President’s Message Dear Colleagues, I am not sure how many of you are familiar with Garrison Keillor’s: “News from Lake Wobegon,” a weekly monologue about a mythical small town in Minnesota. Mr. Keillor always starts his stories by stating that “it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegone.” As he reports the week’s events, however, one comes to the conclusion that it has not been a quiet week at all.  I do not know about the rest of you, but I feel the same way about the fall semester--it has not been a quiet semester at CSM!  We have accomplished so much since Opening Day. Most significantly, we hosted a successful accreditation site visit. The members of the team were genuinely impressed with our hospitality and our collegiality. While it appears that we will receive a number of recommendations, I feel that the recommendations were fair and were in line with what we reported in our self-study. We will receive our formal report after the first of the year. We have already started work on many of the recommendations. I have been impressed with the vibrancy of our campus this semester. I can feel the energy when I walk the quad. I do not think that a week has gone by where we have not hosted some major event.  In addition, I know that many of our faculty and staff have taken on some wonderful initiatives on their own.  As I mentioned on Opening Day, we cannot expect our students to be fully engaged with our campus unless we, too, are fully engaged. There are too many events and individuals to list here, but I salute you all for making the extra effort to connect with our students.   I am pleased to see that our Center for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is off to a successful start in its inaugural semester. Our students will continue to bring an increasingly complex and ever evolving set of needs and expectations to the college. I firmly believe that we must continue to support and foster an environment of innovation and scholarly inquiry in order to meet these needs.  It is for this reason that I fully support the work of the Center for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. At the last “Talking about Teaching” forum, many of us were moved to tears as we heard directly from students who participated in the Writing in the End Zone learning community. Writing in the End Zone is just one of many innovative pedagogical approaches currently employed at CSM.  Writing in the End Zone is well-designed and the faculty who participate are absolutely dedicated to their students.   It takes a solid curriculum design, a committed faculty and staff, and administrative support to make any program work--in the case of Writing in the End Zone, the stars and the moon are in perfect alignment. Over the course of the coming year I hope that you will begin to notice some major changes in our approach to recruiting and outreach. During the fall semester we completed work on Students Speak, a research-based focus group effort.  Our questions centered on what I would call the front end:  how do students find out about us?  What is their first impression when they contact the college?  What is their experience in navigating through our system? We have learned a lot about our students through this effort, and we have made systems changes -  some small,  some large, and all of them important.  In addition, we have started on a complete redesign of our marketing materials.  Finally, we have started work on a new website that we hope to launch by summer 2008. We have a long way to go on all of these efforts but I am genuinely grateful to the talented faculty and staff in the Public Relations and Marketing Office, Research Office, Institutional Support Office, and Student Services units. I am looking forward to starting the spring 2008 semester with the new administrative team in place. I am pleased that we were able to restructure our instructional divisions to better meet the needs of the college. The fact that we have a new senior administration, that we have interim deans in three out of six instructional divisions, and that our management has turned over almost 100 percent in the last three years is a testament to the strength of the college and the trust and belief that we have in one another. In  particular, I want to thank our three interim deans: Felix Robles, Neil McCallum, and Al Naso -  they have done a wonderful  job and have greatly contributed to CSM during their short stay with us. As Mr. Keillor would say:  “that’s the news from CSM.”  I wish you all the best as you wind down the semester. I hope that you have a wonderful holiday season and a restful break. I look forward to working with you in 2008! Mike Claire

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning @ CSM
By Jean Mach

On November 28 and 29, we were honored at CSM to have visitors from the Wabash Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, a highly regarded model for SoTL Centers across the country. Charles Blaich, Director of the Wabash Center, and Steve Weisler, Teagle Assessment Scholar, came to share their experiences in The Wabash National Study, a large-scale study that involves educational leaders from around the country in creating and discussing assessment projects in order to “build ‘communities of practice’ around assessment.”

The following passage, taken from the Center of Inquiry’s website, gives an indication of the purpose and focus of their work:

“The goal of liberal arts education is to create an attitude of intellectual openness, especially to inquiry, discovery, new ideas, and varied perspectives. Liberal arts education should cultivate both the eagerness to grapple with difficult questions and the willingness to develop and enact provisional answers to these questions. Liberal arts education should lead us to carefully examine our own and others’ beliefs, actions, and values.

The Center of Inquiry collaborates with researchers, faculty, administrators, and the public to gather high quality evidence on the outcomes of liberal arts education. Although we believe liberal arts education impacts a wide range of important qualities, our research currently focuses on:

    * Integration of Learning
    * Lifelong Learning
    * Effective Reasoning and Problem Solving
    * Moral Character
    * Intercultural Effectiveness
    * Leadership
    * Well-being”

(quotations from the Wabash Center’s website: www.liberalarts.wabash.edu).

Charlie’s presentation, entitled “Do we really accomplish what we hope for our students? Conditions and practices that impact student learning," made it clear that all types of educational institutions, public and private, large and small, two-year and four-year, share similar challenges in educating their students and have much to learn from one another.  The study results that Charlie discussed with us were often fascinating, surprising, and/or complex, yet one simple point stood out:  The “how” of an institution’s interactions with its students is even more important than the “what.” 

