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Revision as of 14:26, 6 March 2008
Contents
Institutional Mission and Goals
In May, 2004, the President directed the Provost to take the lead to update Evergreen’s 2000 Strategic Plan. The Strategic Planning Coordinating Committee engaged in a collaborative, multi-year strategic-planning process that reinforced Evergreen’s core values, articulated its mission, and provided a framework for the allocation of resources, a capital campaign, and the campus master plan. During the three years leading up to the accreditation visit, Evergreen’s Strategic Planning Coordinating Committee collected and coordinated the work completed by multiple Disappearing Task Forces (DTFs), work groups,[3] and faculty and linked several central themes: a dynamic and collaborative academic community, a focus on student learning, attention to the quality of faculty and staff work life, stewardship of our natural resources, community partnerships, and the reality that state accountability requirements would likely increase at the same time state operating support would likely flatten or decrease. The mission statement reiterated Evergreen’s core values and its distinctive niche….
As the nation’s leading public interdisciplinary liberal arts college, Evergreen's mission is to sustain a vibrant academic community and to offer students an education that will help them excel in their intellectual, creative, professional and community service goals.
This mission and the Strategic Plan honored the vision of Charles McCann, the college’s first president who, forty years ago supported by the Board and a legislative mandate that encouraged innovation, articulated Evergreen’s basic principles:
- It would not be bound by any rigid structure of tradition
- It would unshackle our educational thinking from traditional patterns
- It would give the student confidence and ability to master difficult situations
- It would be free of the machinery of the traditional college including rigid administrative reporting lines or departments
- It would not impose academic coursework requirements upon students
- It would equip the student for life-long learning
- It would focus on interdisciplinary study around themes and problems, on contracted study and on internships
- It would employ the seminar method
- It would enable the student to set an individual course of study closely advised by a faculty member (cite John McCann p5)
McCann and Evergreen’s founding faculty created a college devoted to teaching and learning infused by a culture of innovation and opposition. Their innovations were influenced by the ideas of Alexander Meiklejohn-that education should prepare students for a purposive public life within a democratic society. The founding faculty created coordinated studies programs and processes to foster collaborative, team-taught interdisciplinary learning communities. McCann established the Four Nos that set the foundation for Evergreen's distinctive competence: No academic departments, No faculty ranks, No academic requirements, No grades. Embedded in this set of negatives was his vision that the authority to determine what constitutes a liberal arts education should be centered on the individual relationships between faculty and students. Evergreen’s pedagogical practices evolved from this collective effort of the early faculty to create an innovative liberal arts education and foster the qualities associated with student engagement e.g., love of learning, a wide range of knowledge, and reflective thinking. This is reflected in the mission and the maintenance of a culture that supports engaged, active citizens, community participation, and the qualities associated with publicness/community i.e., autonomy, responsibility, problem solving, team work. Evergreen is one of two public colleges cited in Loren Pope's Colleges That Change Live: Forty Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About College which he wrote to "help youths of many levels of academic aptitude find catalytic colleges that will change their lives, help them find themselves, raise their aspirations, and empower them. In doing so it will free them from our system's obscene obsession with academic aptitude, which does not determine achievement, satisfaction with life, or the merit of a human being." Thirty-five years later, Evergreen is still an experimental college with an impressive track record of student engagement and success fostering and disseminating interdisciplinary teaching and learning, anchored by a vibrant community of scholars committed to providing an affordable education to Washington residents and nonresidents alike and to serving underrepresented and non-traditional students.
"Every organization has a culture that is a persistent, patterned way of thinking about the central task of and human relationships within an organization. Personality is to the individual as culture is to the organization. It includes the predisposition of members, the technology of the organization, and the situational imperatives with which the agency must cope.”[1] The oppositional aspect of Evergreen's founding culture was a response to both the dominant education paradigm and the political/economic culture operating in the late 1960s.[2] The founding faculty sought to eliminate traditional barriers to learning by inculcating a culture with a healthy distrust of administration. The academic administrative structures, established in the founding period, valued a flat non-hierarchical organization, a rotating deanery with close ties between academic administration and teaching, and semi-autonomous work groups (academic program teams) loosely-coupled to the academic administrative structure (deanery/provost). Evergreen has sustained itself an an innovative experimental college in large part because it has retained a high degree of congruence among its critical task/mission/distinctive competence, its organizational structure, and its culture (shared values, beliefs, practices).
