Summer break
I'll be off-line until August 8. Enjoy the summer!
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I'll be off-line until August 8. Enjoy the summer!
It's easy to forget some of the most effective instruments of public engagement we have on our university campuses: our museums. Whether they're art, natural history, anthropology, or another kind of museum, they serve many of the functions we most desire in our public engagement activities.
Recently I tuned in to a PBS program on the moose and wolves of Isle Royale. It described the work of Rolf Peterson, a Professor in Michigan Tech's School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, and his wife. The Petersons have been leading the study of these interacting populations for 34 years.
The single-minded dedication of the Petersons to their project may be unusual even among environmental scientists, but other aspects of their endeavor are typical of the publicly-engaged nature of much environmental research:
AVID, which stands for “Advancement Via Individual Determination,” is an in-school academic enrichment program supported by a national non-profit organization and implemented in local junior and senior high schools.
Earlier this week, several of us at the University of Minnesota interested in service-learning and tutoring opportunities for our students met with the St. Paul School District AVID coordinator and a local foundation executive who was instrumental in bringing AVID to Minnesota and continues to serve in an advisory capacity with the school district.
The meeting was arranged by Julie Plaut, Associate Director of Minnesota Campus Compact (MCC), who wrote us the following about the AVID program, which relates to MCC’s goal of increasing educational success among low-income students, students of color, and potential first-generation college students.
The program delivers impressive results, targeting students in the academic middle, and providing the support structure to enable over 90% of them to go on to college. AVID has been around for 25 years but is new to Minnesota. The St. Paul School District has just completed a successful first program year and is rapidly expanding for next year.The primary way that colleges and universities get involved with the AVID program is by helping to recruit tutors, who are paid to work with small groups of junior and senior high school students in their AVID classes during the school day. Additional benefits of a partnership might include:
- Enhancing your efforts to reach back into the public education system by working with a program with proven results.
- Directly helping high school students overcome academic barriers to a successful college experience.
- Providing meaningful service-learning and/or community-based work-study opportunities for your college students.
- Aiding campus recruitment efforts by connecting your students to a diverse pool of talented high school students.
Link to AVID website
On July 3 I wrote about the Child Development Policing Program, an innovative collaboration between the Minneapolis Police Department and community and university partners "to increase access to services for children who are traumatized and ultimately to ameliorate the impact of violence on children."
Abilgail Gewirtz, the Director of the program, informed me that the Child Development Policing Program is part of a bigger program, the Minnesota Child Response Center (MnCRC), which in turn is part of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)'s National Child Traumatic Stress Network, as a Community Treatment and Services Center. There are seventeen current collaborators with MnCRC, including community groups, state, county, and city agencies, and the University of Minnesota Insitute of Child Development. The MnCRC enumerates five goals:
The Minnesota Child Response Center will work closely with the National Network and its treatment services and community treatment sites to disseminate and expand the use of best practices, to offer knowledge regarding uptake of best practice treatments in the target community, and to significantly contribute to network efforts to implement screening in order to enhance the capacity of frontline providers to access mental health services for traumatized children.With a broad base of community expertise via mental health providers, culturally specific and mainstream social service providers, supportive housing agencies, schools, police, child service systems, and University of Minnesota researchers, Minnesota Child Response Center partner agencies reach more than ten thousand traumatized children annually, predominantly homeless and formerly homeless inner city African-American, American Indian, Latino, and war-surviving refugee/immigrant children and families.
The MnCRC also has a research component, whose goal is "to improve the knowledge and understanding of the effects of exposure to violence and trauma on children over time, and inform the design of effective intervention and prevention programs for children at high risk."
This partnership of university, community, and governmental resources to address a crucial social problem by research and practical action is a striking model of public engagement.
Much effort is being exerted by government agencies and colleges and universities to prepare kids in K-12 for careers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This effort is motivated by projected workforce needs in the states and nationally, by federal programs, by expectations that training in the STEM disciplines provides the most reliable path to an economically viable life, and by concerns that those who don't achieve a STEM-related career are likely to be left behind.
