approved as a lecture course. We are an equity-focused department, and if evidence showed that student success would be served by raising our class sizes so that other departments could have smaller class sizes, we would support the proposal. Likewise, once the compensation question for activity is worked-out, we would be willing to use activity in English 3 to cut down on the unit value of the course and make it fit better within all campus pathways while reducing the financial burden for students, which our equity work shows to be one of the greatest obstacles to student success for the most historically disadvantaged student populations. We would also invite an open conversation about the composition load factor, which is often used as evidence against smaller class sizes in English and referred to as another source of resentment by a few very vocal faculty in influential positions on campus. We have plenty of evidence to support that additional load for composition teachers with 25 to 30 student ped caps is valid and just.
We recently conducted a survey of our instructors and found that on average, we spend 28 minutes for every 1,000 words we grade. If we use that rate to compare the grading load for History 8, which has 2,500 words and 45 students, with the grading load for English 2 and English 3, which have 30 students and 6,000 words, the composition factor is more than justified, with 52.5 hours of grading in History 8 and 84 hours of grading for English 2 and English 3. That's more than 30 hours of additional grading per term for English 2 and English 3, versus the 17 we are paid for via the composition factor. There is extensive additional evidence to support the particular demands on composition instruction if we really want to improve success rates, which currently show students struggling to succeed and teachers struggling to get them what they need. In particular, getting students the quality of developmental feedback as part of the writing and revision cycle that has a significant impact on their writing is a very different kind of grading than evaluating a final performance of course expectations or mastery of course material in most assignments and exams. This is also why the WP continues to recommend a ped. cap of 17 for the transfer-level first-year composition course. If we want students to achieve, we have to recognize what they need and support faculty in meeting those needs, whatever it takes. Pedagogical caps and additional support for instructors should be decided according to student success-related data alone.
Looking over our Spring 17 brief reflections at the beginning of fall semester, we decided as a department to focus contemporary methods for teaching literacy practices, especially digital modes and methods of literacy instruction. We then held two deep-dive sessions, one in October facilitated by Heather Springer focused on using technology, in this case cell phones, in class to follow up on and check the legitimacy of sources and the validity of the author's use of these sources to support their argument. In December, Allie Matteucci facilitated another workshop where we practiced mapping out then comparing and contrasting as a group the rhetorical strategies and target audiences of different popular apps.
This spring, 2018, we reviewed our SLO brief reflections by dividing into groups focused on different courses and their SLOs and then reporting back on our findings. We discovered the following:
1. The chair needs to send out the guidelines each semester to remind people what we can do to make these more useful. It was clear that the reflections that were more of an instructor's self-reflection on their practices were much more useful, especially when they used the reflection to craft future strategies. The performance reports of student or instructor behaviors were not really useful at all. Some did not do that much, though we acknowledged that this might be more of a dwindling capacity issue by the end of the semester, than anything else.
2. To address the dwindling capacity issue, Amy suggested we spend about an hour during our May (and December) department meetings reflecting on some of the key goals for our classes and sharing/comparing how we're interpreting them, what we're seeing/counting as successful achievement of these goals, and so on. I will attempt to facilitate this discussion this May. We want to begin that discussion with the question, "What do we all mean by 'academic writing'?" And then proceed from there to examine how we're interpreting the SLOs in our composition courses especially.
3. Reading the reflections also showed us that we might want some professional development/discussion on the subject of curriculum development, especially for English 4, which we're teaching in many different ways. I will plan on making this a topic for one of our Fall 18 meetings.
4. We also saw a lot of need for strategies to better teach how to evaluate sources and identify scholarly/academic sources. We talked about some of the great Bibliographic Instruction sessions our librarians are doing now. I'm going to ask Tia Germar to present at a fall Institute Week meeting, to demonstrate some of the amazing work they can do with our students on research strategies. I was really impressed by these.
5. We saw a few reflections that relied heavily on deficit language, focusing on what the students couldn't do and making many assumptions about why that is, but not really attending to the teaching strategies used to scaffold new skills onto the skills and strengths our students already have. It looks like we could still do more professional development on strengths-based pedagogy and avoiding deficit thinking in our work with students.