Since the founding, several core values evolved to guide the development of all college programs and services that continue to define Evergreen‘s distinctive competence. This includes a focus on teaching students to think critically and reflectively. Elizabeth Minnich’s recent work captures the essence of Evergreen’s pedagogy and purpose wherein she argues that the center of a liberal arts education especially one that is interdisciplinary is the act of reflexive thinking, not simply that the learner is reflecting on what it is that she has learned, but that she is reflecting on how they have learned and what they have become as they have learned. This pedagogy stands in stark contrast to mainstream efforts to emphasize standardized test scores.
The Strategic Plan
During the three years leading up to the accreditation visit, Evergreen’s Strategic Planning Coordinating Committee, consisting of the the four vice presidents and three faculty, collected and coordinated the work completed by multiple Disappearing Task Forces (DTF), work groups,[3] and faculty and linked several central themes: a dynamic and collaborative academic community, a focus on student learning, attention to the quality of faculty and staff work life, sustainability/stewardship of our natural resources, community partnerships, diversity, and the reality that state accountability requirements would likely increase at the same time state operating support would likely flatten or decrease. The mission statement reiterated Evergreen’s core values and its distinctive niche….
As the nation’s leading public interdisciplinary liberal arts college, Evergreen's mission is to sustain a vibrant academic community and to offer students an education that will help them excel in their intellectual, creative, professional and community service goals.
The Strategic Plan established nine strategic priorities within three broad goal areas:
Educational Goal: Evergreen’s tradition as an experimental public liberal arts college devoted to scholarship, teaching, and learning, and strengthening its commitment to our original principles remains intact. At the same time we must adapt to growth, new students, and a new generation of faculty.
1a. Reinvigorate Evergreen’s interdisciplinary liberal arts mission
1b. Deepen the teaching and learning experience at Evergreen, focusing on student success
2. Improve student recruitment and retention
3. Recruit, retain, and revitalize faculty and staff
4. Provide institution-wide support for diversity and equity initiatives
Supporting Goal: We will continue to strive for an administrative culture that mirrors and supports Evergreen's pedagogy (interdisciplinary, collaborative learning environments) and uses human and physical resources to support teaching and learning. Two examples include cross-divisional collaborations around student success and campus sustainability.
5. Evergreen: A Place for Sustainability
6. The college’s physical resources will imaginatively enhance the learning and working environment
7. Use technology to enhance teaching and learning and administrative support at Evergreen
8. Evergreen’s local, regional, and national partnerships are a rich resource conduit to its unique mission. The college both contributes to these partnerships and learns from them
Financial Goal: Evergreen faces decreasing state support, prompting tuition increases yet remains committed to serving underrepresented students. Evergreen must, in order to sustain its mission and principles (small classes, an interdisciplinary team-taught curriculum, high degree of student-faculty interaction), augment and diversify revenue streams, improve net tuition revenue, control operating expenditures to sustainable levels, and make prudent use of existing resources.
9a. Diversify revenue streams
9b. Keep the growth of operating expenditures to sustainable levels
The Strategic Planning Coordinating Committee fore-grounded the Northwest Commission of Colleges and Universities 2003 interim recommendations during its planning process. Multiple assessment efforts continued-following the Commission’s 2003 visit-to strengthen and reinforce the emphasis on interdisciplinary learning at Evergreen. In this era of public sector cutbacks, legislators at the national and state levels increased their demands on colleges to be more accountable and to improve-and provide evidence of-student learning. Evergreen has responded to this challenge in a manner consistent with its mission by actively working in statewide and national efforts to develop interdisciplinary assessment tools and rubrics. Nationally, researchers rely on indirect quality indicators measures that directly address the epistemic dimension of interdisciplinary work. Evergreen, a college with narrative evaluations in lieu of grades devoted to interdisciplinarity and integrative learning, has had to develop its own set of interdisciplinary assessment rubrics (see Standard Two).
The Biennial Planning Cycle, Annual Goal Setting
The Strategic Plan was approved by the Board of Trustees in March, 2007 following several on-campus and local community fora with college stakeholders. The senior staff held a retreat in March to use the Plan as a framework to guide budget priorities for the 07-09 biennium and finalize the development of “dashboard’ indicators or metrics to assess our progress towards the strategic plan priorities on an annual basis.In April 2006 the faculty passed a series of resolutions re: faculty salaries and the budget. (attached) One of them was to establish a Faculty Advisory Panel on the Budget (FAPB) to “advise the president and vice presidents on the budget. The standing question shall be: Is the college’s budget so constituted and managed as to further the college’s academic mission?” The faculty elected FAPB members and worked closely with administration during the first year to make the budget process more transparent and inclusive. The FAPB reported their work at the date faculty meeting.
