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| The PCI Pathways program's lead tutors in 2020, before the pandemic. |
Amid early news reports about a deadly new virus in China in early 2020, Dr. Cynthia Park gathered her Pre-College Institute (PCI) team and delivered a simple message.
This will soon be here, it’s going to impact us and we need to be ready.
“We're in such a large system, that I knew it was going to be difficult to make decisions in real time,” said Park, professor in the School of Teacher Education and founder and executive director of PCI. “So what I tried to do was to preempt — to say this is going to happen and that we need to look at the whole year, not piece by piece.
“I said to the team, we have two weeks to talk to these students before we have to shift. Let's get them prepared for what it means to go online with us.”
At a time when universities across the country struggled with a sudden lurch to online education, PCI and its students thrived thanks to foresight, collaboration and a student-centered focus. More than a year later, a PCI team of Liz Buffington, School of Teacher Education lecturer; Park; Nadia Rohlinger, director of service learning; and Katie Bodie, tutor specialist, recounted the experience and the lessons learned in an article published recently in the Journal of Higher Education Management.
Founded in 1983, PCI promotes college access and completion for underserved students. The article focuses on the pandemic response for the organization’s TE362-Fieldwork in Community Settings course and its Pathways program, which places undergraduate students as tutors in K-12 schools in four districts across San Diego County. Integral to the success of PCI’s service-learning programs, the Pathways office works to deliver the best experience for service-learning Pell-eligible tutors in class, in open office hours and in fieldwork coaching to prepare students for careers beyond college graduation.
“We were able to focus on the instruction through a student-centered lens, because the four of us were clear that that was the main goal,” said Buffington, who taught TE362. “We knew that if we anchored everything from the student's experience and perspective that we would have a successful semester.”
Buffington’s own expertise in digital learning spaces certainly helped; she quickly mastered Zoom instruction and used Google Base to create interactive agendas. But the real key, she said, was creating space — be it in office hours or in class itself — to check in with students individually and see how they were doing and what they needed.
“We made it about them,” Buffington said. “I think that's why they came back to class every single day and they met every single learning objective that was on our syllabus before COVID happened. And they met it with mastery and with exceeding mastery.”
It was a similar success story with the Pathways program, which began the Spring 2020 semester with 106 service-learning tutors. Ultimately, 68 stayed on through the pandemic and the shift to virtual tutoring. Rohlinger credits a quick embrace of technology, as well as their dogged organizational push to find university funding sources to continue paying tutors — particularly important since half come from low-income backgrounds and many had lost jobs at the start of the pandemic.
Pathways staff also supported students through virtual open office hours, which allowed student tutors to share their pandemic-related fears and frustrations.
“I think we operated very much from an ethic of care and putting our students at the center,” Bodie said. “I think for all of us, that was calming.”
Added Rohlinger: "Shifting rapidly makes you really evaluate what we keep, what we need to address and change and what we can discontinue.”
Park said she hopes sharing the PCI experience through the article will serve as a model for how organizations can adapt to unexpected crises.
“The Pre-College Institute, through the Pathways office, is showing a microcosm of what the future can look like,” she said. “Under the conditions of panic and a crisis that was very real, we were able to have our heads around being change-ready. I think what we all wrote about is a model for change-readiness, and that's what I'm hoping we can build on.”
