City College of San Francisco - California Competes

THEME I
need to synchronize the activities and findings of the Mathematics and English Departments with those
of Transitional Studies, ESL, the Basic Skills Subcommittee and Diversity Committee is critical at this juncture.
However, instruction and student support in English and Math have been the primary target of the
Basic Skills Initiative for reform with grants, and, while other departments within the basic skills realm
have, to a greater or lesser degree, also sought grants for improvement, the efforts of all departments
had not been coordinated with each other on a larger scale until recently. That is, the College is only
now starting to see the coordination among all basic skills areas and, on a very small scale, the transfer
of basic skills considerations to other disciplines, in large part through the activities of the Diversity
Committee and Basic Skills Subcommittee, the activities of which have begun to overlap (described
in the following section).
Expanding and Enhancing the Focus on Basic Skills throughout the Institution. Through the Diversity
Committee and Basic Skills Subcommittee of CCSF’s Shared Governance System, faculty, staff and administrators
have begun expanding and enhancing the focus on basic skills. That is, both committees include
faculty and staff from a variety of disciplines and service areas (for example, the Basic Skills Subcommittee
includes roughly 50 faculty and staff from departments such as English, ESL, Math, New Student
Counseling, Continuing Student Counseling, Learning Assistance, EOPS, and the targeted student retention
programs described in the section “Beyond Instruction: Additional Support for Basic Skills Students”).
The Diversity Committee was revived in Fall 2002, when a group of CCSF students expressed their feelings
that CCSF curricula generally placed too little emphasis on content and pedagogy that reflected the rich
diversity of the San Francisco Bay Area, let alone the world at large. In response to this concern, the
Chancellor convened a working group to consider the ways in which CCSF could incorporate and/or
enhance multicultural perspectives in its curricula. A critical outgrowth of the Diversity Committee has
been the Multicultural Infusion Project, a professional development program that provides faculty with
the incentives, time, and resources to revamp their curricula and teaching methods to increase their focus
on multicultural issues. The project focuses on helping faculty to not only infuse multicultural content
and perspectives into the curriculum, but also expand teaching strategies to meet the needs of a diverse
student population. The Committee has also hosted a series of Diversity Institutes to address these issues
in workshop and seminar settings.
The Basic Skills Subcommittee began meeting in Fall 2003 to (1) address the CCSF Strategic Plan Priority
focusing on Basic Skills; (2) read and discuss articles on basic skills and “best practices” at other community
colleges, with the goal of forming recommendations for CCSF; and (3) address CCSF’s Enhanced
Self-Study recommendations for Basic Skills.
In the past, these committees had generally operated on parallel but separate paths; however, the College
has recognized that the multiple factors that influence teaching and learning in socially and culturally
diverse classrooms cannot be separated from the content and pedagogy of those classrooms.
Another emerging (but not yet existing) resource to support the dissemination of information on basic
skills is a teaching and learning website for faculty, to be developed with Title III funding. The website
will provide faculty and staff throughout the College with centralized access to a variety of resources in
basic skills instruction and link to the Multicultural Infusion Project’s website to support the infusion of
multiculturalism across the curriculum.
Using Data to Inform Practice. As referenced earlier, a significant event was the release of a “Pre-
Collegiate Basic Skills Accountability Report” (Parts 1 and 2). This report was first issued in April 2004
by the Office of Research, Planning and Grants in response to a request by the Chancellor and the Board
of Trustees to produce an annual review of student progress through pre-collegiate courses in English,
Math, and ESL, and of related retention/success programs. Part 1 focuses on demand, supply, and student
250 CITY COLLEGE OF SAN FRANCISCO