In order to strengthen the involvement of faculty and academics with college-wide budgetary processes, the faculty recommended the creation of a Faculty Advisory Panel on the College Budget (FAPCB). The charge to the FAPCB (11/9/06) by the Agenda Committee states that the FAPCB will ask a standing question of the president and vice-presidents: Is the college’s budget so constituted and managed as to further the college’s academic mission? Further, the “Panel will pose its standing question to the president and vice-presidents in public hearings. The president, vice-presidents and their budgeters will be invited to appear annually before the Panel to explain how their principal budgetary decisions further the college’s academic mission and to receive the Budget Advisory Panel’s advice, thanks and criticism.” The Agenda Committee further proposed that “the Panel meet regularly with the Associate Vice-President for the Academic Budget, and other administrators as appropriate, to keep apprised of current budget considerations as they arise, and to report as necessary to the faculty as a whole.”
The four elected members of the FAPCB began their work in Fall 2006. For 2006/07 this consisted mainly in gaining an understanding of the budget building process, in the particular context of the 2007/09 biennial budget being worked through the state legislature at the time. Thus extensive attention was paid to priorities already established in the budget request, with particular emphasis on how budget requests were being prioritized and how they related to institution-wide issues. The FAPCB presented a basic introduction to the budget process at a spring faculty meeting, fielding questions that would be asked at a subsequent meeting with the budgetary decision-makers of the college (President, Vice-Presidents, and their support staffs responsible for budget). This was a very preliminary process, limiting its focus to working only with new money requested from the Legislature, a process joined well after the budget request priorities were established. The responses to questions put forward by the FAPBC are being published to a Drupal web site, along with other information requested by faculty members.
The 2006/07 goals for the Panel are to 1) meet with administrative parties connected to budgetary decisions (President, Provost, Vice Presidents, division heads) as they begin planning for the 09/11 biennium in order to continue to build understanding and to bring faculty and academics to the process from start to finish; 2) move into analysis and understanding of the allocation of the base budget rather than just new allocations; 3) continue to respond to faculty questions and share information about the budget in order to increase transparency; and 4) organize the public forum identified in the charge.
Washington state passed legislation that now requires all state agencies, including colleges and universities, to submit an application for the Washington state Quality Award a.k.a. Baldridge Award once every three years, which will provide another indicator to the degree that Evergreen’s planning, management, and evaluation efforts are reviewed and improved.
The Campus Master Plan
The Campus Master Plan (CMP) consultants followed the Strategic Plan and used three core principles (learning, community, and sustainability) as its foundational values. They employed a broad, extensive community-wide process as they developed several iterations of the CMP. They succeeded in capturing the spirit of Evergreen and its future aspirations, especially in the manner in which they infused sustainability into all aspects of the plan. (The CMP is scheduled to be approved by the BOT in January, 2008). This plan will serve as the basis for the formulation of Evergreen's ten-year capital plan.
Evergreen’s Public Service Centers
Evergreen, as a public liberal arts interdisciplinary college, honors the traditions of a liberal education: thoughtful, well-educated, ethical, and active citizens. Evergreen’s culture of innovation is evident within its public service centers as they deepen Evergreen’s mission and extend the reach of the college outward from local to international communities.
Evergreen’s Public service centers have grown in number and scope since the last accreditation. These Centers enact, through their work, the central values of the college: community, diversity, cross-disciplinary approaches, social justice, and education with local, state, and national constituencies.
The centers position themselves in a reciprocal and collaborative relationship with the communities and organizations they work with. The assumption is that the centers will work in partnership with their constituents to identify needs and resources, establish goals and objectives, and collaboratively develop and implement programs and services that respond to the issues and resources that were mutually identified.
The result of this co-teaching and learning is that the experience and knowledge gained are reciprocal and of benefit to each party involved.
The centers enrich the campus environment in a variety of ways: by bringing guest lecturers, artists and scholars to campus; teaching throughout various areas of the curriculum; providing public forums for presentation and dialogue; serving as consultants (subject matter experts) to faculty and staff who are developing programs; providing resource rooms with books, films, newsletters, etc. that are open to students, faculty, staff, and community members; linking students with internship opportunities in the broader community; writing and publishing materials that are available to Evergreen and beyond; partnering with other educational institutions and with community organizations on research and educational programs that inform teaching and learning at Evergreen; and so on.
As the work of the centers proceeds, the skills and capacities of the centers expand and they come to take on more complex roles in the local, regional, national, and international work in their areas of focus.
