To counter the narratives about African American males in special education, my poetic account represents the voice of a gifted AA male with dyslexia. I applied critical disability theory to learn, and become mindful, about my academic journey and how my identity was shaped. As an auto-ethnographer, I examined my schooling to understand my…

Much of the scholarship on Black males in the educational literature focuses on the achievement gap; their underrepresentation in gifted and advanced placement programs; their overrepresentation in special education programs and their high rates of school suspensions and expulsions. Although overrepresented in special education, Black males with…

Remedial mathematics has taken several forms over the years--across the nation, within departments, and among mathematics instructors. There is a growing debate over the effectiveness of remedial courses in relationship to eventual student matriculation, which increases institution funding. The use of technology, real-life problems and projects,…

This report discusses the attributes of an effective department chair, including the characteristics of the individual and how the chair enhances the opportunity of each faculty member to do his or her job best. The roles of the department chair are many. Each role that a chair plays must in some way advance excellence in teaching and learning.…

This paper describes three main types of underprepared students: academically underprepared, emotionally underprepared, and culturally underprepared. The category that most faculty, counselors, and administrators tend to focus on is the academically underprepared. Remedial and student skills courses, free peer tutoring, and tutorials on videotapes…

Teaching critical thinking is what employers ask of educators and what teachers expect from their students. This paper attempts to reestablish the importance of critical thinking and how Valencia Community College's (Florida) critical thinking competency can be developed using several teaching models. A discussion is provided on the background of…

Multicultural education relates to the infusion of all cultures into the current standard curriculum. Culture consists of ways of thinking, values, reactions to problems and situations, and many other things. Deep culture refers to the features that are not visible. The deep culture of a group explores intrinsic and subtle features. This paper…

This paper begins with a history of the tumultuous beginning of Arkansas's two-year college system. The system has gone through three major eras with the third, and current, era beginning in 1991. As a result of commissions sponsored by local businesses and the Carnegie Foundation in 1991, legislation was passed to convert 13 of the 24 vocational…

This paper discusses fostering a sense of unity across multiple campuses of a community college. It defines multi-campus community colleges (M3C) as a community college district composed of more than one site where learning is to take place. Unity is considered the state at which the students, faculty, and staff on the various college campuses and…

This article reviews the basic principles of Total Quality Management (TQM) and how they can be applied to the administration of community colleges. TQM is a customer (student)-focused, continuous-improvement, quality-oriented way of thinking about all aspects of operating an organization that is shared and practiced by all employees (faculty and…

This paper compares community college faculty salaries in Florida and the nation, discusses the effects of unions on salaries, and addresses reasons for faculty continuing in education despite lower pay. Community college faculty salaries have increased an average of 51% throughout the United States in the last decade, with some states being as…

The associate of arts (AA) major was implemented at Valencia Community College (VCC) in Florida as one of the goals set by an ACE-Kellogg roundtable for 1997. This degree was proposed with the intent of assisting students in making better decisions about choosing careers, majors, and courses. The AA major is equivalent to the current AA degree…