City College of San Francisco - California Competes

THEME IV
Collaboration has allowed the Department to leverage the resources they do have to maximum benefit.
Participation in the Design Collaborative, a partnership with four other departments, is an obvious plus
for a department that has suffered from many problems related to its small size. The Collaborative allows
participating departments and programs (Architecture, Art, Graphic Communications, Multimedia Studies,
and Photography) to achieve what one department acting alone would not be able to do. For example, the
Collaborative has created Design courses that address the needs of students in participating departments.
The Architecture Department’s collaboration goes beyond participation in the Design Collaborative.
Collaborating with Engineering, Architecture can now offer drafting classes several hours a day in a
much more user-friendly Engineering Department lab. This enables them to remove the drafting tables
from the CAD lab and turn it into a fully functional technology lab. In addition, their collaboration with
Multimedia Studies has enabled Architecture to use the software from that program while letting them
use ARCH hardware. This exchange gives ARCH students a chance to learn 3-D modeling and animation.
Multimedia, in turn, has waived a class pre-requisite for Architecture students, recognizing that they have
acquired equivalent skills.
Supporting learning. The many collaborations have greatly supported student learning. In fact, student
success was cited by the Department Chair as an overarching departmental goal. One of the most important
current initiatives has been a transfer and articulation guide. The new guide is seen as essential in
helping students (especially the limited-English-speaking) navigate the seemingly mysterious labyrinth
of procedures leading to transfer.
In order to improve learning, the Department has taken steps to make facilities more useful. Many of
these modifications required no funding. One strategy was to open up spaces to new functions; for
example, converting storage areas to pin-up space, so that student work could be critiqued; creating
private spaces where faculty could confer in confidentiality with students; and setting aside large work
areas for part-time faculty to grade student work. Thoughtful redesign and redeployment have supplemented
available funding as a way of achieving goals. Much of the facilities redesign occurred as part of
the process of Program Review. The Program Review Committee was struck by the large number of basic
facilities needs in the document. The Associate Vice Chancellor for Facilities was invited to a meeting
with the Committee and the Department Chair. Ultimately, these individuals cooperatively established
a structure for meeting facilities goals and committed to their achievement.
In other instances, there may be budgetary constraints that do not lend themselves to mitigation
through creativity or alternative funding. A major funding disappointment for Architecture has been
the lack of funding for classified staff. In terms of serving students, a significant problem has been that
the Department office is often not staffed. The other funding disappointment for the Department has
been that only $500 a year is available for all supplies. All CCSF departments are struggling with similar
limitations due to statewide cutbacks in recent years.
Evaluation of the degree to which the Department’s goals have been met will be included in the next
Program Review, just as the current one started with an assessment of what had been accomplished from
the previous review. Departmental achievements will be summarized in Mid-Year and End-of-Year
Assessment Reports.
ESL Promotion Testing – Fine Tuning the Assessment Process. The evaluation that was conducted in
Fall 2004 of noncredit ESL promotion testing forms the basis of this case, which was selected because it
addresses student learning issues at the College within a noncredit context.
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