6. There was a lot of talk around revision and how we teach revision and how we could give students more of a real stake in globally revising their essays. I’m asking for volunteers to present on best practices for encouraging global revision next Fall and Spring.
7. The reflections also gave rise to questions about how much control we're giving students over the development over their own reading/thinking/writing processes and whether we could do better in this area. Leslie suggested bringing Kathy Davidson to speak on the issue of active learning as student-led learning, but she may be beyond our budget. I will speak to admin, though, about the possibility of bringing her for Institute Day.
8. Our discussion of the reflections also led to the suggestion that we could do more professional development/have more dialogue around the topics of writing about writing and contract grading. Leslie said she'd be willing to share her practices of contract grading, possibly at one of our next meetings.
Finally, in response to our success and completion rates that are still disproportionately low for men of color, we are, as a department reading Teaching Men of Color in the Community College, and holding two hour long discussions on the book during our March and April department meetings.
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The most significant way the English department contributes to helping the college meet its college achievement standards and goals is by doing all we can to increase student success in their transfer-level English requirement (so English 2 and eventually English 3). Our dedication to this goal has never wavered, but we need support from our administration in the form of a decreased gap between full-time and associate faculty labor that could help us increase consistency within our transfer-level offerings and ensure students taking those courses have the support they need when they need it. Even with the two new approved hires, we will have 11 full-time and 38 associate faculty teaching our courses. Typically, only about 10 to 15 of these associate faculty members can consistently make our meetings, and not being able to offer them either FLEX or mandatory meeting as incentive to attend, especially when they still have FLEX to fulfill, makes it harder to incentivize meeting attendance for faculty working at multiple schools. We are also not allowed to offer stipends or other incentives for associate faculty who attend all department meetings in a semester, which would be another way to get more associate faculty there. I'm doing all I can to create meaningful dialogue and professional development opportunities at meetings to try to get more associate faculty to attend, but in the end, nothing is as effective as financial compensation. We all know this and understand it. So as usual, if we really care about something, we have to put some money behind it.
The same goes for getting computer access in all of our transfer-level composition courses. As more and more K-12 students practice literacy development using digital modalities, our classes begin to feel less and less relevant and up to speed for them as they enter college. Most literacy practices in our modern world are increasingly depending on digital technology, and if we really want to help students practice the kinds of writing they will be doing in their various professions, the kinds of critical thinking, collaborative projects, rhetorical strategies and devices they will be employing, we need to have computers in our English 2s and 3s. Ensuring digital access in the classroom also addresses equity gaps in access for some of our most institutionally and historically marginalized student populations as well.
Our department also contributes to the College Achievement Standards and goals by having a clearly mapped-out AA-T pathway in English. We currently have 169 students declaring their intent to complete an English AA-T, and through our various outreach efforts, bringing speakers to campus, organizing WordSpring each spring semester, and engaging in inspiring classroom teaching, we hope to continue increasing the numbers of declared English AA-Ts at Butte College, but most of all, support them as they persevere, complete their degrees, and transfer successfully. We're currently in communication with the CSU, Chico English department about offering more of their lower division requirements for their different majors here at Butte and decreasing the number of courses English majors transferring to Chico have to complete once they're there. We hope to engage in a similar process with CSU, Sacramento next.
We support and teach courses in the Honors Program at Butte College, and several of us have mentored students throughout their process at Butte in Honors, then onto transfer, and even onto Ph.D. programs. We have 4 former honors students, two in English and two in Anthropology currently working on their Ph.D.s at Berkeley, Texas A&M, and Columbia.
Two of our faculty members co-facilitate the Cultural Awareness Community of Practice on our campus, bringing faculty and staff together to increase cultural awareness and strategies for creating more inclusive spaces for students of color, students with disabilities, and gender and sexual minority students.
We’re devoted to increasing faculty diversity as part of our hiring process. Our department chair attended the CUE Institute for Diversity in Hiring and shared the material she received there with all members of the English Department hiring committee. She met with members of the Academic Senate to make the hiring procedures on our campus more equity minded. She also attended two job fairs, one in Oakland and one in Los Angeles, in the hope to reach out to more diverse potential candidates and help them see how Butte College might be a great fit for them.