However, interest in STEM careers seems not to be shared by many Minnesota students. A report released yesterday by the Minnesota State Department of Education presented results from the ACT Educational Planning and Assessment System (EPAS), showing that only about 11% of eighth-graders and 21% of tenth-graders express interest in a STEM career.
For comparison, a story about the EPAS results in this morning's StarTribune says "About half of the eighth-graders and a third of the 10th-graders listed interests that researchers say point them in the direction of 'social service"'jobs, which could include jobs in the health care, education, community service and hospitality fields, among others. Nineteen percent of 10th-graders have interests pointing them toward 'artistic' jobs, and 26 percent of eighth-graders are aimed at 'enterprising' jobs, which could include such work as marketing and sales."
There will be much speculation about the reasons for these results. Certainly one factor is a lack of role models in STEM professions among many groups in our population. Another is likely to be that preparation for STEM - all those tough math and science courses - is hard.
In addition, however, there may be some important values being expressed here. Careers in social service and the arts, and even in private enterprise, can be every bit as valuable to society as those in STEM. Of course, the intellectual preparation and discipline for any of these careers - and for being an informed citizen - should involve a healthy dose of science and math. But we will not reach many of the students we should be reaching if we maintain too exclusive an emphasis on STEM.
Links:
Department of Education press release
StarTribune story
Universities that want to engage with their communities often try to figure out how to make the campus a more welcoming and accessible place. However, occasionally the idea of the university as a public space can get out of hand, as this story indicates.
The Las Cruces (NM) City Council approved a resolution to have "a civic and convention center built [on] the New Mexico State University campus." Amendments were adopted after the councilors heard testimony from faculty and students, but it appears that the council - at least at first - did not consider that university people are also constituents.
I don't know any more about this issue than is reported in the brief story. But my sense is that it exemplifies three issues that are all too common. (1) University and community are out of touch. (2) Universities take land out of circulation but don't use it productively. (3) The community values the campus more as an "economic engine" than as a place of learning and discovery, and all economic engines are potentially fungible.
A story last week on a new treatment for macular generation - a leading cause of blindness in people over 55 - brings to the fore the promise and complexity of university research with public health and commercial potentials.
Interdisciplinarity:The invention comes from the collaboration of two university faculty: Art Erdman (Mechanical Engineering) and Timothy Olsen (Opthamology). As so often the case, a development with real public impact comes from interdisciplinary work.
Secrecy: Although one is certainly curious about the nature of the invention, no information has yet been divulged, because to do so might damage the patent application and enable pirating of the technology. This is presumably temporary, but goes against the grain of the openness expected of university research.
University involvement: The University of Minnesota is creating a start-up compancy to market the invention, and will initially be the controlling stockholder. This contrasts with the usual process of licensing an invention to an existing company. Such an arrangement may get the invention to the stage of practical utility quicker, assuming it passes development hurdles and gets regulatory approval. But it puts the University in an unfamiliar commercial role.
Partnership with the private sector: According to the story in the July 12 StarTribune,
Mulcahy [the University's Vice President for Research] said the university used the expertise of the university's Office of Business Development, and signed on a proven entrepreneur to serve as the new company's CEO. The university will lend the fledgling company $50,000 to get started. The company then will issue 2.5 million of its 3 million initial shares to the university, and look for investors. The stock has no value now, but it would acquire value as the company takes off. The windfall to the university would come from the rising value of the stock, plus licensing income that comes from the sale of the product.If it works, all this will take time. Mulcahy estimates it will take the company five years to begin mining the commercial applications for the Olsen-Erdman invention. In the meantime, it will require as much as $25 million more in funding from investors to get the product to the marketplace.
There are those who criticize universities for becoming too commercial, and others who contend that we don't do enough to get our scholarship into public use. This case exemplifies all the challenging complexity of public engagement through technology transfer. It will be fascinating to see the story unfold. And as an over-55er, I'm hoping it works.
