Self-Evaluation

The first year of my tenure process gave me the opportunity to really look deep at what our program is, the courses, and opportunities for improvement. I am lucky to truly enjoy all of our coursework. I have found myself, at the beginning of each quarter, saying to my classes "I love this course!". I want them to enjoy the course content and outcomes too. Converting our courses to the Canvas format also gave me the opportunity to look for new, relevant, and valuable content for our students. Education is meant to be engaging, and a wide variety of resources helps both me and my students.

First Year Goals:

• • • Develop Business program courses for the Department of Corrections (DOC) environment, using Canvas.

    • Orient the new Business program faculty member, and help to strengthen the Business program team

    • Relaunch student advisory groups at all three educational facilities, to provide feedback on program offerings, curriculum, outreach, reentry, etc.

    • Prepare to facilitate equity and inclusion discussion, around the coursework primarily, and engagement that can further understanding in the classroom.

Develop Business program courses for the Corrections environment, using Canvas.

Our business program at Corrections had been set up to augment the use of books, as well as paper-based resources, with the vast opportunities represented by electronic resources. This was at the same time that COVID was beginning in earnest. For the first quarter of COVID, Spring 2020, we used paper packets to provide coursework for students, as they were unable to come to class. In Summer quarter 2020, laptops were distributed to our students for the business program, and they returned to the classroom, in a modified manner.

All of our coursework was converted during the first year to a Canvas-based system. This is an ongoing process with the opportunity to work on course development and refreshing for relevance and clarity, as well as continuing the process to provide additional value and depth to our courses. I currently teach the following courses for our two-year transfer degree program:

• Fundamentals of Accounting (ACCT101)

• Computer Fundamentals (BSTEC130)

• Principles of Management (MGMT214)

• Entrepreneurship (MGMT260)

• Introduction to Business (BUS&101)

• Retail Management (MGMT106)

• Project Management I (MGMT270)

• Business Strategies (MGMT275)

• Environmental Science (ENVS&101)

Almost throughout the disruptions of COVID, our students in Corrections have been in the classroom with the resource of laptops and Canvas courses to keep them moving forward with their education. In the Corrections environment, this is a very significant advantage.

Orient the new Business program faculty member, and help to strengthen the Business program team

It continues to be my pleasure to work with an amazing and truly dedicated group of professionals at Corrections, and on campus. My team members for the Business program at MCC are so dedicated and student-focused, and I count myself among their number gratefully. The Corrections, and DOC environment in particular, continues to be a challenging place to teach, but with very significant rewards. When new faculty are hired to teach at Corrections there is both a formal and an informal orientation to go through. The formal component is a training course administered by DOC, along with ongoing and annual training. The informal component consists of mentoring from seasoned staff. In my seven-plus years teaching in Corrections, I have experienced and learned much, and it is my pleasure to help new and intermittent faculty and staff to understand and work within the unique environment where we work. In particular, it is important to remember that we are partners with DOC in helping our students to transform their lives and prepare for successful release and reentry into society. Interacting with our DOC partners with respect, integrity, partnership, and often a lot of humor, is very important for us all to achieve what we are tasked to do.

Relaunch student advisory groups at all three educational facilities, to provide feedback on program offerings, curriculum, outreach, reentry, etc.

The COVID pandemic has put a pause on our efforts to form student groups at each of our teaching facilities because we cannot meet with students from different locations. We have conducted planning sessions and developed a plan for beginning the outreach process during Winter quarter when the pandemic prevented any further group meetings from taking place. With the loosening of restrictions that we hope to see upcoming, we will be able to pick up the plans and put them into action. Our students remain very engaged with education opportunities, and it is very important for them to see themselves as valued participants as they have a significant interest to be a part of the planning and feedback process.

Prepare to facilitate equity and inclusion discussion, around the coursework primarily, and engagement that can further understanding in the classroom.

Recent and ongoing events in our world today confirm that the need to have productive conversations and engagement around equity and inclusion in the classroom is more relevant and important than ever before. The Corrections team has been meeting for racism discussions and equity training similar to that held on campus, facilitated by the same dedicated leaders of this effort. Personally, I am finding awareness to be heightened as I engage in self-directed learning along with the team efforts. With that increasing awareness, I am proactively looking for resources and providing opportunities for recognizing what needs to be changed with respect to coursework, and how to facilitate discussions with students, and between students, when the opportunity arises. I have witnessed a few discussions begin spontaneously in the classroom between ethnic groups. Our student population is very diverse, from every standpoint; there are many opportunities for these discussions to begin. So far, this has not presented me with any security problems, but in a prison environment, this is always a concern. Facilitating discussions like these, or just hanging back, and waiting for an opportunity to engage or direct is very important. I look forward to continuing collaboration with my colleagues both in Corrections and on campus to develop these resources.

Second Year Goals:

As I look back on this second year of the tenure process, I am struck by how fortunate I am to have the job that I do. Finding my true calling, teaching, in my forties was a tremendous opportunity to contribute to the lives of others, and spread the word that education really does transform lives, all while being happy doing it. The last seven of my fifteen years teaching at Edmonds College, have been at the Corrections campus. I knew from the moment I met the students there that this would be my place to make the most difference. I am happy to meet the students where they are, and to illustrate through example and instruction that it is okay to be smart, as well as how to lean into it, become comfortable with it, and change the world with it. Most of our students in the prison environment come from very to very significantly marginalized and disadvantaged backgrounds. Recognizing and using intelligence has not necessarily been socially acceptable. I want them to know, implicitly, that it is okay to be smart, and that they do not have to hide it, but embrace it. For those who have committed to a different life, we need their voices in our communities today.