Finally, our instructors are active in almost every committee on campus and several of us advise active student clubs. We have representatives on the Student Equity Committee, the Diversity Committee, the EEO Advisory Committee, Student Success Committee, the Global Education and Outreach Committee, Curriculum Committee, the Academic Senate, the Book in Common Committee, and many others.
The department supports strategic directions A through E in the ways already covered above. Additionally, we support direction F by carefully monitoring student enrollment behaviors and adding and removing courses according to student preference. This would be a lot easier without the effects of the "Seven Days to Pay" policy and the extremely high numbers of students waiting to register till the week before classes begin, but that's on the college to address.
We've tried adding courses at alternative times, late start courses, and Friday courses, but these haven't fared well unless enrollment is so impacted that people are desperate to find courses, as happened with our Friday Chico Center course last fall, which didn't make this spring. We are also constrained in what we can offer by services available to students at certain times in certain locations, bus routes (why our Chico Center enrollments are suffering-- I believe--since it's harder for Chico residents without transportation to get to Chico Center than it is for them to get to main campus).
In terms of Strategy G, we ask for lap top carts for our English 2 courses every year, but have yet to receive them with the exception of the two we have for the co-req pilot paid for by the Transformation Grant, and those two are not going to be enough to support the increased number of courses in the fall as it is. We have no consistent technology access for students taking English 2. Teachers have to scramble all over campus to find open labs, and many are denied when they try to request them, especially if it's later in the semester.
Recommendation #1: Hire more full-time instructors
With the addition of two new full-time instructors that we’re getting, in fall 2017, we will have 11 full-time and 38 associate faculty; this is a disproportionately high number of associate faculty, which creates substantial challenges for staffing, training, and maintaining consistency among sections and represents an unprecedented imbalance compared to other disciplines. It is the preeminent issue for the English and Journalism department, though with two new hires for fall, we are certainly making more progress toward this goal. We will again have 3 more faculty than we did at the time of our last program review, and three were recommended.
Recommendation #2: Offer more professional development for consistency.
The success rates among our many sections of English 2 vary greatly, and we are still working to get all instructors in our department consistent access to professional development and fostering discussions about how we’re interpreting our SLOs for English 2 and measuring student success in those courses. Though, since our last program review, many of our teachers have participated in the following:
Recommendation #3: Develop additional support strategies, particularly for students of color where data indicate lower achievement
Recommendation #4: Explore strategies to ensure optimal placement of students in composition
Recommendation #5 and Response: All composition instructors should emphasize the development of critical reading skills in their courses
Recommendation #6: Share student work.
Recommendation #7: More technology
Recommendation #8: Resources such as a full-time hire or a stipend for the newspaper advisor would aid the program in meeting longer-term expectations. Of paramount need is for the Roadrunner to be published on a regular schedule.
Recommendation #9: Completing all needed assessment cycles as planned over the course of the next six years
Recommendation #10: The department should review the variety of courses within its curriculum and consider streamlining or combining courses where appropriate.
Recommendation #11: The department should pursue pedagogical cap adjustments where research demonstrates a need for such change.
Recommendation #12: Professional development opportunities are fundamental to many initiatives . . . . The department should pursue and the college should consider increased institutional support for the professional development of associate and full-time faculty
Recommendation #13: The English and journalism department secretary should be restored to a full 12-month contract
Strategy 1 - Office hours for associate faculty
Associate faculty need to receive paid office hours for meeting with students in composition courses.
Associate faculty teach the overwhelming majority of our courses. Research shows that access to faculty increases student success, and that the number of courses taken with part-time instructors is negatively correlated with completion of associate degrees and other outcomes, due most likely to the lack of student access to part-time faculty outside of class hours. Access to faculty is particularly crucial for students in writing courses. At Butte, the success rates for sections of English 2 taught by associate faculty is consistently an average of 10 percentage points lower than the success rates for students in sections taught by full-timers. Paid office hours for meeting with students will put a dent in that number. In addition, student/faculty interaction was one of our lowest items on the CCSSE. Paid office hours will provide more opportunity for students to meet with their instructors to discuss grades and assignments, thus increasing our score on the CCSSE. Further, we need associate faculty to have paid office hours in order to maintain the appropriate program and service mix between the main campus and outlying centers. Full-time instructors teach primarily at the main campus, so students who take courses there have access to office hours. Students taking courses from associate faculty members at the outlying centers should have the same access to office hours.