Links:
University of Minnesota News Service story
StarTribune story
In my July 12, 2006 blog on "The Importance of Numeracy", I wrote that two fundamental issues in getting kids to take more math are convincing the parents that more math is important, and motivating students that math can make a difference in their lives. What I didn't fully comprehend, and what our discussion in the Colloquium didn't address, is how much deeper the problems can be.
Consider the Commentary in Wednesday's StarTribune by Syl Jones, an African-American playwright, journalist, and corporate communications consultant from Minnetonka. Jones writes:
Good news: Despite a welter of reports trashing the scholastic achievements of African-American kids in the Minneapolis public schools, black children are doing some things right. They get an A in Disruptive Classroom Behavior, a B in Special Education Reassignment, and an A+ in Being Kicked Out of Class. They also shine in Exposing Deficiencies of Institutionalized Educational Approaches.That's a shocking way to talk about the plight of African-American students in Minneapolis, but it's not nearly as shocking as the facts. Only 44 percent graduate from high school statewide, one of the lowest figures in the nation. The numbers for African-American boys are even lower. Those are the facts.
You can look at the facts in several ways, though, including this one: "You've got to hand it to some African-American students in Minneapolis. Instead of cooperating with a system that degrades them because of what they don't know, they're using their meager talents to force that system to its knees. It takes genuine street skills to get kicked out of class so you don't embarrass yourself with what you don't know in front of your peers. It's an art to disrupt the formal lesson plan and force the teacher to make you the center of attention."...
Black students desperate for help often unconsciously employ these African-American trickster skills to save face in a topdog/underdog world. They are literally at war with their environment and will use their wiles to hang onto the last vestiges of their self-respect.
When higher education, business, and government convene conferences to talk about how to "improve the pipeline" of students of color from preK-12 into college and beyond, we pretty much ignore this stark reality. Reaching kids who are so alienated from the system is perhaps the greatest challenge facing our schools of education and child development. (Let alone our elementary and high schools.)
We can't do it without the parents. That's why it's heartening to see programs such "Parenting Across Cultures, a five-day workshop to help strengthen multi-ethnic families and communities" to be offered October 9-13 by the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation of St. Paul, in conjunction with the Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota and Children's Home Society. To quote from the workshop announcement,
"The model has been identified as a promising practice by the Federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and is based on the belief that parents will take responsibility for making good choices when given information on the consequences of different parenting strategies and techniques.
The workshop has five component areas:
-cultural focus
-rites of passage
-parent/chid relationship
-positive discipline
-community involvement"
An announcement of the program is here.
A Google search for "patient advocacy" + disease + research in the .edu domain yields about 26,500 English pages. Two of the interesting sites high on the hit list are from the University of Wisconsin and Brandeis University.
The Wisconsin site is from the Center for Patient Partnerships in the Law School. They state their primary functions as
A different focus is seen in a lecture that Zach Hall, Vice-Chancellor for Research at UCSF, gave in the M.R. Bauer Distinguished Guest Lecturer Series at Brandeis University. The summary of his talk concludes with the paragraph
Finally, ("Political Advocacy") patient advocacy groups are among the most important lobbyists in Washington for biomedical research. They bring to the Congress the personal dimension of disease research and a sense of focus and zeal. Although scientists agree with the advocacy groups on the ultimate aims of research, they often differ on how to get there. Patient advocacy groups are intensely focused on a single disease or group of diseases, are interested in short-term results, and are often competitive with each other for the science dollar. Increased understanding and continuing education are essential to a strong working relationship with these groups. In advocacy, both for specific causes, and for the larger enterprise of biomedical research, we must emphasize the possibilities offered by science, but must do so responsibly and realistically.
In these two quite different but often overlapping modes, university medical centers engage with the public - their patients and families - in ways that complicate but enrich the clinical teaching and research environment.