While engaged in self-reflection during the tenure process, it has been very refreshing to be directed to look at my own teaching style on its own, rather than just comparing my style with others' in passing. I admire my colleagues teaching methods, and can appreciate and learn from them. That does not mean that I need to emulate a different style, but that I can learn from someone else, and incorporate an aspect of their style into my own. Another, and somewhat humbling realization, has been that there will always be new perspectives, that I have not encountered, or had not taken the time to examine. A different perspective, and from students in particular, can be different enough that I am stopped short. I consider this ‘brain food’, and as such is something to be enjoyed and perhaps internalized. Growth feels good, and I look forward to all the perspectives that I have not encountered.

Second Year Goals:

• Continue to develop curriculum to serve this population, including the online environment, and the gathering of resources.

• Dependent on COVID conditions, launch the student advisory groups, with my colleagues, to provide a voice to our students for educational programming and outreach.

• Continue to participate in the Equity and Inclusion Committee (participation was made very difficult by being offsite and COVID conditions).

• Collaborate with my colleagues to develop techniques for addressing racism, in the classroom, and also in our curriculum.

• Provide context to my campus colleagues for the work we are doing at Corrections, and how it is complementary to the work done on campus. This will be done primarily through participating in Teaching and Learning Day, and presenting a workshop with my colleague Nancy Nelson, “An Overview of Corrections Education”.

COVID: the overwhelming driver of 2020, 2021, and beyond

This year has been dominated with COVID issues, and the many requirements in place to contain its spread. Since July 2020, we have been seeing Corrections students in cohorts by unit to avoid transmission. This means that instead of twenty-four hours of in-class instruction per week, our students have had six hours of instruction per week for twenty credits of Business program courses. It has been important to provide a full range of resources so that they would have what they needed to complete coursework relevant to the program. It is my habit to read, and collect information that is relevant to our coursework on a daily basis. I follow industry groups, peer-reviewed literature, think-tank reporting, and traditional business news sources, for topics that are related to our coursework, and also to the lives of our students. This serves two purposes; I get to provide current information for our students to orient them to our world today as many of them have not been at liberty in many years, to show them the constant changing world of business, and the opportunity to apply critical thinking to pertinent and current issues. A third purpose is one of intense interest to me, and that is that I have always found the world of business to be very interesting and ever-dynamic, providing me with endless opportunities for analytical thought.

During the recent shutdown of educational programming due to a facility-wide COVID outbreak, we worked to provide the full quarter’s worth of curriculum so that those who were not ill could continue studying, and therefore have something to do. This objective is very important in a prison environment.

Another opportunity presented itself due to the recent COVID outbreak lockdown, and that was that our entire team worked for three weeks in the Inmate Kitchen to help prepare meals for 1,200 incarcerated individuals at the Monroe Prison. We worked side-by-side with Corrections staff, and the inmate workers, doing whatever needed done, and preparing meals for distribution. This opportunity afforded us the chance to spend several hours a day with inmate workers, some of them our students, see what they do, and witness the interactions between DOC staff and incarcerated individuals up close. It also was an excellent opportunity for the Education staff to engage in team building, and camaraderie. It was an excellent experience, and it felt really good to contribute in a different way to crucial operations.

We have still been unable to meet with students to form advisory groups at our different facilities. This will remain a priority once we are able to meet in person, as a group, again.

Equity and Inclusion: Training and Participation

Due to the cohort-model of instruction, I was unable to participate in the Equity and Inclusion committee on campus this year. To have done so, would have meant cancelling class, and that at least one group of students would have missed a whole week of instruction.

I was privileged to attend a Racelighting Seminar earlier in the year, “Racelighting In The Normal Realities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color”, led by Dr. J. Luke Wood, and Dr. Frank Harris III. This webinar was in response to the Scholarly Brief published by Dr. Wood, and Dr. Harris, among others of the same title. It was very valuable for me, as a majority of my students are people of color. I find myself very disappointed in my higher-education environment when hearing of how my colleagues have been treated in higher education alone. It brought to my attention that this is representative of regular occurrences, that must be endured by highly qualified and talented professionals just due to their skin color, regardless of their contributions.

Other opportunities to keep learning about how to make sure my classroom provides an inclusive learning environment were: Ed Trust’s Final Racial Equity Professional Institute, 2/23/22; Dr. Yvonne Terrell Powell, Becoming an Anti-Racist Institution, 2/24/22.

Teaching and Learning Day, 2021

My colleague, Nancy Nelson and I, participated in Teaching and Learning Day, in October, and provided an Overview of Corrections Education to our campus colleagues. We talked about what kinds of educational programs are available at Corrections, walked participants through a day in a Corrections environment, and discussed the issues unique to working in this environment. I enjoyed presenting this overview with Nancy, and answering questions from our campus colleagues.

Though the second year was a very challenging year, there were opportunities for personal and professional enrichment. I look forward to a continuation of that trend!

Conclusion

Looking back at the tenure process and my experiences over the last few years, the COVID pandemic has been the overriding theme. It has presented so many challenges for education in this environment, as I am sure my campus colleagues will agree. It did allow me and my fellow Corrections colleagues, both faculty and staff, to think creatively to deliver our services to students who are incarcerated. Laptops were first distributed to our vocational students in Summer quarter 2020. We also used the internal messaging system at DOC to communicate and provide a direct link with education for our students. Even if quarantine situations prevented class meetings, we were able to stay connected and provide educational support and engagement. COVID presented many unique challenges for the Corrections environment, and it has been both awe-inspiring and heartbreaking to watch and participate in these challenges with our DOC partners. Personally, I have suffered tremendous personal loss over the last three years, and my work has been my salvation, along with the incredible support I have received from both my Corrections and Campus colleagues. For this, I am truly grateful.