Newsletters
Volume 4 Issue 1 (Feb 2022)
REFLECTING ON ALL OUR WORK SO FAR
By Rob Stevenson & Tina Giron
Over the past five years MJC has made tremendous strides in building and implementing Guided Pathways, and we would like to take a minute to review that work and acknowledge some of the people that made this possible. The roots of Guided Pathways come from the 2016 Great Teachers Retreat, which brought Dr. Rob Johnstone to Asilomar, and the foundational work done by counseling and student services in the year after. MJC was able to secure a spot as one of the California Guided Pathways 20, and by the spring of 2018 we built and named our Schools through a campus-wide decision-making process. In the summer of 2018, 43 counseling and discipline faculty built the Flexible 15s for each School, and in fall of 2019, all of this work was accepted by the Academic Senate, ASMJC, the Instruction Council, the Student Services and Equity Council, and College Council. In the Summer of 2019, 72 faculty convened to build Coursework Roadmaps for every award program and Program Profiles for each department. In the summer of 2020, counseling and student services again took the lead by organizing counseling, services, and onboarding by Schools, and together with newly trained faculty advisors, deans led teams that put together the first meet-and-greats and orientations for each School. It has been an enjoyable and exciting ride as your GP Faculty Co-Leads, and we would like to thank all of the administrators, faculty, staff, and students who have participated in and made this work possible. We look forward to helping Erin and Belen, our new GP Faculty Co-Leads in continuing the Guided Pathways effort at MJC!
WELCOME YOUR NEW FACULTY CO-LEADS
BELEN ROBINSON, COUNSELOR
I am a counseling faculty, professor and credentialed school psychologist. My education and experience is in teaching and curriculum development specialized in working with culturally and linguistically diverse populations, students with disabilities, and learning strategies. I have also taught “Cultural Diversity in the Classroom” for CSU Stanislaus and supervised student teachers in Liberal Studies. I was so excited when I heard that Guided Pathways 2.0 would be focusing on contextualized learning as our students will have an opportunity to experience teaching that will include more diversity, real life connections to their majors, and a more hands-on approach to learning. As a counselor, I have participated in GP institute trainings, on-campus GP trainings and helped facilitate GP sessions from the beginning of this initiative. I became a member of the PIT Crew in early 2020. Since 2013, I have been a contributing member of the New Student Outreach and Schools Orientations. In 2020, I presented a proposal to the PIT Crew on how to approach an orientation to new students on choosing a School for their pathway. This led to my co-development and co-presenter of our “MJC 101 Orientation.” I look forward to collaborating with MJC faculty and my co-lead, Erin, on upcoming Guided Pathways projects.
ERIN DARK-HEROLD, INSTRUCTOR OF ENGLISH
I am a full-time tenured English professor. I am excited to step into the Co-lead position, especially as we begin the latest Guided Pathways development: contextualized learning. When AB705 was passed, the English department embarked on a project to introduce new courses to replace and remove remediation. I was able to join a team of English professors as we attended conferences with the California Acceleration Project (CAP), which is how we learned to build thematic transfer-level composition courses similar to the ones we’ll be creating for contextualized learning. My introduction to the Guided Pathways institutes and trainings began when I attended the Asilomar Great Teachers Retreat in 2016. I had the privilege to attend Dr. Rob Johnstone’s presentation, which not only demystified Guided Pathways for me, as the title of his presentation suggested, but also motivated me to become an active participant in anything Guided Pathways related from that day forward. My involvement since then has included: identifying course recommendations for the meta-major project, creating Coursework Roadmaps trading cards, collaborating to build Program Profiles for English majors, training on Credit for Prior Learning, and becoming a Discipline Expert for the School of Language Arts and Education,. I look forward to working on upcoming Guided Pathways projects with my co-lead, Belen.