Strategic Vision for Equity 2021-2025
Process of Plan Construction
Historical Context
The work of equity and diversity is not new to the Foothill community. As the elements of the plan come together, there is a recognition of alignment across three areas aimed to inform the vision for equity at Foothill: campus feedback, scholarship on race and equity, and California state initiatives. Organically, these three areas revealed consistency in thought and focus, providing a common foundation from which to build.
The development of this Strategic Vision for Equity began as an evaluation of the 2015-16 Student Equity Plan[1], charged to the Equity and Education governance council. The activities described in the plan were to be evaluated annually, with the desired goals to be achieved by the 2019-20 academic year. Due to the large and operational undertaking an evaluation requires, Equity and Education tasked the Office of Equity to complete the evaluation and share its assessment with the council.
Through this process, some general observations surfaced. While it was proposed in the 2015-16 plan, our college lacked an entity overseeing the implementation and annual evaluation of the plan and its activities, and did not have a strategy to institutionalize this process. Furthermore, years of conversations in venues such as shared governance committees, program review, and professional development activities demonstrated a need for a shared vision of equity, anchored by a common definition or scope of work. While the metrics in the state-mandated plan meant to indicate progress of student outcomes, they ultimately were not sufficient in addressing the cultural and systemic change our college was asking for. Previous state equity plans led with a particular set of metrics, whereas this plan has developed organically through campus inquiry and self-reflection, informed by issues surfaced from the campus community.
State Legislation and Equity Initiatives
As a public institution of higher education, our college shares in the state’s goal to provide educational opportunity and success to the broadest possible range of our state’s population. California Education Code Section 66010.2 leads with the idea that efforts should be made with regard to those who are historically and currently underrepresented, and affirms a commitment to academic excellence through quality teaching and programs. It goes on to address an aim to provide educational equity, not only through a “diverse and representative body and faculty, but also through educational environments in which each person, regardless of race, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, or economic circumstances, has a reasonable chance to fully develop his or her potential.” [2] This code addresses concepts of fairness and inclusion, offering opportunities for all groups and ensuring social, institutional, and/or personal circumstances do not prevent students from reaching academic goals.
The state has taken large strides to set forth systemic initiatives for local implementation, with a particular focus on institutionalizing campus equity efforts through mandated student equity plans. The most recent 2019-2022 state required Student Equity Plan was drafted largely by the Office of Equity in collaboration with and guidance from the Equity and Education governance council. The plan was shared across campus for discussion and feedback[3] and was approved by the District Board of Trustees in June 2019.
Additionally, part of the state’s efforts to achieve equity are through initiatives intended to transform the experience of students at the community college and remove barriers to progress in their educational journey. Vision for Success is the state’s effort to make sure students from all backgrounds succeed in reaching their goals and improving their families and communities, eliminating equity gaps once and for all. It is a vision with bold goals to improve student outcomes, including closing equity gaps, increasing degree and certificate attainment and transfers to four-year institutions, reducing excess unit accumulation by students, and securing gainful employment.
In that spirit, two of the most recent initiatives from the state are Guided Pathways and AB705. The Guided Pathways framework creates a highly structured approach to student success that provides students with a set of clear course-taking patterns to promote better enrollment decisions and completion of their educational goal at our college. At Foothill, we are approaching that Guided Pathways effort through four teams: Meta Majors, Onboarding, Communication, and Technology and Data. AB705 is a bill that took effect in January 2018 and requires community colleges to maximize the probability that a student will enter and complete transfer-level coursework in English and math within a one-year timeframe, through the use of multiple measures placement, including high school GPA or self-guided placement, which research has shown are more effective of predicting course success than traditional assessment tests.
Collectively, these efforts are guided by the core belief that colleges should simplify paths to educational goals and help students stay on those paths until completion.
Scholarship on Race and Equity
Implicit Bias
The Office of Equity explored a number of seminal theories to inform the equity framework, paying particular attention to a few that are valued at Foothill College. Implicit bias[4] and the practice of recognizing when and how bias comes up can inform our equity practices greatly. The success of our students is impacted by the attitudes of faculty, staff, and administrators, towards students and one another, as is the association of stereotypes with certain individuals or groups without conscious knowledge. It has been proven that implementing exercises to actively lower bias[5] and directly challenge stereotypes are successful strategies and are areas that the campus can explore. As such, our students led an implicit bias workshop at College Opening Day 2020 as a follow up to their open letter[6] where they had requested college staff and faculty be regularly trained and educated on implicit bias.
