Community Colleges and Their Students

This book employs a socio-cultural approach to study the organizational dynamics and experiences of self-formation that shape community college life. The authors use case studies to analyze both the symbolic dimension and practices that enable the production of educational experiences in seven community colleges across the U.S. Levin and Montero-Hernandez explain the construction of organizational identity and student development as a result of the connection between institutional forces and individual agency. This work emphasizes the forms and conditions of interaction among college personnel, students, and external groups that were enacted to respond to the demands and opportunities in both participants' local and larger contexts. The authors acknowledge both the collective and individual efforts of community college personnel to create caring community colleges that support nontraditional students.

John Levin is the Bank of America Professor of Education Leadership and the Director and Principal Investigator of the California Community College Collaborative (C4) at the University of California, Riverside. Previously, he was the Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor and the W. Dallas Herring Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University. From 1993 to 2002, he was affiliated with the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona. He holds a Doctorate of Education degree (Higher Education) and a B.A. (English) from the University of British Columbia and an M.A. (English Literature) from York University in Toronto. He was a college instructor and administrator for 23 years in British Columbia, Canada. His research has addressed higher education in both the United States and Canada. He is a widely published scholar in the U.S. and an acknowledged expert on community colleges in Canada. His work appears frequently in both U.S. and Canadian publications. His books in this decade--Globalizing the community college (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), Community college faculty: At work in the new economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and Nontraditional students and community colleges: The conflict of justice and neo-liberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)--are empirically based examinations of community colleges.

Virginia Montero-Hernandez is a Doctoral Candidate in Education at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Mexico City and obtained her B.A. in Educational Science in Mexico. She was awarded a scholarship from the Council of Science and Technology in Mexico to pursue her graduate studies in the United States. Her research interests focus on the study of identity formation among students and faculty members in higher education institutions. She has worked as a graduate student researcher with Dr. Levin since 2006 to develop new understandings about community colleges and to develop opportunities for research collaboration by using both the Mexican and U.S. contexts as objects of study.

Preface and Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Community Colleges Seen from an Organizational-Cultural Perspective: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations	p. 11
The Construction of Educational Experiences: Elements and Dynamics of the Complexity of College Life at Bakersfield College	p. 25
Organizational Culture and Organizational Identity: Constructions of Student Accommodation in Community College of Denver	p. 49
Discourses of Democratization: Students' Upward Mobility and the University Transfer Approach at Borough of Manhattan Community College	p. 71
Overlooked Differentiation and Student Categorization: The Hybrid Identity and the Climate of Isolation in Wake Technical Community College	p. 91
Strategic Planning and the Struggle to Generate a Responsive College: Differential Effects upon the Development of the Student Body at Harry Truman College in Illinois	p. 113
Organizational Change and Student Accommodation: Edmonds Community College as an Adaptive-Responsive Organization	p. 135
Forging Student Identity: Socialization, Development, and Contextual Tensions in Community Colleges	p. 159
Conclusions	p. 181
Appendix	p. 201
Notes	p. 203
Bibliography	p. 223
Index	p. 237
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Community Colleges and Their Students Co-construction and Organizational Identity

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