Kate Connor, PhD, Professor at Harry S. Truman College: The Magic Sauce of Working with Adult Learners

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, where I interview leaders and innovators for insights into creating a future-ready workforce.

As many listeners know, I have a soft spot for community colleges because of the years I spent as Executive Vice Chancellor leading the workforce mission of California’s statewide system, so I’m always glad to have a chance to talk to thoughtful leaders from that world. I met Kate Connor when we spent time together on the National Skills Coalition’s Care Workforce Advisory Council, and I’m happy to have her for my guest today.

Kate, who is currently a professor at the Harry S. Truman College in the City Colleges of Chicago System, has spent the last two decades as an educator and leader at community colleges with an underlying mission of making higher education more coherent, equitable, and responsive to community needs. Her track record includes initiatives to strengthen the early care and education workforce, build out career and technical education pathways, and support working adults, including multilingual learners.

Thanks very much for joining us today, Kate.

Kate Connor

Thank you. I’m really excited to be here and have this conversation with you.

Van

Well, let’s get started by having you give us a better understanding of your background and why you’ve devoted your career to the mission of the community colleges.

Kate

Yeah, you know, I started at community colleges actually as a part-time tutor and intern and I loved it. I really enjoyed it. I was working in the field of early childhood and then needed to do some hours in graduate school and the opportunity presented itself to work at Harold Washington College, which is one of the colleges in the City College’s system downtown.

So, for a while I worked there part time and a few of the other colleges in our system part time while working in the field. Then an opportunity for a tenure track position came up and I applied and earned that and was really excited to be on that journey.  I have loved working in community colleges ever since. The way community colleges approach education reminds me a lot about the way the system that I work in approaches education. Thinking about community and what our community needs and how we can collaborate just reminds me so much of early childhood. It felt like being home in the field except in a new field. So, I’ve really enjoyed it.

I have taken on different roles across the system, and I’ve worked at four of our institutions, so it’s been really neat to see the way the community college mission lives in itself — even within the city of Chicago — how each college has its own unique relationship with the community, its own way of working with students, its own dynamics. It’s a really wonderful system and way to be a part of education within the city of Chicago.

Van

Well, let’s go big picture for a moment. I’d just love to get your take on what role community colleges are playing in the US right now and what support you think is needed from the government or other stakeholders to be more effective.

Kate

I truly believe we are the workhorses of education when it comes to higher ed. You know, we play such an important role in access and equity and innovation. I look at the early childhood faculty that I am lucky enough to call colleagues across the state of Illinois, and it is just one of the most innovative groups. Having served as chief academic officer at Truman, I got to see a lot of different industries and how industries work even across the state with higher ed, and I will say that community colleges are just really open to the conversation. They’re really curious about what do you want from folks when they’re coming through the program? How can we work together?

So, I think we play this really unique role because we balance this idea of a general education and liberal arts education, how it is very important, and at the same time, you can integrate in skills that get you ready for industry. They don’t have to work against each other. They can collaborate and kind of occur at the same time in a really kind of synergistic way and I think that we lose that sometimes when we just talk about higher ed or when we just talk about vocational education, where really they can dance together and I think community colleges do that dance so beautifully .

And truly, I think many folks, at least on the higher ed side, don’t realize what a dominant role we play in higher education access. For instance, the number of people who are actually in higher education at a community college within early childhood – this is as of a year or two ago when I looked at that data — there’s a good 50% plus of the early childhood workforce that were enrolled in community colleges.

I mean, we are such a big part of the space of higher education and we’re often ignored in the research and we’re often ignored in the funding, but we still get it done. And that’s what I think is really special about community colleges is that we know how to get it done. Even when we’re not always represented in the many roles and identities community colleges play, we sit at this beautiful intersection of higher education, getting jobs, getting access to that bachelor’s degree.

We have an alumni of Truman who just got her bachelor’s degree from Yale and did a social media post opening her diploma and how amazing that is and wonderful and exciting, and at the same time, I have teachers that I’ve worked with in my teaching of early childhood who now are public school teachers in Chicago working in the neighborhood they grew up in. We just play such an important role across all of those spaces.