The Center for Community-Based Learning and Action, founded in 2004, works with academic programs to integrate service-learning and community project work as an integral part of the Evergreen student’s experience. They provide connections for students to work with nonprofit and community-based projects such as trail maintenance, food banks, or low-income housing. One such project is the Gateway Program that helps incarcerated youth at Maple Lane and Green Hill obtain pathways to higher education while promoting the youths’ awareness of their own cultural identity.
The Evergreen Center for Educational Improvement works to improve teaching and learning in the K-12 system. Established in 1993, the Center partners with school districts and trains teachers on educational reform in math, science, and culturally appropriate curricula. The Labor Education and Research Center opened in 1987 to provide a safe forum for workers, community members and students to examine their work and lives in the context of labor history and political economy. The Labor Center develops credit and non-credit educational programs for Washington state residents, often contracting with Labor Unions to provide continued education for their membership.
The Northwest Indian Applied Research Institute, established in 1999, works with tribes to address issues important to the future of their communities such as cultural revitalization, tribal governance, resource management and economic sustainability. The Institute played a major role in the establishment of our MPA program in Tribal Governance, the first of its kind in the U.S.
The mission of The Washington State Institute for Public Policy, since1983, is to conduct practical, non-partisan research on issues important to Washington’ s citizens. Through the work of its own policy analysts, economists, and consultants, the institute works with legislators, government agencies and experts in the field to provide recommendations on relevant public policy questions in education, criminal justice, welfare, children and adult services, health, utilities, and government relations.
Since 1985, The Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education has successfully fostered collaborative approaches to educational reform by conducting campus-based, statewide and national professional development workshops based in principles of access and equity and significant student learning using a variety of curricular approaches including integrative learning and ongoing assessment. For the past ten years, the Washington Center has held the National Summer Institute on Learning Communities at Evergreen, which draws between twenty to thirty campus teams from all over the U.S. each year.
The Longhouse Education and Cultural Center celebrated its 10th anniversary in September 2005. The “House of Welcome” was built in collaboration with Northwest Indian tribes. Its mission is to promote indigenous arts and cultures. As a gathering place for people of all cultural backgrounds to teach and learn with each other, the Longhouse also provides a venue for hosting cultural ceremonies, classes, conferences, performances, art exhibits and community events. More recently, the Longhouse has evolved into one of the premier Native Arts management and cultural preservation centers, fostering cross-cultural exchange and expanding an indigenous Pacific Rim network.
Planning and Effectiveness, Accountability and Assessment
The External Authorizing Environment
During the past five years, statewide enrollment pressures grew as the supply of seats increased (Washington state increased the supply of public baccalaureate college seats; the competition from private, on-line colleges and mega-universities intensified) and student demand decreased (the increasing cost of attendance[4] deterred more students from attending college; Washington ranks 49 of 50 states in college participation rates for 4-year colleges among 18-25 year olds). The state funded two new four-year branch campuses to the north (Tacoma) and south (Vancouver) of Olympia An important part of Evergreen’s strategic planning work over the past two years has been the development and implementation of a strategic enrollment plan (See link and Standard 3).
During the years 1991-2004, according to SHEEO data, Washington state total higher education funding per student decreased by 24% (the third highest percentage decrease of all fifty states- see chart). During that same period, Washington state and local tax appropriations to Higher education dropped by 28% (the fifth highest decrease of all fifty states-see chart). With the HECB emphasis on "efficient degree production" Washington public baccalaureates are the most efficient BA degree producers in the US (Kelly, Patrick and Jones, Dennis. “A New Look at the Institutional Component of Higher Education Finance: A Guide for Evaluating Performance Relative to Financial Resources, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, December 2050, p 21) and State baccalaureate funding per student in Washington ranks near the lowest of all 50 states. Evergreen is the most efficient "degree producer of the Washington public baccalaureates (link). As the state's own data suggest, Washington is not keeping up with Global Challenge States and is falling farther behind the international advanced economies. Without major new investments in higher education, it will be difficult to achieve the proposed HECB master plan goals or to be a global challenge state, one that strives to increase baccalaureate participation rates, meet the needs of diverse learners, and improve access to Higher Education.
