Tidbits, Resources, and Discussion for ELI Faculty

Friday, February 20, 2009

Reading about Community Colleges

This summer, Beth Harper and I are co-teaching a graduate course on community colleges for UVa. We're on the hunt for additional materials we might use in the course. Does anyone have a favorite book or article, or film, about community colleges that you'd recommend?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I completed the GMU College Teaching program and when we took the core course on The Community College, one book we used was The Diverted Dream by Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel. This book covers the gammat of community college history, theory and practice. I was never sure if their title was meant to "dis" the community college as "diverting the dreams" of students who might otherwise go to a 4 year school or if it was a satirical use of a term that others might use to "dis" the community college system. Another book we read in that class was Terry O'Banion's A Learning College for the 21st Century. One early assignment that I still recall and had fun with was for each student to research the history of the Community College. Many of use used online resources including the AACC website (www.aacc.nche.edu). We were to create a timeline of key events, people and places. I had fun with this visual project. In class, we went around and each student shared the highlights of what they had learned from their research. It was interesting to see where various students started their timelines and what they considered to be significant details to include (some had more, others less). The project was informative not only in terms of the basic history, but also in terms of introducing us to online resources we could and would make future use of.