Over the two days of the visit, Charlie and Steve talked with faculty, administrators, and students, gave us ideas for developing our own assessment practices, and briefly summarized, before they left, what they were learning from these conversations.  As they had indicated earlier, often they are only helping an institution focus what it already knows.  To paraphrase Charlie’s impressions, we are making good progress in many ways, but our students speak of a wide range in the quality of their experiences here.  Such friendly and honest feedback will, I hope, lead to many more conversations with them and with each other here at CSM, helping us to develop that “eagerness to grapple with difficult questions” as well as that “willingness to develop and enact provisional answers.”

This site visit was a generous gift from the Wabash Center of Inquiry and a benefit of CSM’s participation in the CASTL Institutional Leadership Program.  The materials from the presentation are available in the SoTL Center.

Associated Students Fund Longer Library Hours
Thanks to Associated Students and CSM’s Library, students will have a suitable place on campus in the evening to study for finals this semester.  The Student Senate met with Director of Library and Learning Resources Lorrita Ford to discuss what it would take to keep the library open for extended hours during the last two weeks of the semester so that students can remain on campus and have an appropriate place to study. As a pilot project, Associated Students will provide the funding to cover staffing expenses for the Library’s longer hours. At the end of the semester, the students and Library staff will evaluate the usage during this time to determine if it will be repeated.

Authors Announced for President’s Lecture Series, Spring 2008
The President’s Lecture Series: Diverse Voices in Writing will continue in spring 2008 with three notable authors.

• On February 13, the series will host Naomi Helena Quiñonez, poet, educator and an American studies scholar. Her two books, Hummingbird Dream/Sueño de Colibri and The Smoking Mirror, have received critical acclaim. Her forthcoming book of poetry is entitled The Exiled Moon.  She co-edited an award winning anthology Invocation L.A: Urban Multicultural Poetry and the highly regarded critical anthology Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Studies in 21st Century. Currently, Quiñonez is a lecturer at San Francisco State University’s College of Ethnic Studies.
  
  
• On March 13, the college will welcome Adrienne Rich, award-winning poet and author. In 1951, at the age of 21, she received the Yale Younger Poets Award. More recently, Rich was the recipient of the 1999 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Common Wealth Award in Literature, the National Book Award, the 1996 Tanning Award for Mastery in the Art of Poetry, and the MacArthur Fellowship. In 2003, Rich was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. She is the author of more than 16 volumes of poetry, including, Diving into the Wreck, The Dream of a Common Language, The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001, An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991, Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970, Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995, Midnight Salvage, Fox, and The School Among The Ruins, as well as the prose book Of Woman Born. She has also authored five books of non-fiction prose, including Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution and What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. Her newest book of poems is Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth.
  
  
• The final installment for the spring semester will feature Dr. Stephen Bezruchka on April 23. Dr. Bezruchka is a senior lecturer at University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine where he was named Teacher of the Year in 2002; he works as an emergency room physician in Seattle. Dr. Bezruchka’s particular areas of research are population health and societal hierarchy and its application to health. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including: Altitude Illness: Prevention and Treatment and Trekking in Nepal: A Traveler’s Guide.

CSM Students Hold Mock Primary and Political Forum

For their honors project, students in instructor Erin Scholnick’s American Politics classes recently coordinated and participated in a mock presidential primary and political forum. Students represented candidates by speaking about their views on education, health care, immigration and the Iraqi war. They also conducted a mock presidential primary election with a “ranked choice” ballot which resulted in a ranking of candidates.

Representatives from the League of Women Voters, Congressman Tom Lantos’s office and the Democratic Club of San Mateo also participated. The League brought voting machines and allowed people to test them out; Democratic Club registered new voters and both groups talked to students about volunteering on campaigns. Members of Phi Beta Kappa were available to provide information about the election and conducted a survey to determine political knowledge.

AIDS Quilt Displayed at CSM

The college celebrated AIDS Awareness Week from December 3-6 with a number of important events including the display of the AIDS memorial quilt in the Staff Dining Room. The quilt has evolved into one of the most important tools used in AIDS education. It has helped teach compassion, triumphs over taboo, stigma and phobia, and inspires individuals to take direct responsibility for their own well being and that of others close to them. To accompany the quilt display, Mike Smith, the executive director of the AIDS Emergency Fund and Co-founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, presented a keynote speech. John Andrews from the San Mateo County AIDS Program was on hand to provide information and hold information conversations. Free HIV testing was available through the college Health Center and the Asian/Pacific Islander Wellness Center provided Aids prevention and wellness information. AIDS Awareness Week activities were sponsored by the Diversity In Action Group (DIAG), the Associated Students, Health Center and the Gay Straight Alliance.

