Transformational Change in Community Colleges

Book excerpt: From the foreword by Walter G. Bumphus, President & CEO of AACC: “Becoming an Equity-Centered Higher Education Institution is a significant contribution to the on-going struggle to find practical approaches to implementing an equity agenda in higher education.” The authors had three main goals for this text: Relevance: This book is the result of many years of teaching, leading, researching, and coaching individuals and institutions about equity inside higher education. The authors place a clear emphasis on awareness and teaching skills first, but also ensure that those skills are based on practical application in the field. Practical Application: To describe and explain equity and transformational change concepts, this book provides step-by-step implementation approaches that can be used to integrate equity-centered principles into practices and policies to implement or improve equity work into the organizational culture. A Purposeful Approach: The authors defined the act of becoming an equity-centered institution in terms of a transformational change approach using Kotter’s Eight-Stage Process. Kotter’s Model and AACC’s Leadership Competencies for Community College Leaders are introduced in Chapter 1 and integrated throughout the book. This integrated framework allows practitioners to place the intersectionality of equity, transformational change, and requisite leadership competencies into the larger context of higher education. While using Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model, the authors emphasize that operations and situations inside higher educational institutions are not linear as implied in Kotter’s model. They show how the stages of change may occur at different times and different situations at different institutions, and demonstrate what leadership competencies are recommended for each stage in the change process.