Welcome to the Lane Community College Faculty

Faculty Connections is an institutionalized, faculty-led opportunity for the faculty at Lane Community College to welcome and integrate colleagues into its ranks.  Such colleagues include any newly hired colleague, permanent colleagues on probation, and adjunct colleagues wanting a broader connection to the faculty and college.  Established colleagues participate as mentors providing connections across the college. 

More detailed and historical information about Faculty Connections is found throughout this site. The site mainly contains resources for new colleagues and for sustaining connections among colleagues.  In addition to facilitating this collection of specific resources and a hearty welcome, as Faculty Connections Coordinator, I offer the following perspective:
 
First, as a faculty member in a community college, you are part of a complex institution.  Its mission includes transfer credit to higher education programs, pre-college developmental education, career-technical programs, and stand-alone community education classes primarily aimed at self-enrichment.  This means faculty colleagues come from diverse traditions of what constitutes being a faculty member and diverse expectations about the role of the faculty in a college.  There are many ways to draw from these diverse traditions and practices to create your identity as a faculty member.  I encourage you to find support in these traditions and practices for the highest levels of professionalism in academic responsibility, service, scholarship, governance, collegiality and solidarity.

Second, take the time to celebrate our important educational responsibility in the college’s service district and more generally.  In the learning environments we create, students transform themselves in ways that often go beyond what they imagined as possible.  Seek out colleagues to share this challenge and satisfaction.

Third, most community colleges were created in the tumult of the 1960s’ demand for expanded access to higher education for traditionally excluded populations of women, people of color, and blue-collar working class families.  Community colleges were also created to widen access to the larger number of highly skilled jobs expected in the last half of the 20th Century.  Community colleges like LCC were a historic step forward, and also a compromise with counter-forces, which avoided building more 4-year colleges and universities, and which severely constrained traditional faculty leadership to models more akin to traditional K-12 schools.  Similar counter-forces challenge us today to provide broader access to quality college education, access to pathways to good jobs, and support for faculty professional leadership.  As community college faculty members committed to student learning, we find ourselves also making a broad social contribution, which is also worth taking time to celebrate.

Finally, it is worth remembering that while you are a member of a specific department/division of LCC, you are also a member of a profession or discipline that is global in extent.  There are often considerable resources created by specific professions and disciplines.  There may be lively research and discussions about effective teaching in your discipline that you can make use of or engage in.  I encourage you to join with colleagues to continue to develop your participation in these wider professional communities while you become an active part of our local college faculty community, whether you are here permanently or will make LCC one stop in your career journey.

I hope you experience the warmth and welcome of colleagues at Lane, and find this site and Faculty Connections useful.  The Faculty Connections Steering Committee welcomes your suggestions to improve this website and the Faculty Connections program.

Liz Coleman
Faculty Connections Coordinator