Washington’s 2008 Higher Education Master Plan, entitled "Moving The Blue Arrow: Pathways to Educational Opportunities," was published in December 2007. The blue arrow signifies the educational attainment for adult workers and young people. The Master Plan sets two statewide goals: 1) We will create a high-quality higher education system that provides expanded opportunity for more Washingtonians to complete postsecondary degrees, certificates, and apprenticeships. 2) We will create a higher education system that drives greater economic prosperity, innovation, and opportunity. Increased degree production and responding to employer needs were the two goals of the 2006 Master Plan. Evergreen enrollments have grown steadily over the past decade towards a goal of 5,000 SFTE. Increasingly, over the past three biennia, the state has provided targeted enrollment growth funds in specific “high demand” degrees such as biological science, engineering, computer science, nursing, and teacher education in math/science.
This provides several challenges for Evergreen. First, the expectation for STFE growth, given Evergreen’s uniqueness as an alternative interdisciplinary liberal arts college with an emphasis on learning communities and student engagement, makes it more difficult to both preserve and adapt its culture and distinctive niche as an interdisciplinary learning community of scholars. Second, the emphasis on high demand degrees combined with increased competition for students challenges Evergreen to find ways to grow in areas that are less liberal arts oriented. Third, over the past three biennia, (2001-07) Evergreen experienced enrollment growth of about 500 new student full-time equivalents (SFTE) combined with budget cuts and a plethora of accountability requirements imposed by legislators and regulators upon the 4-year baccalaureate institutions. A summary of these state mandated accountability requirements is at [link]. Evergreen continues to seek ways to honor its obligations to the state's Master Plan and meet the accountability requirements while maintaining its core mission as the state's liberal arts college.
Another challenge is that legislators expect the public baccalaureates to increase degree production in high demand math/science areas while at the same time four-year college participation rates in Washington are near the lowest in the nation, at least half of new students attending college need remedial work, the diversity of students is increasing (and with it the need for more student support services), and access to higher education is decreasing due to rising costs and lessened state support.
Evergreen responded in the 2007-09 biennium by enhancing its upper division health sciences enrollments and by developing a new Master of Education in Curriculum and Instruction with emphases in Mathematics and English as a Second Language. While under consideration, this proposed change was vetted with the Northwest Commission of Colleges and Universities at the very earliest stage as were other proposed changes such as the Tribal MPA and the dual MES/MPA degree.
Evergreen is the smallest public four-year baccalaureate institution in Washington state and, as such, is more dependent upon state funding than its larger Washington peers. As the two large Washington public research institutions (UW, WSU) become more aggressive in pursuing their capital and operating budget needs and other interests, Evergreen must continue to make its unique needs known. One vivid example during the last legislative session occurred as UW and WSU were set to pilot test "performance contracts" but the final legislation included all of the public baccalaureates in the performance contract pilot.
Student engagement is the overarching theme and guiding principle for Evergreen’s assessment work (see Standard Two). NSSE SCORES here?? It also infused the work on the Strategic Plan and the development of the Institutional Dashboard Indicators. Each division was involved in determining the metrics to provide comparable, realistic measures of divisional performance in support of the college mission and nine strategic priorities.
Another challenge for Evergreen is peer benchmarking. The new Carnegie classification of colleges and universities, was unveiled in 2006. Evergreen’s peer college rankings are based upon these Carnegie classifications e.g., the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) benchmarks, US News rankings, and HECB accountability measures, to name a few. Evergreen is no longer in the baccalaureate liberal arts college classification due to the fact that it awards greater than fifty graduate degrees per year. This bumps Evergreen into a different peer group entitled Masters, Smaller Programs (MSP). Given the MSP criteria (size, selectivity, residential, four-year, public/private, etc) various sub-groups can be delineated within the MSP universe. Interestingly, Evergreen is literally in a class by itself or “peerless” because no other college shares all of our characteristics. This forces Evergreen to merge sub-groups using one or two Carnegie characteristics in order to create an adequate peer comparison group. Whereas in the past Carnegie classification Evergreen had several legitimate peers, in the new MSP classification, there are only five legitimate peer institutions. Without a consistent set of peers Evergreen’s challenge is, find realistic benchmarks for the variety of data sets and indicators that are monitored and reported both internally and externally. Additional the Governor has introduced the Global Challenge states as aspirational peer benchmarks for Washington higher education policy goals.
Increased external accountability demands combined with increased internal data driven decisions-making has put significant stress on the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (IR). Since the 1998 re-accreditation visit, Evergreen has increased its IR staff from three to four FTE. While small in size relative to the other state baccalaureates, Evergreen's IR staff has played a big role at the statewide and national levels. Examples: Poster awards, National conference presentations: Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU), Consortium for Innovative Environments for Learning (CIEL), numerous assessment conferences. Internally, IR is in constant demand- New faculty, cross divisional, deans, president's office, registrar, and a key role in the provost’s office. They have played an important role in framing the primary message to external audiences i.e., we are committed to accountability but Evergreen is unique, please do not try and standardize us, let us be different, experimental, edgy and let us continue to develop appropriate learning outcome measures that fit our unique pedagogy and mission.