Strategy 2 - Laptop carts for use in English 2
We would like to order four laptop carts for use in English 2. It is bizarre that students have more access to computer equipment in their basic skills and high school writing courses than they do in English 2 at Butte College. Students at the English 2 level suffer from the same issues of access and need for technological literacy skills as do students in basic skills and high school English--and they are required to do more with technology at the English 2 level, which we should be modeling and then asking them to practice, with guidance in class before we expect them to do it on their own as homework. Most of all, reading and writing with books and paper in the classroom or doing group work this way is feeling less and less relevant to students who recognize that in the actual world most reading and written exchange is taking place digitally, and most collaboration and collaborative problem posing and problem solving is taking place digitally and virtually as well. Finally, giving all of our students access to technology as part of teaching reading and writing is an equity issue, since achievement gaps for historically disadvantaged students in education correspond with gaps in access to technology, disproportionately impacting economically disadvantaged students of color, especially.
Increasing students' digital literacy enhances a culture of inclusiveness and works against the digital divide, since many students lack access to this technology in their homes. This project also models sustainability as it would help to reduce the use of paper in the classroom. Student learning and success are also helped by being able to use technology in the classroom, to support their research, reading, and writing.
Strategy 3 - Hire new full-time instructors
Though we have been approved to hire two new full-time tenure track faculty, that just gets us back to where we were since we lost two full-time faculty last spring. In order to keep up with the increasing demand for transfer-level composition and anticipating how AB 705 might even further increase that demand, we would like to have an additional English hire. We are also pursuing the possiblity of a full-time hire in Journalism, which might be the best way to build that program and ensure its future success.
Full-time hires support student and staff success, enhance a culture of completion and academic achievement, are based on data-informed research on student learning and completion, are resources that don't stop giving to the institution, model sustainability, and send the message that we are a culture of inclusiveness.
Strategy 4 - Replace slow and outdated computers
Many of our faculty members are trying to get by with slow and outdated computers. Two of our instructors are past year 8 with their machines and need replacements as soon as possible.
Our faculty will be more productive if their technology is up to date.
Strategy 5 - Fund WordSpring conference
We would like to institutionalize the WordSpring creative writing conference, offered for the sixth consecutive year in 2017. The conference generates revenue sufficient to pay for food and materials costs through registration fees and fundraising, and operates as a non-profit event. For the last four years, the English Department has contributed to the conference by paying for all printing costs. Committee members meet at least 9 times in the fall and 17 times in the spring, with a minimum meeting time of 1.5 hours. Many additional hours are devoted to tasks such as fundraising; working with Facilities, CAS, Associated Students, Food Services, the Print Shop, and speakers; maintenance of the WordSpring website; registration; materials; set-up; clean-up; and promotion. The Coordinator is unpaid. Aside from support for printing, the college does not supply any budget for the conference. We would like to see a standing budget of $4000 supplied for the conference to be allocated as overseen by the coordinator, including stipends for the six part-time faculty who serve on the committee.
In 2016 equity funds were used to bring in an equity speaker, pay for a reception, fund scholarships for high-risk students, provide outreach visits to four high schools, and fund registration fees for 20 high school students. This funding stream will not continue in 2017/18, so we are requesting an additional $5000 to cover those costs.
For five years Associated Students has funded WordSpring up to $800, but next year that funding stream is expected to dry up.
Budget requests:
$500 coordinator
$500 each for five additional committee members
$1000 discretionary funds to include speaker fees and student scholarships
$200 requested additional funding for the department
$5000 for speaker fees and travel/accommodations
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As an event attended by over 125 registrants last year, 75 of them Butte students and faculty, the impact of WordSpring is comparable to many other events which receive a yearly budget. WordSpring offers on average 15 workshops or sessions in a wide variety of approaches to creative writing, including one led by students who are guided in their planning. WordSpring is a forum for diverse students to hear their voices and experiences reflected in the presenters’ experiences and to express themselves in a welcoming and creative environment.