I've spent time the past two days at the conference on the Civic Mission of American Education in Bloomington, MN; specifically, at meetings of the Minnesota team for the Educational Leadership Colloquium, organized by Minnesota Campus Compact. Much of our time was spent discussing the importance of students having four years of high school math if they are to succeed in college and be prepared for better-than-minimum wage jobs in the new global economy.
While nobody around the table disagreed with the goal of four years of math (or at least nobody openly dissented), the discussion surfaced some fundamental issues. They can be boiled down to three questions:
Finding and training the teachers: We need to make high school (and elementary school) teaching more attractive for college students who are primarily interested in a STEM career. This would require predictable access to teaching jobs after graduation, good salaries, and reasonable expectations of job security. (As it is, beginning teachers, even if they're good, often get laid off because of shifting school enrollments and finances.) These conditions, while nontrivial, could be readily met if governors and state legislators made solid STEM high school education a long-term as well as immediate priority and funded it accordingly. It would also require attitudinal changes among college and university STEM faculty, to regard K-12 teaching as an admirable career for their students. We also need to provide life-long learning and skills-upgrading opportunities for existing teachers, and develop imaginative new teaching materials for them to use.
Convincing the parents: Many parents don't come from college-going backgrounds, and may not realize the importance of a college education for the success of their children. Children who go to college and thereby enter a new world of contacts and opportunities may become alienated from the homes and neighborhoods in which they grew up: a not-uncommon first-generation story, and one that both parents and children may wish to avoid. Further, even if supportive parents wish to help their children with schoolwork, math and science at a serious high school level may be a difficult challenge. These difficulties may be among the toughest to overcome, but help could come from the business community whose employees may be these same parents. (Businesses, of course, have a self-interest in a steady future supply of well-educated workers.) A concerted program in which businesses communicated with parents about the importance of their children's education, developed tutoring programs, and generally reinforced governmental and educational efforts could go a long way.
Motivating the students: Even smart, well-educated, and successful people often have trouble seeing how math is useful in their daily lives. To some extent this is because computers have hidden the often quite complex calculations that make the modern world run, or because specially-trained people do much of the quantitative work. But I suspect that nearly everyone could work more effectively if they approached their work more analytically. Equally important, lack of adequate numeracy (to use John Allen Paulus's useful word) is contributing to a degradation of our ability to function as citizens. Unscrupulous politicians can perpetrate many deceptions on a population that cannot analyze the quantitative consequences of government policies. To make math (and science) training more relevant to the population at large, we have to develop new ways of teaching so as to make the practical applications clearer. We should devote as much effort to teaching probability and statistics as we do to calculus and linear algebra. This is an effort that we in higher education should lead.
Research universities engage with their publics over a wide range of important issues. There can be few issues of greater concern than our energy future, and few issues in energy more controversial than the potential of biofuels.
A news story yesterday afternoon from the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota sheds some important light on the subject. The story is based on an article that will appear tomorrow in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, written by Jason Hill, postdoctoral researcher and lead author, David Tilman, Regents Professor of Ecology and co-author, and Doug Tiffany, research fellow, applied economics, all at the University of Minnesota. The news release was written by Peggy Rinard, College of Biological Sciences.
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (7/10/2006) -- The first comprehensive analysis of the full life cycles of soybean biodiesel and corn grain ethanol shows that biodiesel has much less of an impact on the environment and a much higher net energy benefit than corn ethanol, but that neither can do much to meet U.S. energy demand.The study, which was funded in part by the University of Minnesota’s Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment, was conducted by researchers in the university’s College of Biological Sciences and College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences. The study will be published in the July 11 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers tracked all the energy used for growing corn and soybeans and converting the crops into biofuels. They also looked at how much fertilizer and pesticide corn and soybeans required and how much greenhouse gases and nitrogen, phosphorus, and pesticide pollutants each released into the environment.
“Quantifying the benefits and costs of biofuels throughout their life cycles allows us not only to make sound choices today but also to identify better biofuels for the future,” said Jason Hill, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of ecology, evolution, and behavior and the department of applied economics and lead author of the study.