This plays out at the federal level as the Department of Education promotes standardized tests for college graduates and greater control over regional accreditation agencies to enforce accountability standards and student learning outcomes. Evergreen's Master In Teaching (MIT) accreditation visit in October 2007 was a precursor to the future of accreditation and illustrative of its main challenge-translation i.e., Evergreen must constantly translate what it does and how we do it. The Professional Educator Standards board (PESB) accreditation standards were geared for graduate professional schools of education. They had strict standards for centralized assessment and clear expectations that programs demonstrate "positive impact on student learning." The Evergreen MIT program is purposely embedded within its liberal arts mission and pedagogy and not the traditional professional school of education model. There were clear cross-cultural communication issues at play between the accreditation team and Evergreen during the entire four-day visit as Evergreen simply did not fit the standard mold. Gradually, as they met with various stakeholder groups on campus and in the community, the team began to translate and ultimately to understand. At the exit interview, the accreditation team leader indicated that the MIT program met all of the accreditation standards and cited the program as exemplary in six areas: 1) Professional Education Advisory Board operating procedures, membership, meeting times, 2) Experience working with diverse faculty, 3) Recruitment, admissions and retention, 4) Collaboration (both across the campus and in the community), 5) Field experiences and clinical practices, and 6) Collaboration with P-12 schools.
They stated that we were one of the few programs in the state that met all of the strict Section 2 standards which include learner expectations, an assessment system, use of data for program improvement and positive impact on student learning. They complimented the staff and the faculty for the design and delivery of a teacher educator program that turns out well-trained educators as evidenced by the team’s interviews with local school principals, teachers, and our graduates themselves.
Positive Restlessness: A Culture of Evaluation
The most extensive external assessment of Evergreen during the past five years occurred with a visit from George Kuh and his team of educational researchers from the Documenting Effective Educational Practices (DEEP) program at Indiana University. Their report, dated December 31 2003, was a remarkable affirmation of Evergreen’s pedagogy and a clear, accurate depiction of Evergreen’s culture and practice, “the operating philosophy: innovation leavened with autonomy, personal responsibility, and egalitarianism.”[5] The DEEP team reported on Evergreen’s success in each of their five benchmarks of effective educational practice (academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction, enriching educational experiences, and a supportive campus environment) and were effusive in their praise for Evergreen in all five areas, “Evergreen has created a structure for putting higher order mental skills into practice.”[6]
The DEEP team’s work is anchored by the concept “student engagement,” of which there are two elements: (1) the amount of time and effort students put into their studies and other educationally purposeful activities and (2) how an institution allocates its resources and organizes the curriculum and other learning opportunities and support services to encourage students to participate in activities that lead to student success (learning, persistence, satisfaction, graduation).
Subsequently, in their book, Student Success in College: Creating Conditions That Matter[7], the DEEP researchers identified twenty “gemstone” colleges who share six features that foster student engagement and persistence.
* A “living” mission and “lived” educational philosophy * An unshakable focus on student learning * Environments adapted for educational enrichment * Clearly marked pathways to student success * An improvement oriented ethos * Shared responsibility for educational quality and student success
The Evergreen State College was one of those twenty institutions wherein they cited several of our practices and characterized our culture as one of “positive restlessness” meaning:
* Restless in a positive way, never satisfied with their performance, continually revisit policies and practices to get better * They simply want to be the best they can be * Focused on the quality of their work and its impact on students and institutional performance
Simply put, Evergreen has a rich culture of evaluation. At the conclusion of each academic program, faculty members write narrative evaluations of each student. Students write self-evaluations of their own work and a narrative evaluation of the faculty. Faculty teaching colleagues prepare and exchange written evaluations of each other. Each faculty writes a self-evaluation. At the end of the year, the academic deans write annual evaluations of faculty on term contracts. All of these evaluations are kept within each faculty’s portfolio and reviewed annually by the deans until conversion to continuing status and then every five years hence by teaching colleagues and an academic dean. Feedback loops abound within the academic culture of Evergreen, a hallmark of reflexive thinking.
Student engagement, success (learning, satisfaction, graduation), and student autonomy to devise their own academic pathways are core educational values at Evergreen as articulated within its Five Foci and Six Expectations.
