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Community College of Rhode Island
City Campus makes college opportunity reality for students
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City Campus students, with Assistant Professor Wayne Solomon (near left) board the RIPTA trolley at the Liston Campus in Providence to visit Providence's Black Heritage Society Museum. |
"Super advisor." The term sounds like a character out of Marvel comics. But when City Campus Program Coordinator Melanie Sullivan refers to super advisors, she’s not talking about caped crusaders. She’s talking about real people who are real advocates for at-risk high school students.
Funded by a recent grant from the MetLife Foundation, super advisors are the latest innovation in the City Campus Early College/Dual Enrollment program at CCRI’s Liston Campus.
Launched in the spring of 2004 by CCRI and the RI Office of Higher Education, City Campus is an urban collaborative comprised of high schools, employers and CCRI. Each semester, over 100 urban high school students enroll in CCRI college-level courses, where they earn high school and college credit simultaneously. High school teachers, workplace professionals and college faculty team-teach the students in thematically-focused Student Success courses. Themes such as ‘Crime and Punishment’—a look at jobs in law enforcement and criminal justice—and ‘The Real ER’—a hands-on study of health care careers—help students adjust to college-level work while getting a better idea of possible career and degree pathways. This fall, high school partners included the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (aka “The MET”), the New Feinstein High School and E-Cubed Academy.
Motivating At-risk Students
“City Campus gives at-risk students an early opportunity to learn that they can be successful and motivates them to stay in high school and go on to college,” says Project Leader Kathleen Mallon. Who are at-risk students? City Campus students live in the inner city, where public high school graduation rates can run below 50 percent. Many have to work. Though still in their teenage years, some students are single parents. For others, English may not be their native language. And, thanks to Mallon and Sullivan, the majority of the City Campus students will be the first generation in their families to enroll in college. Their success in the program turns the dream of college into a viable option.
Building Confidence
“I believe that City Campus changes how students see themselves,” says Sullivan. “They come to realize that they are capable of doing college-level work. The benefits of this new self-image can also be seen in students’ work ethic,” Sullivan asserts. “They become more focused and more goal-oriented,” she says.
For teenagers without college role models, higher education can seem an unfamiliar and foreboding frontier. That is why City Campus goes a step further than traditional dual enrollment programs that try to plug high school students into existing college classes. City Campus has created a new classroom model more attuned to the needs of transitioning high school students, according to Mallon.
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Super advisor Lisa Abreu Morel (right) mentors and advises Geraldine Mejia (left). |
Here’s how this new model works: Students are team-taught by a CCRI faculty member, a high school teacher and a super advisor to make sure they get the personal attention they need to succeed. The three-credit CCRI student success courses in which they are enrolled have been retooled to incorporate more hands-on learning with a focus on specific careers. The curriculum includes on-site exploration of career opportunities, whether this means a field trip to the court house or an insider’s look at a local hospital.
Mike Hynes is a super advisor in faculty member Bill Pellicio’s Crime and Punishment Student Success section. In addition to his recurring presence in the classroom, Hynes oversees student advisory sessions to troubleshoot academic and career questions. This unusually large amount of student-advisor face time lets Hynes build meaningful relationships with each student. “I’m following (students) on a weekly basis, watching, guiding and tracking their progress,” says Hynes. “I’m getting as much one-on-one time as possible.” It also allows him to spot academic struggles before a student falls too far behind.
Easing the Transition to College
K.C. Perry, principal at the New Feinstein High School, lists the benefits participating students from his school have received through City Campus. “It gives them a college experience. It certainly makes the transition to college better. It enhances their applications to other colleges. And, for some kids, it’s been really great in terms of career experience.” He cites real world exposure, such as a recent City Campus visit to Rhode Island Hospital, as an example. “Kids that had not really considered health careers as a possibility may decide to go to college because of something they experienced through that class,” Perry says.
Sullivan sees first-hand how students become more engaged learners as a result of integrating external classroom experiences into their coursework. Discussing a recent trip to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut with Wayne Solomon’s Cultural Diversity Student Success Class, Sullivan reflected, “The students took notes, asked excellent questions and collected data on the culture and history of the Pequot Tribe. These exercises allowed them to integrate sociological concepts and terminology they had learned in class. This experience not only gave them the opportunity to learn about Native American culture, but about larger social justice issues as well.”
Career Insights
CCRI Associate Professor of Human Services Bill Pellicio serves as CCRI faculty member for the Crime and Punishment team, a success seminar focusing on careers in criminal justice. With E-Cubed Academy High School teacher Stephanie Morrison and super advisor Mike Hynes, Pellicio has spent the semester taking his 16 City Campus students to real-world environments, from the Department of Children, Youth and Families to the Rhode Island Training School. “The course is almost equally divided between outreach and class time,” says Pellicio.
Over the course of the semester, Pellicio has witnessed a noticeable change in the students. “They were very passive at the beginning and expecting a lot of things…. We would give them an assignment that would be posted on the Web, and then they would complain that they didn’t know what to do.” So the first few weeks of class, Pellicio and his team worked to strike a balance between being demanding and being nurturing. “We had to make sure they had enough support to go out and find the information on their own and to have the confidence that they could do this without the teacher telling them,” he says.
Now, Pellicio uses the word “impressive” to describe the quality of work his City Campus students are producing. “This is serious,” he says. “We’re at a different level now.”
For more information about this program, contact Kathy Mallon at 825-2194, or Melanie Sullivan at 455-6007.
Coming Soon: The City Campus Web site.