The study showed that both corn grain ethanol and soybean biodiesel produce more energy than is needed to grow the crops and convert them into biofuels. This finding refutes other studies claiming that these biofuels require more energy to produce than they provide. The amount of energy each returns differs greatly, however. Soybean biodiesel returns 93 percent more energy than is used to produce it, while corn grain ethanol currently provides only 25 percent more energy.
Still, the researchers caution that neither biofuel can come close to meeting the growing demand for alternatives to petroleum. Dedicating all current U.S. corn and soybean production to biofuels would meet only 12 percent of gasoline demand and 6 percent of diesel demand. Meanwhile, global population growth and increasingly affluent societies will increase demand for corn and soybeans for food.
The authors showed that the environmental impacts of the two biofuels also differ. Soybean biodiesel produces 41 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than diesel fuel whereas corn grain ethanol produces 12 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline. Soybeans have another environmental advantage over corn because they require much less nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides, which get into groundwater, streams, rivers and oceans. These agricultural chemicals pollute drinking water, and nitrogen decreases biodiversity in global ecosystems. Nitrogen fertilizer, mainly from corn, causes the 'dead zone' in the Gulf of Mexico.
“We did this study to learn from ethanol and biodiesel,” says David Tilman, Regents Professor of Ecology and a co-author of the study. “Producing biofuel for transportation is a fledgling industry. Corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel are successful first generation biofuels. The next step is a biofuel crop that requires low chemical and energy inputs and can give us much greater energy and environmental returns. Prairie grasses have great potential.”
Biofuels such as switchgrass, mixed prairie grasses and woody plants produced on marginally productive agricultural land or biofuels produced from agricultural or forestry waste have the potential to provide much larger biofuel supplies with greater environmental benefits than corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel.
According to Douglas Tiffany, research fellow, department of applied economics and another co-author of the study, ethanol and biodiesel plants are early biorefineries that in the future will be capable of using different kinds of biomass and conversion technologies to produce a variety of biofuels and other products, depending upon market demands.
Hill adds that both ethanol and biodiesel have a long-term value as additives because they oxygenate fossil fuels, which allows them to burn cleaner. Biodiesel also protects engine parts when blended with diesel.
“There is plenty of demand for ethanol as an additive,” Hill says. “The ethanol industry was built on using ethanol as an additive rather than a fuel. Using it as a biofuel such as E85 is a recent and currently unsustainable development. As is, there is barely enough corn grown to meet demand for ethanol as a 10 percent additive.”
An attractive development in the exploration of scientific developments with the community at large is Café Scientifique. The idea started in France with Café Philosophique. According to its web site in the UK, where the movement developed as applied to science,
Cafe Scientifique is a place where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, anyone can come to explore the latest ideas in science and technology. Meetings take place in cafes, bars, restaurants and even theatres, but always outside a traditional academic context.Cafe Scientifique is a forum for debating science issues, not a shop window for science. We are committed to promoting public engagement with science and to making science accountable.
At the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, recent topics have included
Other University of Minnesota campuses have developed their own Cafés Scientifiques. In Duluth they've discussed "Stopping the Stowaways: Aliens of Lake Superior", and in Morris, "Origami in Math and Science".
A listing of Cafés around the world is at http://www.sciencecafe.net/html/links1.htm.
If you look for books with "university" in the title on amazon.com, numbers 2 and 3 in ranking are
Universities in the Marketplace : The Commercialization of Higher Education (Paperback) by Derek Bok (#27,858 in Books)
and
University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education by Jennifer Washburn (#49,427 in Books).
You're also led to the relative best-seller
Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line : The Marketing of Higher Education (Paperback) by David L. Kirp,
(#29,779 in Books)
If you search for "university engagement" you find
Creating a New Kind of University: Institutionalizing Community-University Engagement by Stephen L. Percy (Editor), et al (#392,766 in Books)
and
University-community Partnerships: Universities In Civic Engagement by Tracy Soska (Editor), Alice K. Johnson Butterfield (Editor) (#458,289 in Books)
As so often the case, bad news sells better than good. But it's encouraging to see that books about the positive efforts that universities are making to enhance their engagement efforts as key parts of their societal role are being written. One may hope that as the movement spreads, they'll even sell well.