Research shows that students who participate in campus events and feel connected to the larger campus community are more successful. In addition, WordSpring will perform outreach to area high schools by presenting creative writing workshops to students there, and signing up students for the conference on the spot. We do sufficient fundraising that we are able to waive the registration fees for many of these students. Once students and community members do come to WordSpring, they are exposed to the setting of the Center for Academic Success. This recruitment of high school students has directly led to increased enrollment at Butte, and as outreach is increased, enrollment should continue to increase as well.
WordSpring has brought in students and speakers from many other academic locations, including seven colleges and universities and five high schools last year. We provided 35 student scholarships, co-sponsored a reception/reading by novelist Pam Houston and a poetry slam for high school and college students, and worked with the Literary Arts Club and Associated Students. This year we are able to begin to expand our focus by providing scholarships for all foster youth and by continuing to bring in dashboard speakers to be more inclusive of marginalized groups.
Strategy 6 - Professional development focused on strengths-based pedagogy and culturally responsive pedagogy
Invite guest speakers and provide follow-up professional development opportunities focused on anti-racist (and anti-sexist, homohobic, ethnocentric) writing pedagogy and work against deficit models of instruction and evaluation. This work is integral to the professional development needed to prepare more of our instructors to teach English 3 and to support student success once AB 705 is implemented.
It is these longer-term more personal access to various identities and attitudes toward cultural awareness that can really effect the kind of adaptability to and evolution of cultural values we'd like to encourage in our instructors. We want to support instructors in their efforts to reach out to and and more deeply connect with students from all cultures and backgrounds and create a safe, welcoming, and productive community in the classroom that we know will lead to greater success and completion. We feel this work will be especially crucial preparation for success in our English 3 and English 2 courses once AB 705 has been implemented, and we want to start preparing now.
Strategy 7 - Augment English Majors Day
We didn't receive the budget augmentation we requested last year for English and Journalism Majors Day, so we're doing a scaled-down version, inviting one speaker thanks to Diversity Committee funding and providing very basic snacks that we're buying ourselves and inviting students to share their work (we can't even offer them gift cards for the book store or something nice like that). We also cannot afford the $1000 it will take to invite a Bay Area journalist who has had a very interesting career and a lot of insight in what journalism looks like today to come talk to our students, but we're hoping we might get her here next year. Also, our advertising will be minimal since we can't stipend a designer to design the poster. We'll be making something up ourselves and funding the basice printing. Still, we hope that our efforts will make some progress toward increasing our English and Journalism AA-Ts and better supporting and encouraging those who have already declared. We're creating and sending invites to all students on our AA-T lists.
We are still trying to build our English AA-T program and we continue to see a decline in enrollments in our Journalism courses, so we'd like to transform our English Majors Day, which we held in the fall to English and Journalism Majors Day, bring speakers who will inspire our diverse student population to pursue English or Journalism degrees. We want to show them the wide variety of careers you can go into with an English or journalism background, We also want to stipend faculty to visit local high schools and/or contact English programs and counselors at local high schools to promote the program. We also need more money for printing and refreshments.
Strategy 8 - Two computers for two new faculty hires
We will need two new computers for our new faculty hires this year.
Faculty cannot work optimally without updated computers.
Strategy 9 - High-level administrator devoted to equity and inclusion on our campus
We want to support the Diversity and Equity Committees' requests for a high-level administrative position devoted specifically to equity and inclusion on our campus. We don't feel our campus can effectively support efforts toward closing achievement gaps without this level of leadership, and we feel that our own department's contributions to this effort, especially to remove achievement gaps in basic skills, would be better supported as well.
This supports our initiatives to create a culture of inclusiveness and to support student success and completion, since most of the students on our campus who struggle to succeed and complete are already on our dashboard.