Validation Theory and Stereotype Threat
As we proactively seek to be of service to the most disenfranchised student populations in our college community, it is critical that we are well informed on how to appropriately approach, engage, care for, and validate[7] our students. This includes development of not only people but spaces. Creating spaces that eliminate stereotype threat[8], a situation or action that puts students at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their culture or social group, and simultaneously forming a campus culture where the knowledge, skills, and experiences our students bring with them to college are continuously validated, and where they know they are valuable assets of our college learning community. Something as simple as learning a student’s name and pronouncing it correctly, shifting curriculum to reflect students’ backgrounds, or even engaging them in how the course develops over the term, can completely change the dynamic of a classroom. With these efforts, a student now knows they are seen and heard, and they can also then see themselves and their lived experiences in the learning.
Critical Race Theory
Colleges up and down the state have racial disparities across multiple metrics. Foothill is no different in that no matter the metric or population of study, racial inequities are present. Over time, they continue to exist. This persistent disproportionality points to a systemic issue. To focus on racial equity, the Office of Equity engaged Critical Race Theory[9], which uses the examination of race and racism across dominant culture as an approach to understanding structural racism to find justice-based solutions. If Foothill envisions our campus to be an equitable institution for higher education, we must be willing to upend our practices for vigorous examination of inequitable policy. In the development of this plan and an equity framework, many of the Critical Race Theory tenets felt especially relevant. In particular, the ubiquity of racism and how it undergirds many of our assumptions of how things operate within the status quo (Permanence of Racism), and the importance of elevating the voices and experiences of those most marginalized in our system (Counter Narratives). The incorporation of scholarly theory aids us in raising questions about things we may not have considered. It can also provide context to system and human behavior in this process, explaining how it can be that Foothill staff and faculty share similar values around the desire for equity, but work in an institution that has equity gaps. All the same, as a college we could not rely solely on state mandates nor scholarly theories in the development of this plan. We understood that actively engaging the Foothill community is critical.
Campus Feedback
One of the vital foundational elements of plan stemmed from the campus community.
The vision, structure, and goals came organically through inquiry and discussion with the college. In the evaluation of the state-mandated 2015-16 Student Equity Plan, the Office of Equity learned many proposed activities were technically implemented, but people did not feel the campus culture changed, nor did their equity work and efforts move the mark. Changes occurred in pockets but the changes were not systemic. As our college moves forward from the evaluation of previous plans, this plan is also an effort to acknowledge where we fell short as a campus in reaching previous goals or addressing concerns, building trust, communication, and collaboration. In crafting an updated plan, the Office of Equity intentionally engaged students, staff, faculty, and administrators in a variety of spaces.[10] The team led Opening Day workshops, conducted inquiry around professional development, held town halls, visited divisions and departments, engaged governance committees, conducted an online survey, held an equity retreat, and most importantly, listened to students.
In its early stages of the plan’s development, students identified the need for academic resources and social support in particular. Issues of transportation and housing rose to the top as major student concerns[11], and they spoke at length about their desire for space and community. Communication was also a theme that emerged, forcing the college to think differently about how it reaches out to students while keeping them engaged and connected to campus support and resources. As the Office of Equity continued to collect input from the campus, the world as we knew it experienced an abrupt change. A global pandemic forced us off campus and into our homes. As we adjusted to a world quickly changed by the COVID-19 virus, the college prioritized issues of access and learning in regards to online education. Transitioning to a virtual campus in March 2020 required quick-thinking, extensive yet urgent training, and the implementation of critical services and support. Further, it amplified a number of inequities in our system and forced the campus to take note of potentially overlooked concerns experienced by Foothill students in online learning. Sentiments that we were “all in this together” and that sheltering-in-place was an act of humanity blared through our media outlets, assuring us that our efforts to slow the spread and protect those most susceptible to the virus showed our unity and compassion as global citizens. Then, just as Foothill began to settle into a routine of our new normal, a few months later we received a stark reminder that humanity is relative, as the video of a man tragically murdered at the hands of police brutality went viral around the world. Not the first or last to suffer this tragic fate, George Floyd[12] was one of too many in the Black community to fall victim to racial violence. An uprising of neighborhoods and cities, in proportions rarely seen in history, took to the streets to demand justice and plead for change. Racial violence had set the world afire and we saw communities come together through pain, from struggle, and in protest. While it did not take a world-changing event to prompt a commitment to equity from our college, the commitment was already there. In many ways however, it was these events that narrowed our focus and caused us to reflect deeper as a campus about what we considered to be our most significant equity issues, once again driven by student voice.
