Lisa Wolf-Wendel

A Tangled Web of Terms: The Overlap and Unique Contribution of Involvement, Engagement, and Integration to Understanding College Student Success

Established theories and constructs long associated with student success, including involvement, engagement, and integration, provide common language and a body of knowledge to inform understanding of the challenges currently facing higher education. This paper examines how the theories and terms have evolved, explores how the terms are currently used, and considers their legacy for understanding contemporary concerns about student development and success.

Community-Centered Service Learning Moving from Doing For to Doing With

Many colleges and universities seek to enliven their service missions through service learning. This article critically analyzes the service-learning literature, illustrating the idea that higher education institutions traditionally operate under an orientation of doing for communities rather than doing with them. Doing for is typically aligned with a charity perspective and emphasizes the position of privilege of campuses in relationship to their local communities, whereas a doing with perspective of service emphasizes collaboration and mutuality. Using special focus colleges and universities as a model, the authors provide suggestions on how to shift the paradigm to one that is more community centered.

Faculty Life at Community Colleges: The Perspective of Women with Children.

This article explores the dynamics of how female faculty members at 2-year colleges balance the demands of their faculty jobs with motherhood. Results suggest that the community college appears to be a place that offers women the opportunity to balance their interests in teaching at the postsecondary level with the demands of having a family. This is not to say, however, that academic life at the community college is devoid of challenges for women faculty with young children. Some of these challenges include not having enough time, feeling guilty about not being able to give 100% to all of ones roles, concerns about tenure, inequity at work, and inequity at home.

International Faculty: Experiences of Academic Life and Productivity in U.S. Universities

Using the 2003 Survey of Doctoral Recipients, we examined satisfaction and research productivity of international faculty as compared to U.S. faculty. The study found that foreign-born, foreign-educated faculty are significantly more productive than their U.S. counterparts after controlling for personal, professional, and institutional variables. No significant difference in the productivity was found between foreign-born U.S.-educated and U.S. faculty. The concentration of international scholars on a campus positively affects productivity for U.S. faculty but not for foreign-born, foreign-educated faculty.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Race/Ethnicity and Student Achievement in Education Policy Research

The goal of this study is to bring the discussion of ethnic heterogeneity and the racial/ethnic classification of students for research purposes into the education policy arena. The relationship between race and ethnicity and academic achievement is focused on in particular. The heterogeneity of academic performance in reading and math is demonstrated between subgroups of Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Island students, using the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS ’88). In the case of both the Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Island aggregate groups there are substantial, though not always statistically significant, academic performance differences among ethnic subgroups, with a range of math performance among Hispanic subgroups of 10.7 points (mean score = 34.4) between Cuban and Puerto Rican students and a range of math performance among Asian/Pacific Island students of 15.3 points (mean score = 41.0) between West Asian and Pacific Island students.

Factors Predicting Community College Faculty Satisfaction with Instructional Autonomy.

In light of growing speculation that the autonomy of community college faculty members is eroding, this study draws on the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty to explore the institutional and personal variables that predict faculty satisfaction with authority to make decisions about content and methods in instructional activities. Results for full-time and part-time faculty members at community colleges are compared, as are the perceptions of community college faculty members with the perceptions of faculty members at 4-year institutions.

Searching for the Next Generation of Teacher Educators: Assessing the Success of Academic Searches

In light of a documented shortage of candidates for teacher education faculty positions, this article explores the academic labor market for teacher education faculty using job announcements from the Chronicle of Higher Education and a survey of search chairs to examine the qualifications sought. The authors conclude that the demand for teacher educators is high and the pool of qualified candidates in less than adequate in terms of number of applicants as well as quality. Ads at all types of institutions favored generalists with a terminal degree and K-12 teaching experience, with research universities predictably searching for research experience. The authors discuss implications of various elements of the search process for schools and colleges of education.

Who’s Teaching the Teachers? Evidence from the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty and the Survey of Earned Doctorates

In light of a documented shortage of candidates for teacher education faculty positions, this study explores the academic labor market for teacher education faculty utilizing data from the National Survey on Postsecondary Faculty and the Survey of Earned Doctorates. The study sheds light on the factors that predict who becomes a faculty member in teacher education.

From Disciplinarian to Change Agent: How the Civil Rights Era Changed the Roles of Student Affairs Professionals

Little has been written about the roles and functions of student affairs administrators during the civil rights era. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine how the civil rights era influenced the student affairs profession, paying particular attention to the roles played by student affairs administrators in relation to students, other administrators, and the community. A secondary analysis was conducted based on interviews with 18 student affairs professionals who served on a variety of college campuses during the civil rights era, primarily from the 1950s through the 1970s. Our findings suggest that these administrators took on roles such as educator, advocate, mediator, initiator, and change agent in order to effectively and efficiently resolve issues that arose on their campuses as a result of the civil rights era and the student protest movement.

FROM THE BARRIO TO THE BUCOLIC: THE STUDENT TRANSFER EXPERIENCE FROM HSIS TO SMITH COLLEGE

The study reported in this article examined two Hispanic-serving institutions, Miami-Dade Community College and Santa Monica College, and the innovative transfer agreements they have with Smith College, a highly selective private womens college. Factors that influence the successful transfer of women students to Smith from these HSIs are highlighted. The article concludes with recommendations for how Hispanic-serving institutions, and community colleges in general, can learn from the exemplars offered here how to develop their own unique transfer initiatives that benefit Latinas/os and other underrepresented students to transfer to and be successful at elite four-year colleges and universities.