We would like assistance getting rooms on campus as we scale up our English 3 and English 2 offerings in response to AB 705.
We would also like assistance in storing, securing, and managaing laptop carts.
We would also like adminsitrative support to continue moving forward on AB 705 implementation. Specifically, we should not have to be stressed about whether we will have enough enrollment in our fast track 119/2 courses because there are so many 118s in the schedule siphoning off students placed one level below transfer in English.
In Fall 2017, 231 students who would have been eligible for the fast track model enrolled in English 118, where their chance of completing English 2 is lower, and we struggled to fill our fast track 119s in spring 2018. We would like strategic, completion- and equity-focused scheduling decisions to help us with this problem.
The English Department uses its Butte College budget to ensure that our large and disproprotionate number of associate faculty are able to participate in much-needed professional development and SLO work.
We also use English department funds for printing costs and have applied for Student Equity Funds to pay for scholarships for foster youth to attend WordSpring. We would like to receive funding to pay associate faculty for their work in organizing and running the conference. Since WordSpring could be used as a high school recruitment and English major completion strategy, we would like to request district funds for this.
We also request funding from Associated Students, Diversity Committee, and Equity Committee to support speakers and programs that advance the strategic initiatives of those committees, but those funds are not dependable or consistent sources for us.
We have also applied for Equity and Diversity funds to help defray the costs of bringing diverse writiers for literary readings.
We draw on Student Equity, Transformation Grant, and Innovation Award funds to support our work in streamlining and maximaizing student success in the writing sequence.
| Original Priority | Program, Unit, Area | Resource Type | Account Number | Object Code | One Time Augment | Ongoing Augment |
| Description | Supporting Rationale | Potential Alternative Funding Sources | Prioritization Criteria | |||
| 1 | English | Equipment | $100,000.00 | $0.00 | ||
| Four mobile carts and classroom set of lap tops | It's very difficult to imagine how we can effectively teach college composition and research without ongoing access to computers. The college has recognized and addressed this need at levels below transfer but not at the transfer level where it is just as crucial. And it has become increasingly important as more students are able to take their transfer-level composition course. Digital literacy is inextricably part of any literacy practice in 2018, and we can't teach reading, writing, critical thinking, and rhetorical strategy in a modern context without computer access. Lab space on campus and at Chico and Glenn Centers is very difficult to plan ahead for and request early. If you request it when you realize you most need it, it's usually too late to find a space. Many frustrated English 2 instructors are struggling (and far too often failing) to work around a lack of computer access in class, and it's a key obstacle to increased success rates and completion rates in English 2. Likewise increasing students' digital literacy and access enhances a culture of inclusiveness and works against the digital divide, since many students lack access to this technology in their homes. The curriculum alignment group has identified digital literacy as a barrier to the success of students from the Oroville Union High School District in particular. This project also models sustainability as it would help to reduce the use of paper in the classroom. Student learning and success are also helped by being able to use technology in the classroom, to support their research, reading, and writing. The budget also includes the costs of storing, securing, and maintaining the carts, which is an estimated $1000 each. |
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| 2 | Two full-time tenure track faculty hires | Personnel | $0.00 | $212,000.00 | ||
| Our department needs to hire at least two full-time faculty. | In order to help us increase consistency in our composition offerings, to help us prepare for the impact of AB 705, and to build and support our Journalism AA-T and newspaper production, we are requesting two additional full-time hires. |
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| 3 | 2 New Computer for New Hires | Equipment | $6,000.00 | $0.00 | ||
| We need two new computers for our new hires | In the 2016/17 academic year, we needed to replace three computers for faculty. We were only able to cover one and a half of one, and this caused a severe lack of funding for incentives to get more associate faculty involvement in the department, which is crucial to improving our program consistency and for continued professional development for our instructors. If we continue to be forced to pay for computer replacement out of our department budget, student success and retention rates will start to fall even further. With so many associate faculty, we need all the money we can get to fully support them and their students and clarify and unify our department expectations. |
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| 4 | Computer Life-cycle Replacement for Two Full-time Faculty | Personnel | $4,400.00 | $0.00 | ||
| We have two current full-time faculty who are past year 9 on their computers and in dire need of replacement. | We have two full-time instructors with slow, outdated computers that need to be replaced. |