Evergreen’s Five Foci: 1) Interdisciplinary education 2) Personal engagement in learning 3) Linking theory and practice 4) Collaborative learning and 5) Teaching and learning across significant differences
The Six Expectations for all Evergreen graduates: 1) Articulate and assume responsibility for your own work 2) Participate collaboratively and responsibly in our diverse society 3) Communicate creatively and effectively 4) Demonstrate integrative, independent and critical thinking 5) Apply qualitative, quantitative, and creative modes of inquiry appropriately to practical and theoretical problems across disciplines and 6) As a culmination of your education, demonstrate depth, breadth, and synthesis of learning and the ability to reflect on the personal and social significance of that learning.
These form the basis of Evergreen's general education assessment methodologies as detailed in Standard Two wherein the data suggest that there is a remarkable degree of congruence between: What the college purports to do (above), why students select Evergreen, and what employers say about our graduates. To summarize briefly, the top three factors in students' decision to attend Evergreen are 1) opportunity to design their own education 2) Interdisciplinary learning 3) Integrated learning. The top four fields of interest for entering students are-for 1st year students-Visual/performing arts, Natural Resources, Psychology, and Social science and-for transfer students-Visual/performing arts, Education, Natural Resources, and Public Administration/Social science. The top three goals, cited by entering Evergreen students for earning their degree are 1) Personal success or satisfaction, 2) Personal growth and development, 3) Creative and effective communication skills (1st yr students)and Job or career change (for transfer students) (cite) Greeners at Work 2003,a survey research project studying how Evergreen prepares its graduates for the workplace consisting of a survey of alumni who graduated in 1999-2000 and a survey of alumni supervisors, indicates that supervisors rated Evergreen alumni highest on their willingness and aptitude to learn new skills, ability to work in a culturally diverse environment, and ability to cooperate on team efforts.
As it celebrates it 40th year, Evergreen is now in the midst of a faculty generational turnover. During the ten-year period 1999-2009, about 75 faculty or 50% of Evergreen’s regular, continuing full-time faculty will retire or leave the college. One indication of the impact of this turnover is that, during the three year period 2005-07, nineteen faculty retired with a combined 598 years of service to Evergreen (an average of 31.5 years)! And, at the 2007 convocation, Evergreen recognized seven faculty members, each with 35 years of service to the college.
During this same three-year period (2005-07), Evergreen hired thirty new continuing faculty members (see appendix for a summary of the hires). Twelve continuing faculty positions are being recruited in the 2007-08 year. This has been an enormously time consuming, important, and fulfilling part of the work during this period as there were over 2,100 applicants for these thirty positions and in almost every case Evergreen hired its first choice. In many respects, Evergreen is in the midst of a re-founding period wherein it must balance the retention of its culture and core values with adaption to a rapidly changing external environment, a new generation of faculty, staff, and students, and a new faculty union and collective bargaining process. The strategic planning reinforced its commitment to a set of core values and deepened its commitment to others e.g., sustainability, diversity. When faced with the imposition of new accountability or accreditation requirements that threaten to divert it from its mission, Evergreen turns to its core values, its unique pedagogy, and its love of innovation and creativity. For example, in the recent MIT accreditation review, Evergreen faced a strict set of accreditation requirements aimed more at "professional schools" and "teaching to the test." While that may be useful for some students, we know it doesn’t work for all, especially diverse learners and we had to translate and demonstrate that our unique approach works. Similarly, as we begin our new MEd program this fall with an emphasis on Math and ELL, it’s a question we must struggle with- keeping on eye on the state accreditation requirements while staying mission-driven and not sacrificing what we have learned after forty years.
Within this turbulent political economic system, Evergreen has witnessed many of its major innovations (learning communities, interdisciplinarity) being adopted by the other public baccalaureates in Washington state as well as nationally. Innovation is such that one must constantly foster a culture of innovation and creativity as competitive advantages are often short-lived. Positive restlessness again emerged among the faculty in 2005 as many felt that the Planning Unit structure (implemented in 1995 as the result of a Long Range Curriculum DTF process) was moving Evergreen towards departments and threatening its core educational values as the curriculum seemed to be drifting away from full-time interdisciplinary coordinated studies programs. In response, the faculty Agenda Committee (Evergreen's version of a Faculty Senate) re-instituted Dean's Governance Groups to facilitate faculty conversations outside of the planning units and within interdisciplinary venues. As a result of these lively and well-attend conversations, the Agenda Committee and the provost co-charged a Curricular Visions DTF in fall 2006 to "summarize and disseminate the content of these discussions and produce coherent proposals that substantially reflect the governance groups discussions."
