Achieving the dream for student success
Public deliberation students draw ATD praise
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April 16, 2009
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Skyline News
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University of Houston Downtown
UHD has done what other colleges and universities with Achieving the Dream (ATD) Programs throughout the country have been unable to do – engage the greater community and students in finding ways to improve student success.
Windy Lawrence, UHD associate professor of Communications Studies and director of the Center for Public Deliberation, developed a new service learning course, Advanced Public Deliberation and focused the public deliberation decisionmaking model on ATD.
The students are working in relationship with Achieving the Dream to convene, moderate, facilitate, and record Dialogue-to-Action Circles,” Lawrence said. “These Dialogue-to-Action Circles feature diversity in ranks, roles, positions, ethnicities, ages, religion, and political ideology. Students are playing important leadership roles.
“Feedback from the national evaluators was that this is one of the most innovative programs in the country, they’ve not seen anything like it and they want us to be a model for other programs.”
Lawrence said the evaluators invited her and her students to the next Achieving the Dream national conference to present their research.
Achieving the Dream is a national program involving 83 universities and community colleges that have large enrollments of low income, minority or historically underrepresented groups. The goal is to increase the success rates of students in several key areas, said Gene Preuss, UHD assistant history professor and cochair of UHD’s Achieving the Dream Committee with Gary Greer, assistant dean of University College.
The committee is looking at strategies to increase the percentage of students who successfully complete the courses they take, who advance from remedial to credit courses, who enroll in and successfully complete gatekeeper courses, who enroll from one semester to the next and who earn degrees and/or certificates.
In addition to student success, ATD is pursuing outcomes in terms of institutional change, public policy, public engagement and new knowledge. Part of that effort includes regular faculty discussion groups and the Dialogue-to-Action Circles.
The Dialogue-to-Action Circles involve four teams that work through a process that starts with sharing perspectives, moves to deliberation and priority setting and finally to generating action ideas. The goal is to:
- Increase understanding about the need to help more students succeed at UHD
- Expand the understanding of who can help work to address student success. Increase commitment to find common ground between the varied perspectives on the issue.
- Build confidence that members with diverse views can talk together about difficult subjects.
- Encourage participants to develop ideas for action to address their concerns.
The Dialogue-to-Action Circles will present reports to the community from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 8, at the Willow Street Pump Station. Based on those reports, the next phase is moving to action, Lawrence said.
The circles have involved 60 people including students, faculty community representatives and staff members who committed eight hours to the process over several weeks.
“College success is not just an Achieving the Dream issue, it is an issue that effects everyone in the community,” Lawrence said. The deliberations have produced 16 action items which will be presented at the April 8 meeting. At the Action Forum, attendees will be asked to discuss and vote on the 16 action ideas using remote control clickers. Through this process, participants will select four major ideas and be asked to join action groups in order to help implement the ideas.
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