The University of Minnesota is the lead institution in a $15 million, five year grant from NSF to study advanced uses of fluid power technology. The research might lead to greater energy efficiency in devices as diverse as personal service robots, dentists' drills, jaws of life, backhoes, and regenerative braking in autos. The principal investigator is Kim Stelson, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power.
The Center is remarkable not just for its technical promise but for the extent of its collaborative arrangements. These include four other research universities (Illinois, Georgia Tech, Purdue, and Vanderbilt), two outreach universities (Milwaukee School of Engineering and North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University), the National Fluid Power Association, and more than 50 companies. In addition, the Science Museum of Minnesota will create a public display on fluid power and will have teenage staff in its Youth Science Center give talks to museum visitors; and Project Lead the Way, a national nonprofit organization that develops pre-engineering courses for middle and high schools, will develop modules for teaching.
One can be confident that these extensive and deep interactions with industry and educational organizations played a large part in the award of the grant, by effectively addressing the NSF broader impacts criterion.
Yesterday I wrote about the transformation of the University of Minnesota's General College into a new Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Development. In the final issue of Access, the GC magazine, Interim Dean Terry Collins has some thoughtful reflections about the meaning of the change and its potential consequences for diversity and access.
We are well on the way toward realizing the major structural changes to emerge from the University’s Strategic Positioning process. The academic heart of General College will be reconfigured on July 1 as the new Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning. Our advising and student support services will re-emerge in the Student and Professional Services department. We look forward to another year of intense program building in the new College of Education and Human Development.Amid these changes, we worry about the central values of access and diversity in the University of Minnesota. Many friends of General College wonder whether the strategic positioning initiative signals a retreat from these core values.
So far, half of the answer is clear. As you may already know, President Bruininks has announced new scholarship support under the Founders Opportunity Scholarship Program. This ambitious program provides full tuition and fees for students (both new freshman admits and transfer students) from economically challenged families. This is a very exciting program, among the most meaningful steps on access I’ve seen during my three decades in GC. It goes a long way toward insuring that the University will remain economically accessible to all Minnesotans, even as tuition and related costs continue to increase.
While the news is indeed good on access as measured by affordability, other dimensions of access and diversity will be determined during the coming year as key decisions are made about recruiting and admissions. The freshman-admitting colleges at the University will be challenged to build diverse student profiles. Both President Bruininks and Provost Sullivan have spoken their commitment to maintain diversity in the University. How these assurances translate into practice will be clearer as we move ahead.
We in GC hope to contribute constructively to future decisions on a range of topics, among them how the University engages middle-school and high-school students on matters of preparation; the proper role of high-stakes ACT test scores in admissions; and the obligations of all of the undergraduate colleges to act responsively in shaping their classes consistent with the institution’s public statements on diversity and access.
As we end this first transitional year, the seriousness with which University leaders have addressed issues of affordability and access convinces me that we are moving in directions consistent with the values held deeply in General College. But there is a lot of work to do. For the University to have created GC in 1932, during our nation’s Great Depression, was wonderfully optimistic and visionary. That optimism is our legacy. The University of Minnesota is a treasured public asset whose leaders will be stronger if they hear from us in the future on matters we hold dear.
One of the longest-lived and most deeply felt debates at the University of Minnesota for the past several decades has been over the rationale for the continued existence of General College.
General College (GC) was founded in 1932 as an open admission college at the University of Minnesota for students less well prepared, by training or academic background, to succeed in narrowly-focused fields of major study. In the 1960s, as junior colleges were established in Minnesota, the role of GC was questioned; it responded by focusing on serving new populations, such as ethnic minorities and low-income students previously bypassed. In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, proposals to eliminate GC were brought forward but were defeated.
