Overview
Advocate, Create, and Transform (ACT) Hispanic-Serving Institutions to Improve Student Experiences is a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project conducted in collaboration with two California community colleges–Fullerton College (FC) and Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC). The aims of the project, funded by the Student Experience Research Network, were to transform the ways HSI community colleges use research to develop educational structures that serve Latine/x students in practice and to foster collaborations that can inform HSI policy advocacy and resource creation.
Our approach was to launch 12-month transformation teams at FC and SRJC. The transformation teams were created by the presidents of each campus, Dr. Cynthia Olivo (FC) and Dr. Angélica Garcia (SRJC), who served as collaborators on the project. They used a shared governance approach to create the teams, ensuring that there was equal representation from faculty, classified staff, management, and students. The teams met monthly with a stark focus on translating HSI research to practice as guided by PI Garcia’s book Transforming HSIs for Equity & Justice. Team members were assigned “homework” which included reading chapters in the book and completing assigned pages in the Transforming HSIs for Equity & Justice: A Practitioner’s Workbook. As part of the experience, the transformation teams engaged in PAR, identifying problems and collecting data to illuminate the issues. All team members then broke into 5 PAR teams on each campus and developed a set of solutions and action plans for implementing servingness on their campus. Listen to the outcomes of the project on this episode of ¿Qué pasa, HSIs?: Transformation Teams Leading HSIs.
The HEART Lab also conducted interviews with Transformation Team members. This study focused on how members became “HSI-minded,” which includes a foundational understanding of HSI federal definitions and Title V grants, as well as a deeper concept of servingness beyond federal criteria. It aims to document how members apply empirical research to reshape educational practices for Latine students, with the goal of informing how change happens in organizations committed to serving Latine students. The HEART Lab is currently analyzing the data and will present and publish the findings soon.