RCC Team Attends ESCALA Retreat to Empower Latinx Student Success

This past month, a team of Riverside City College (RCC) administrators, classified professionals, faculty, and students attended the ESCALA Moving Towards Serving (MTS) for HSI Teams professional development retreat. This training coincides with a series of ESCALA professional development opportunities RCC has invested in. The other ESCALA trainings include STEM-X (Culturally Responsive Practices for STEM Faculty Teaching Latinx Students), a Certificate in College Teaching and Learning in HSIs, and Culturally Responsive Facilitation in HSIs.

ESCALA is a leading professional development organization for Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), which educate two-thirds of Latinx students in the U.S. Its programs focus on dismantling systemic racism in higher education by empowering HSI practitioners to unapologetically transform their institutions. ESCALA aims to restore justice to historically marginalized Latinx communities, recognizing their cultural and academic strengths to foster environments that support their success. The organization is at the forefront of making Latinx student success the new standard in higher education.

The 3-day training retreat was hosted in San Jose, California, from September 25 to the 28. The purpose of this retreat was to equip the RCC team with the tools to:

• Analyze student outcomes, strategic plans, and other documents through a Latinx-focused, critical-historical lens while creating collective priorities and activities that integrate and unify efforts to enhance servingness.
• Utilize protocols that foster empathy, awareness, and space for diverse voices, ideas, and experiences while revealing and discussing the group’s intercultural competence through the use of the Intercultural Development Continuum assessment tool.

Through in-depth reflections and difficult conversations, the RCC team recognized some institutional areas in need of improvement and identified some next steps to move the institution towards serving Latinx students more intentionally. Though the team members are leading the work, they will engage with the campus community to move RCC closer to truly serving our Latinx student community.

The RCC team who attended the ESCALA retreat included Ajené Wilcoxson, Brandon Owashi, Eddie Perez, Elia Blount, Jennifer Bielman, Joanne Solis, Lauren Barajas, Lilia Acevedo, Luis Molina, Lynn Wright, Maria Manes, Melissa Harman, Virginia White, Wendy McKeen, and Yadira Perez. Other institutions represented at the retreat were Berkeley City College, Cabrillo College, California State University, Monterey Bay, Mission College, Saint Mary's College of California, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Ventura College.

Thank you to RCC’s Office of Institutional Effectiveness and the Title V grant, Proyecto Creación De Comunidad, for providing funding to make this possible.