AAC&U News | November 02

Growing from Deep Roots

Kapi'olani Community College Honors a Queen's Legacy in Developing Learning-Centered Education

The University of Hawai'i Kapi'olani Community College (KCC) aspires to provide an education—both in its environment and its curriculum—that embodies the legacy of its namesake Queen Julia Kapi'olani. The Queen, known for her concern for the health, education, and perpetuation of her people is remembered by more than just her name; her legacy often finds its way into the practices and learning innovations of the college to this day.

Queen Kapi'olani's Legacy in the Curriculum

KCC was founded in 1946 as a technical college, but today the school marries a liberal arts curriculum with vocational/technical work. The school is part of the University of Hawai'i (UH) system. Since the late 1980s, KCC has refined a competency-based curriculum that emphasizes learning outcomes and the abilities a student is to have mastered by completion of his or her program. In concert with the rest of the UH system, KCC has implemented five new general education "skills standards," including critical thinking, information retrieval and technology, oral communication, quantitative reasoning, and written communication, but added a sixth, unique to the college, "Understanding Self and Community."

"As a community college, a sense of place is important," says Robert Franco, KCC's director of planning and institutional research. "We don't have a sports team or many residence halls. We need to create a sense of place and identity for our students." As students learn, for example, about Hawai'i's history, they struggle with historical inequities and moral issues such as the overthrow of the Hawai'ian monarchy in 1893. Curriculum planners hope students emerge with a sense of this history and their place in it, and they believe that this firm sense of identity will serve as an anchor to help the students succeed in whatever they try to do.

Franco explains that visitors are commonly greeted with a chant in Hawai'ian culture. "We can't greet individual students with a chant when they first arrive on campus, but our general education curriculum surrounds them with the spirit of tha—it is our welcoming chant."

The College also has successfully implemented other learning-centered innovations for all students: writing across the curriculum, writing-intensive courses, information technology, Asia Pacific studies (comparative studies of American, Pacific Islander, and Asian Studies), and service learning.

Sustaining a Learning-Centered Campus Culture: A Queen's Legacy

Last July a team of KCC faculty and administrators attended the second Greater Expectations Institute on Campus Leadership for Sustainable Innovation, a gathering designed to build faculty and administrative capacity to sustain learning-centered innovations. KCC has sent teams to this institute during the past two years to develop aspects of their strategic plan. KCC is also one of the schools selected as part of the Greater Expectations Consortium on Quality Education. "It's a venue for develop something we've already been working on," says Franco. "In 2001, we worked on developing our general education outcomes and our first-year programs, and in 2002 we worked to weave the [UH strategic plan, the] Malama Hawai'i initiative into that."

The plan that emerged from the 2002 meeting is called "Achieving Greater Expectations Ka Hikina O Ka'i'ini," and launches the Malama Hawai'i initiative to become a cross-curricular emphasis. The first goal of the institute team was to "develop a student support program for Native Hawaiians and other students, incorporating the values of Queen Kapi'olani." It focuses on strengthening support for remedial and developmental learning, and plans to ensure that students graduate in a timely manner with needed skills. The detailed plan includes three additional goals that concentrate on the curriculum and students' sense of place as well as nuts-and-bolts plans to ensure the implementation of the strategic plan.

Building Faculty Commitment to Campus Change

Franco finds the institute an effective way to build teams of faculty and administrators to effect change on campus, and he especially likes that the institutes take place during the summer. He recognizes that teaching loads make it more difficult for the faculty to concentrate on effecting campus change, and the institutes give them a head start: "We really try to get faculty involved and at the same time recognize that their primary duty is to teach."

"We are committed to the importance of the summer institutes," he says, "because we use them to strengthen our emphases." He also notes that the institution's commitment to send a team of faculty to the institute was an obvious demonstration of the school's faith and interest in faculty development: "That's a big commitment from an island school—to send them to an institute as far away as Leesburg, Virginia. Faculty gets this sense of commitment and knows that the college will act upon what they bring back. Folks come back as a team and know that the institution has empowered them to do something." He believes this is essential to cultivate the next generation of campus leaders.

After sustained, non-interrupted immersion, the teams demonstrate a "synergy of thought, action, and commitment." Not only do the faculty work as a team at the institutes, but also they get a chance to exchange ideas with other campuses. Franco believes the investment is worth it: "At a community college we don't have financial resources, [so] our capital comes in the form of social capital and intellectual capital. That's what we use to make and sustain change."

For more information on The University of Hawai'i Kapi'olani Community College, visit www.kcc.hawaii.edu/.

To apply to have a team from your campus attend the 2003 Greater Expectations Institute on Campus Leadership for Student Engagement, Inclusion, and Achievement (formerly the Institute on Campus Leadership for Sustainable Innovation) in Denver, CO, bookmark www.aacu.org/meetings/gxinstitute.cfm.

To view KCC's campus statement for the Consortium on Quality Education, visit www.aacu.org/gex/campusstatements/kapiolanistatement.cfm.

To view the Malama Hawaii Initiative, visit www.kcc.hawaii.edu/~strategic/.