Foothill students rose up and called the college to action. In their open letter to Academic Senate and administration in June 2020, individual members of the Black Student Union (BSU), the Puente program, Associated Students of Foothill College (ASFC), and student Trustees, collectively outlined what they needed to feel seen and validated as members of this college community. A subsequent letter addressed to College Governance in October 2020 further elaborated on student needs including demands relating to: diversifying curriculum and faculty, professional development, outreach to communities of color, and basic needs, to name a few[13].
While a review of relevant literature helped to ground this strategic plan in research and bridge the operational with the theoretical, it is the voice of the campus community that breathes life and purpose into this plan. Not surprisingly, much of what the Office of Equity heard as campus concerns with equity are echoed in the literature as long-standing challenges in higher education, and are part of larger areas of concern being addressed through state initiatives, revealing an organic connection and alignment of state initiatives, relevant scholarship, and campus feedback. However, the voice of the students has been the strongest impetus to move the campus toward its goal of racial equity.
[1] 2015-16 Student Equity Plan: https://foothill.edu/president/Foothill_Student_Equity_Plan_Final.pdf
[2] California Education Code: https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/education-code/edc-sect-66010-2.html
[3] The 2019-2022 Student Equity Plan was presented to Academic Senate, Classified Senate, and President’s Cabinet, as well as all governance councils (College Advisory Council, Community & Communication, and Revenue & Resources, with specific endorsement from Equity & Education), resulting in submission to the state with signatures from the College President, VP of Finance, EVP of Instruction and Student Services, and Academic Senate President.
[4] Implicit bias refers to unconscious attitudes, reactions, stereotypes, and categories that affect behavior and understanding. In higher education, implicit bias often refers to unconscious racial or socioeconomic bias towards students.
[5]Eight tactics to identify and reduce your implicit biases. https://www.aafp.org/journals/fpm/blogs/inpractice/entry/implicit_bias.html
[6] Open Letter to Foothill College’s Academic Senate. June 12, 2020. https://foothill.edu/gov/academic-senate/2019-20/jun15/OpenLetterToFoothillCollegeAcademicSenate.pdf. Open Letter to Foothill College’s Governance Councils and Senates. October 8, 2020. https://foothill.edu/gov/equity-and-education/2020-21/oct16/Open-Student-Letter-to-FC-Governance-Oct2020.pdf.
[7] Dr. Laura Rendon developed her theory of validation in 1994, referring to the “intentional, proactive affirmation of students using both in- and out-of-class agents with the intent to: 1) validate students as creators of knowledge and as valuable members of the college learning community and 2) foster personal development and social adjustment.” Dr. Rendon’s lecture to the Foothill campus in April 2018 included strategies and recommendations for promoting an ethic of care, or cariño, for our students.
Dr. Rendon’s visit to FHDA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGmklyKFzqY
[8] Dr. Claude Steele’s visit to Foothill, known for his work on stereotype threat, prompted great energy and excitement, resulting in the work of many faculty examining their classroom practices to mitigate this threat.
[9] Critical race theory (CRT) is an intellectual movement that seeks to understand how white supremacy as a legal, cultural, and political condition is reproduced and maintained, primarily in the US context. While CRT is part of a much longer research tradition investigating race and racism, which includes such key figures as W. E. B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and many more, CRT distinguishes itself as an approach that originated within legal studies (in part building from and responding to critical legal studies); aims to be a vehicle for social and political change; has been adopted interdisciplinary across many fields, including perhaps most notably education; and, in certain contexts, has come to be the umbrella term for studies of race and racism generally." De La Garza, Antonio & Ono, Kent. (2016). Critical Race Theory. 10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect260.
[10] Engagement began in January 2019 and has continued through all iterations of the plan.
[11] Based on student focus groups, Homelessness Summit, student-led public town halls, Board meeting presentations. Hope Center Report: https://foothill.edu/housing-insecurity/pdf/RealCollege_Survey2018.pdf
[12] What We Know About the Death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd.html
[13] Open Letter to Foothill College’s Academic Senate. June 12, 2020. https://foothill.edu/gov/academic-senate/2019-20/jun15/OpenLetterToFoothillCollegeAcademicSenate.pdf. Open Letter to Foothill College’s Governance Councils and Senates. October 8, 2020. https://foothill.edu/gov/equity-and-education/2020-21/oct16/Open-Student-Letter-to-FC-Governance-Oct2020.pdf.