A Participatory Decision Making Culture
Evergreen has a long history and culture of inclusive, participatory processes and decision-making. During the past ten years, Evergreen has experienced a steady growth [chart STFE, faculty, and staff). This, combined with increased complexity and faculty/staff workloads pressures, contributed to a sense that Evergreen’s shared governance model was deteriorating. The Enrollment Growth DTF galvanized this sentiment and resulted in an institutional re-commitment to experiment with new structures and participatory processes e.g., the Governance Groups convened by the Agenda Committee, the Provost and Agenda Committee co-charging DTFs, FAPB, and the United Faculty of Evergreen. Sustaining a participatory culture within the re-founding era is another challenge facing Evergreen. The Strategic Plan, the Campus Master Plan, and this accreditation self-study have used a combination of high-tech/high touch methods to increase participation. For example, the self-study process began three years prior to the accreditation visit, first with the Strategic Plan, followed by the Curricular Visions work, and the Campus Master Plan.
Much of their work begins with off-campus retreats, an integral part of Evergreen culture. Annual retreats include, but are not limited to: Board of Trustees, Management, Senior Staff, President-VPs, Faculty, Deans, Agenda Committee, Divisional retreats, and Unit retreats.
Broad based Steering Committees or DTFs are convened to oversee the work. Community fora on campus and in the community are held, a WIki web site with summaries of iterative drafts of the works in progress is utilized. And, in the case of the self-study-in addition to the Steering Committee-the faculty member coordinating the writing of the document has convened a group of faculty readers to review and critique the self-study. The Agenda Committee provided faculty meeting time to review the self-study.
Central to the Strategic Planning process was the work of the faculty that began in 2006-07 and is still in progress. The Agenda Committee and the Provost co-charged a Governance Group Curricular Visions DTF to guide faculty discussion of “what adjustments are needed to bring current curricula, structures, responsibilities, and practices into alignment” with Evergreen’s mission as a public, interdisciplinary liberal arts college.
Faculty governance group discussions during 2006-07 as well as several summer institutes in 2007 highlighted the central questions about what is meant by "public, interdisciplinary, liberal arts education" and about what obligations faculty have to offer curricula which provide this education. The DTF produced an interim report in May 18, 2007 wherein they cited three proposals that were “ready-to-go:” Thematic Planning Groups, Fields of Study, and First-Year Cohort and recommended that the provost provide summer funds for faculty to develop proposals for the next year. This occurred and the recommendations of the summer work groups were sent to faculty for review during the fall of 2007. Briefly, these recommendations include:
1) Fields of Study: In order to make the curriculum more transparent and accessible to students, to craft: web-based content descriptions of the fields of study available at Evergreen; offerings in the field affiliated with the field; news and discussion sections; on-campus resources that support the field; and some links to professional resources; web pages designed so that all faculty affiliated with a field can edit the page at will, and offerings will be updated automatically to match the online catalog; brief profiles of alumni and students with examples of work done by those who’ve studied the field at Evergreen.
2) Thematic planning Groups: This speaks to the need to reinvigorate Evergreen’s curricular structures and invites faculty to form broadly interdisciplinary groups to explore topics and issues of high interest. Faculty would create and join groups on themes they genuinely want to teach students and study with colleagues over a sustained period of time keyed to matters of public significance, revisable on a regular basis, drawing together faculty from across the college who share common interests but might never realize it otherwise, these groups signal a fertile new direction in Evergreen’s life as an interdisciplinary institution.
3) First year cohort
This idea, originating in the First-Year Experience DTF report, calls for a more integrated academic experience that will give both faculty and first-year students a sense of themselves as a teaching and learning cohort—and for multi-year commitments by faculty to teaching first-years e.g., an initial cohort model with a 3-year cycle wherein faculty commit to teaching core 2 of the 3 years. Each core program would be 12 credits and share a common 4-credit module which has a common reading list, lecture series, films, etc. and a faculty seminar. A group of faculty has committed to meet during fall ‘07 to begin the planning for a fall ’09 implementation date.
Washington State Accountability Requirements
Evergreen submits annual Accountability Reports to the Washington Legislative through the Higher Education Coordinating Board (link)
Exhibits: Enrollment trends
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Supporting Documentation
See Supporting Documentation for Standard One Admissions Recruiting Plan Strategic Enrollment Plan charge and fall 2008 update
Institutional Research Ten year enrollment/demographic statistics on graduate, off-campus, and undergraduate programs.