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| 5 | English | Personnel | $10,342.00 | $0.00 | ||
| Office hours for associate faculty | Students need access to the faculty who teach their courses. Success rates in English 2 are 10 percentage points lower in sections taught by associate faculty than they are for sections taught by full-time instructors. We would like to request 10 paid office hours for each of our 37 associate faculty members, calculated at a rate of $25 per hour plus benefits of 11.809%. |
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| 6 | English | Operating Expenses | $0.00 | $10,000.00 | ||
| WordSpring Creative Writing Conference | This conference serves as a recruitment tool for students from local high schools. It is also a way to support our English and Language Arts majors and includes information on our AA-T degrees and careers for English majors. It is also a method for supporting marginalized students by bringing in diverse writers who speak to their experiences. |
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| 7 | Professional Development Focused on Strengths-based and Culturally Responsive Composition Pedagogy | Personnel | $5,000.00 | $0.00 | ||
| We'd like to invite speakers and/or workshop facilitators that address some of the ways instructors can better reach students from traditionally marginalized or minoritized identities and backgrounds in the composition classroom. | We'd like to have ongoing professional development about various forms of trauma that marginalized or historically minoritized students in the college classroom have faced, how that might show up in our composition classroom, and how to better reach these students, help them see their strengths, and build their confidence when it comes to reading, thinking, and writing. As we have more racially, cognitively, physically, and gender/sexually diverse student populations in our English 2s and English 3s, we really need to be on the same page about how we think of our students as learners, resisting some of the assumptions we might make based on internalized cultural norms or assumptions about the ideal "college student," and how we can become more in tune and aware of the students we have, their realities, and how best to scaffold our course goals for them to achieve success. |
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| 8 | English | Personnel | $5,000.00 | $0.00 | ||
| Guest Speakers for Professional Development Focused on Cultural Awareness in English and Journalism Pedagogy | The English department has consistently invited diverse authors, poets and experts in the field of composition instruction. Last year we invited Michelle Tea (a lesbian poet and filmmaker), Blas Falconer (Latino-American gay poet), Kazim Ali (Indian, Muslim, gay poet), Brian Turner (Iraq War veteran poet), Asao Inoe (writer and proponent of anti-racist composition pedagogy), Camille Dungy (African American poet who incorporates slave narratives). This semester, we're inviting Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. In the current social and political climate on and off our campus, it has never been more important for students, faculty and staff to make these personal connections with authors and scholars with these backgrounds. Study after study is showing that historical awareness and data does little to counter racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry and discrimination. What does make a difference both to victims of micro and macroaggressions as well as perpetrators is a deep, personal connection with someone navigating these target identities. These speakers lay their hearts bare for our students and colleagues, and the impact they've had on our campus climate is profound and resonating. This work both helps our department improve access, success and retention for minority or otherwise targeted student identities, supports the strategic initiatives of "supporting student, faculty and staff success" and "enhancing a culture of inclusiveness" and addresses a lack of shared vision for our composition and literary pedagogy we've observed in our SLO work. |
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| 9 | English and Journalism Majors Day | Personnel | $0.00 | $5,000.00 | ||
| We would like to increase attendance at English and Journalism Majors Day, beginning by stipending volunteers who organize the event, and then by ensuring an ample budget for food, speakers, and advertising. | English and Journalism Majors Day, if we have the resources and time to do it well, could become a crucial part of our efforts to attract and retain more students in our English and Journalism AA-T programs, certificates, and classes. With the additional support, we could reach out to nearby high school English teachers and invite them and their students. We also want to reach out our diverse student population and present them with role models of particularly successful Latinx, African American, Native American, Pacific Islander, former Foster Youth, Veterans, and LGBTQ+ English scholars and journalists. We would like offer $500 stipends to two organizers as well as honoraria to two or three guest speakers from diverse backgrounds with very different English/Journalism educations stories. The remaining budget would be for food and advertising. We have applied to IEPI as a possible alternative funding source for this project, not listed among the alternative funding sources below. |
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