Rocket Launching Makes News (& Some Noise)

On Nov. 16, ESL students in Brandon Smith and Amy Sobel’s classes participated in an innovative activity to celebrate the completion of reading October Sky – by launching rockets from a campus parking lot. October Sky by Homer Hickam is an inspirational memoir about four boys growing up in a coal mining town in West Virginia and the challenges and growth the boys experience by building rockets. In addition to the students, the audience included a crowd of children from the Child Development Center that was enthralled by the display. Reporters from local newspapers also attended and stories with photos were carried in a number of the dailies. The goal of launching the rockets was to enhance the learning experience and make the book more of a real experience for the students.

Spring 2008 Outreach Activities
In a continuing effort to increase enrollment for the spring 2008 semester, Student Support and the PR/Marketing offices joined forces to staff an information table at Hillsdale Shopping Center on November 16-18. According to Alex Guiriba, program services coordinator, more than 100 people took time from their holiday shopping to visit the information table. Additional recent outreach activities include direct visits to Laurelwood and Crystal Springs Shopping Centers and downtown San Mateo to distribute promotional materials and schedules.  A CSM banner promoting enrollment for spring 2008 will be prominently displayed in downtown San Mateo from December 17-January 17.

CSM Draws Local Jazz Talent

The music department and Associated Students of CSM recently sponsored the 11th annual CSM Jazz Festival, featuring 14 of the Bay Area’s top high school jazz bands performing.

The Festival also included a noon concert by CSM’s Evening Jazz Ensemble with special guest artist John Santos and free clinics for trumpet, trombone, saxophone and rhythm sections. More than four hundred students, parents and staff attended the event.

Accomplishments

• Students in Jude Pittman’s new Mosaic Mural II class will be making a tile and glass mosaic that will be installed on Building 1 in April 2008. Future mosaic mural students will make murals for CSM and the larger community.  Watch for these beautiful additions to our campus!
  
  In addition, mosaics from this semester’s Mosaic Mural class as well as ceramics and sculpture by CSM students, will be exhibited in the Coastside Student Invitational exhibit at the Sanchez Art Center, at the Pacifica Center for the Arts, January 11 through January 23.The student show will be held concurrently with the John Toki exhibit, “Echoes of the Earth.” Mr. Toki is an internationally known ceramicist.
  
  
• Earlier this year, Professor of Photography Richard Lohmann trekked to China’s Huangshan Mountains to create images for his Atmosphere portfolio. Funded by a grant from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Lohmann traveled with a guide and translator who took him to areas not available to the general public. He spent weeks hiking and exploring the Huangshan Mountains, also known as the Yellow Mountains, with their unique fog and mists. As part of his grant, Lohmann will have an exhibit of his work in the photography department’s Genesis Gallery (Building 4, Room 263) in February and March. His work is currently on display in a group show titled, New Directions, in the Aperture Gallery at Mumm Winery in Napa. To view the blog “Richard Lohmann in China,” visit http://richardstriptochina.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html.
  
  
• Ted Tollner, head coach of CSM’s football team in the early 1970s, was recently hired as an assistant to the San Francisco 49ers offensive coordinator. The selection proved to be a wise one; in Tollner’s first game with team, the 49ers finally made it into the end zone and ended an eight-game skid in a 37-31 victory over the Arizona Cardinals. Tollner was formerly the 49ers offensive coordinator and served in that same capacity for the San Diego Chargers and Detroit Lions. He was also a college head coach, achieving marked success. At USC, he won a Rose Bowl. While at San Diego State University, he was voted Western Athletic Conference Coach of the Year.  

Sports Update
Follow the success of CSM’s football and cross country teams.

• Football
  CSM’s football team won its third consecutive Bulldog Bowl on November 17, beating Diablo Valley College by two touchdowns for a 28-14 victory. The late season surge catapulted the team in three community college polls. With an overall record of 7-3, CSM ended the season ranked 14th in the nation by J.C. Grid-Wire/JC Football.com. In polls conducted by the California Community Colleges Football Coaches Association, the bulldogs ranked 11th in the state and 7th in Northern California.
  
  More good news followed the bowl triumph when the All NORCAL Conference team was announced. Seven bulldogs were selected to the first team: offensive linemen Tevita Halaholo and Anthony Arellanes; running back Daniel Porter; wide receiver Ed Berry; all purpose player Kevion Jones; defensive lineman Bernard Wolfgramm; and linebacker Hansen Sekona. Two made the second team: linebacker Andre Portis and quarterback David Singleton. Linebacker Kurt Filler, defensive lineman Chris Havili and defensive back Rolando Oliver made the honorable mention team.
  
  State and All America teams have yet to be announced.
  
  
• Cross Country
  The California Community Colleges Athletic Association (CCCAA), in partnership with the California Community College Sports Information Association (CCCSIA), selected CSM’s cross country runner Caitlin Roake as the CCCAA Student Athlete of the Month for October. The announcement was made in mid-November. Roake led CSM’s women cross country team to its first Coast Conference championship in the school’s history on October 24, winning the three-mile cross country race by nearly two minutes to remain undefeated and top-ranked in Northern California. In early November, Roake continued her winning ways by racing to first place in the Northern California Championships November 3 and qualified individually for the State Championships.