Finally, as a result of the UM's Strategic Positioning Initiative during the 2005-06 academic year, it was decided that GC will become the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning in the revamped College of Education and Human Development as of July 1, 2006. As announced on its web site, "The new department will continue and extend the core teaching and research interests of faculty from the former General College. It is envisioned as a national and international leader in postsecondary student academic and civic engagement, with particular emphasis on disseminating best theories and practices to foster the success of underserved and underrepresented students."
In the final, Spriing 2006 issue of Access, the General College Magazine, Provost Tom Sullivan had this to say about the transition:
The General College has a mission that has changed over time to best serve students, the University, and the state of Minnesota. Each set of changes brought renewal. Often these changes were motivated by demographic changes and realignments of the structure of higher education in our state. In many ways, the General College exemplifies how new directions, and new possibilities, can thrive within a tradition of deep commitment to access and diversity.It is appropriate, then, in this final issue of Access, that we look to the series of exciting changes ahead, while always keeping in full view the paramount values of the General College.
The General College will be transforming into a new Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning in a newly reconfigured College of Education and Human Development. It is a new name, yet one that identifies and extends the special teaching and research mission for faculty, staff, and students.
We relish the potential for the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning. In collaboration with new colleagues, the department can set the highest standards for the theory and practice of teaching and learning in higher education—especially in addressing complex societal issues such as eliminating demographic disparities in educational achievement. The department is uniquely situated to make this invaluable contribution.
The promise for the new department and the new college is exciting. A vital element of this integration is that the University’s commitment to access for motivated students from all backgrounds will be reinforced and reinvigorated.
Reconfiguring university programs is always hard, but bringing programs together to provide mutual support and synergies is a win-win approach. The new college, with the new department as a key component, will be crucial if the University of Minnesota is to realize its urban agenda and contribute to the post-secondary academic success of all the children of Minnesota.
I've begun reading Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform by Sharon Hays. Although the book focuses on the effects of welfare reform on poor women, who are commonly single mothers, it makes clear that there are also often deleterious effects on their children. The need for single mothers on welfare to get jobs and obey highly prescriptive rules means that they often have neither the time to devote to their children nor the resources to afford adequate child care. Children growing up in such environments may lack adequate parenting, may be subject to abuse, and frequently are witnesses to acts of violence.
I was thus sensitized when a colleage brought to my attention an article in the Summer 2006 CURA Reporter entitled "Improving Access to Care for Traumatized Children: Law Enforcement–Mental Health Collaborations for Child Witnesses to Violence" by Abigail Gewirtz, Donald Harris, and Mary Jo Avendano.
Gewirtz is a child psychologist and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota where she teaches and conducts research at the Institute of Child Development and the Department of Psychology. She is also Director of Research at Twin Cities-based Tubman Family Alliance, one of the largest family violence resource agencies in the country, and project director for the Minnesota Child Response Initiative, a multi-disciplinary preventive intervention for children exposed to violence. Harris is deputy chief of the Minneapolis Police Department. Avendano is clinical supervisor of the Child Development Policing Program and clinical director of Centro Cultural Chicano, a large social services agency providing comprehensive social and psychological services to the Latino community.
The article notes: "Although children may be victims of violence or abuse, the majority of children involved in violent events are witnesses who suffer psychological, rather than physical, harm and thus are less likely to come to the attention of service providers. These children have been described as the 'silent victims' of violence."
It goes on to describe the Child Development Policing Program,
...developed during the past three years by the Minneapolis Police Department and community and university partners to develop and sustain a police–mental health collaboration. The purpose of this collaboration is to increase access to services for children who are traumatized and ultimately to ameliorate the impact of violence on children. The program—which is voluntary for families—partners police officers, children’s mental health providers (psychologists and clinical social workers), and family advocates to enhance police officers’ skills when encountering children, particularly those traumatized by violence, and to provide clinical intervention in the close aftermath of violent incidents witnessed by children.