The Pedagogy of Statewide Developmental Education Reform Policy

• In Event: Honoring the (Often) Invisible: Community College Faculty in an Era of Reform

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore what Cohen and Barnes (1993) have termed “the pedagogy of policy,” in relation to large-scale reform efforts targeted at improving developmental education. Drawing on the specific case of Colorado Community College System’s developmental education redesign, I examined the goals for curriculum and instruction specified throughout the redesign documentation, identified the scope and nature of the learning required of faculty members to enact those goals, and interrogated the conceptualization of faculty learning embedded in the CCCS’ developmental taskforce’s redesign efforts. Ultimately, the resulting analysis maintains important implications for supporting faculty engaged in developmental education reform.

Over the past decade, community colleges across the US have witnessed large-scale efforts to reform developmental education programming (e.g. California’s Basic Skills Initiative, Virginia and North Carolina’s system-wide developmental education redesign. In 2011, the Colorado Community College System established its developmental education taskforce, and mandated a complete statewide redesign with full implementation for Fall, 2014. As in other statewide reform efforts, community colleges throughout Colorado have revised the structures and curricula of their developmental math and developmental English offerings in light of the extant research on improving developmental education.

Ostensibly, the ultimate goal of these ambitious reforms is two-fold: to decrease the amount of time that students spend in remediation, and to improve the course and degree completion rates of students who enroll in remedial coursework. Accordingly, much of the emerging research on these reforms focuses on these basic measures of student success (e.g. Cho et al., 2012; Edgecombe et al., 2013). Considerably less attention has been directed at the role of faculty members in enacting the instructional changes—despite the fact that the success of developmental education reform hinges on the capacity of the faculty members who are teaching the redesigned courses. (Bickerstaff & Cormier, 2015; Bickerstaff et al., 2014; Cox, 2015).

Faculty members’ participation in these system-wide reform projects is shaped by the policymaking processes that occur prior to the actual implementation of the reforms. In the case of the Colorado Community College System developmental education redesign, this included the 1½ year period during which the system’s Developmental Education Taskforce reviewed the existing research and developed the set of recommendations that were ultimately applied across the state’s community colleges. This policymaking process is documented on the CCCS website, in the form of a process narrative, the taskforce’s recommendations, meeting minutes, and a resource sharing hub. As a whole, this documentation renders visible the decision-making process and offers a means of interrogating the role of faculty members in the envisioned redesign.

Applying a critical policy discourse analysis approach (Fairclough, 1993; Taylor, 1997) to this set of documents, I explored the following—as suggested by Cohen and Barnes’ (1993) discussion of the pedagogy of educational policies: (a) how do these documents frame the explicit and implicit goals for classroom-level teaching and learning? (b) what vision of faculty learning is embedded in redesign policies? (c) what are the implications of the slippages between (a) and (b)?

Author

• Rebecca D. Cox, Simon Fraser University