Sudie Whalen could have made some serious money working in information technology at Google, but the pull of adult education teaching was too strong for her to pass up.
“I instantly fell in love with it,” Whalen said of her first teaching job, which was a community-interest class on photo editing. “It was the coolest thing just to be sharing something that I liked to do that other people wanted to get an education on for fun.”
Whalen may have had the world at her fingertips by this point in her career, but her journey to get there was hard-earned. Pregnant at 16 and forced to drop out of high school, she took a clear-eyed look at her situation at that age and persevered, though not without the assistance of mentors and her family, specifically her father, who helped Whalen reach successes she believes she couldn’t have attained on her own.
This content made up the first half of the “adult-learner story” Whalen told to a large audience as the keynote speaker of the 2024 Forum for Excellence in East Peoria, where the topics centered on the importance of partnerships in the fields of career, technical, and adult education (CTAE) in Illinois. During the second half of her talk, Whalen related inspiring student-success stories generated through such partnerships.
OCCRL Sessions
Members of the Office of Community College Research and Leadership (OCCRL), including Director Lorenzo Baber, attended the two-day event to lead sessions on the state of developmental reform in Illinois and discuss ways to infuse culturally relevant pedagogy in campus equity plans implemented by the state.
“The annual Forum for Excellence conference is a critical space for connecting various parts of the educational ecosystem – researchers, policymakers, administrative leaders, and students – to address issues impeding goals of individual belonging and systemic forms of equity across community colleges in Illinois,” Dr. Baber said.
Baber and Deana Schenk, the senior director for student success and learning renewal at the Illinois Community College Board (ICCB), led off their talk on developmental education reform by discussing the Developmental Education Reform Act passed in 2021, and what it emphasizes.
In a 2023 survey on developmental education reform sent to 34 colleges in Illinois, faculty, students, and high school advisors shed light on the most common challenges in this area right now: lack of outcomes, lack of buy-in, lack of resources, and lack of logistics.
The survey revealed that students were resistant to co-requisite courses, possibly due to unfamiliarity with them as well as a lack of explanation on the new curriculum, according to Baber. This spurred discussion at the session on the cost of credit hours and the time commitment in developmental education. One participant said that, to her institution’s surprise, it was the additional support and time with instructors, not the saving of time and money, that most rallied students around developmental education.
The survey also showed the importance of cross-collaboration with units such as student services, and how creating working groups across campus for student placement is crucial. Institutions using preexisting committees that add developmental education as a standing agenda item was also helpful, Baber said.
He added it is important to create new, proactive working groups that put forth updated progress reports during meetings and work in a proactive manner so that curriculum and scaling around developmental education is more of a partnership. Another survey recommendation was offering professional development around what co-requisite models are, particularly for faculty.
Survey participants were asked what support services they would most like to see from ICCB, and information sharing was at the top of the list. Participants asked for increased virtual or in-person opportunities to talk to colleagues in formal and informal spaces as well as at statewide regional meetings. Training for instructors around curriculum and scaling was also suggested.
As part of a state-mandated effort, OCCRL graduate research assistant Naomi Simmons-Thorne discussed the background and importance of integrating culturally responsive principles (CRP) into classrooms and pathways during her talk with Baber.
“CRP, however you want to conceptualize it, what we’re trying to do is promote student achievement, and we’re trying to do that by being sensitive to students’ cultural backgrounds, because those cultural backgrounds inform the educational process,” Simmons-Thorne said.
Putting CRP into motion, Simmons-Thorne said, involves setting high academic expectations and practicing cultural competence and critical consciousness, the latter of which entails sharing power with students and having sensitivity to historical injustices within career clusters and pathways. She emphasized the value in remembering the CRP principles of sense of belonging and validation in career and technical education classrooms.
President Panel
The professional development aspect of the event was in full display during the President Panel with community college presidents Michael Boyd (Kankakee College), Janine Janosky (Richard J. Daley College), Pam Lau (Parkland College), and Terry Wilkerson (Rend Lake College). Led by moderator Jennifer Foster, deputy executive director of ICCB, the panelists answered questions centering on student issues such as wraparound supports, sense of belonging, mental health, and food insecurity. Foster also asked how the panelists’ institutions engage with partners, how they define partnerships, and what the “gold standard” is when it comes to partnerships.
President Janosky spoke about Daley College’s Weekend Warriors collaboration with the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), an organization in Chicago and Atlanta that works to improve those cities through social change, the arts, and a health center. The Weekend Warriors program offers individuals who have recently been released from prison the chance to enroll in, as full-time students, an advanced certification program in industrial welding. Graduates also receive college credits and can continue their postsecondary education.
Janosky called Weekend Warriors “a violence-reduction program” because students are asked to not leave the campus during specific hours as they study and work on their training during the weekends—the most violent days of the week in Chicago.
“It’s less likely that they might be involved in certain incidents,” Janosky said.
In addition to their education and training, participants of Weekend Warriors are offered behavioral health therapy, select weekend excursions, meals, weekly stipends, and much more. The program is currently on its sixth cohort, with a graduation rate of more than 90% within each one, according to Janosky.
“Not only does IMAN have different types of resources than the college does, but together, we can then provide a substantial amount of resources to every one of those students who are enrolled in that program,” Janosky said.
The event’s keynote speaker, Sudie Whalen, is now a senior technical assistance consultant at the American Institutes for Research in Sacramento. She works mostly on the California Adult Literacy Professional Development Project as an online course coordinator. The intentionality and integrated approach Whalen used to work through her own issues earlier in life is how she and others in her work have helped numerous CTE students thrive in their studies and attain solid jobs afterward. Never underestimate the willingness of organizations to collaborate and assist, Whalen told the audience.
“What I found out was when it comes to helping students, people are really willing to partner if that means it’s going to make a better impact on society,” she said. “I didn’t meet a single employer who was uninterested in helping students.”