Van

Well, Kate, pulling on the thread of your words, are intersection and dancing together. One of the reasons we connected was through the National Skills Coalition Care Workforce Advisory Council. In the past on this podcast, when we talked about the future of the care or the care economy, it was more about the healthcare workforce and you come from early childhood education — which is also part of the care economy, if you brought more broadly defined it — and both of these economies draw largely from the female workforce. So, I wonder if you could just comment on why you were interested in being a part of the Council and some of the points that you were advocating.

Kate

Yeah, the Council was really interesting and it was it was really exciting. I don’t know if this is how it works in on the medical side, but on the early childhood side, we often don’t reach across aisles and hear from each other. So for us to come together in the way that we did talking about the idea that everybody needs care at some point in their life, and some of us are the ones giving the care. Who does the work and how do we support them is really important.

In general, I think the cross line that we saw for everything that we discussed is that care work is high skill and low wage, so how do we start pulling those things together where we recognize the skills needed and support that. Early childhood has done a lot of work in this space. We’ve worked together to define our profession and that had its own challenges within our field. We had to debate, we had to discuss, we didn’t always agree kind of who was in the definition of early childhood and who wasn’t. We’ve done that at a national level and then states have also done that.

I think what I was really curious about is what are the learnings we can have for all of us in the care industry to do work within our own professions and have those conversations within our own disciplines? But then also thinking about what are the policy levers and the conversations we can have at a national and state level to think about how do we help this workforce that is high skill, low wage?

These are high stress jobs. In many cases, we’re interacting with families in really sensitive, difficult or big identity changes. In early childhood, it’s not just the child we’re working with…we’re also working with parents who are going through big identity shifts. When you’re doing home healthcare, you’re working not only with your patient, but the families that are dealing with a really tough diagnosis or big transitions. And so there’s all this additional load on top of the high skill that’s needed. I think if we come together, we can communicate about the care workforce in a new way that hopefully helps leverage change that we need for those doing the work every day and deserve the pay and deserve the support financially, but also reputationally. Like, I respect what you’re doing. I think a lot of times folks in the care workforce don’t feel respected.

Van

I was wondering, Kate, what do you mean when you talk about professionalizing this workforce? Is it just developing the skills or articulating skills, or is there more?

Kate

That’s a great question, and we have whole books written on that. I struggle with the idea of professionalization because folks are already professionals. The journey that we went on in our professionalization in early childhood was really defining what is early childhood? What ages are we caring for? That means for us — when we think about the National Association for the Education of Young Children — we’re thinking about having responsibility of the care for children birth through eight. And then we started to have that definition of what does that mean? Who does that work? Are we talking pediatricians? Well, no, we’re not talking pediatricians. Are we talking individuals who work in museums? Are we talking about childcare? Are we talking about classrooms?

So the professionalization effort within NAEYC really tried to help — almost like with a scalpel — figure out the group that we’re really trying to target and address. How we think about what are the skills if you’re doing group care with young children? What are the skills needed to help a child who’s two or three understand that they’re one of many in a classroom? What are the cognitive skills, academic, math, literacy skills that we’re hoping children achieve? What is the theoretical framework with which we want to approach that? How do we integrate in families and think about communities?

All of that was part of our professionalization discussion that took multiple years and multiple iterations and cycles. The way that’s lived out across the country is different states have kind of adopted it in different ways. So for Illinois, we’ve adopted that into a credential structure where people can enter at various levels and build on top of their skills to get credentials that we all agree in Illinois meet the needs of that workforce. So again, we’ve done what we kind of do in education a lot, which is we have a crosswalk of a crosswalk of competencies that speak to something.

But it’s the idea that this is what defines our profession, this is who we’re talking about, then here are the skills needed to do that. And then that happens within a higher education system or in some places, maybe somewhere else, and here’s how we document that.

Van

Could you give names to some of these credential structures that you talked about, just to give the audience a feel?

Kate

Yeah, so in Illinois, we call it Gateways to Opportunities within a system called INCCRRA and we have credential structures that we call Early Childhood Education (ECE), and Infant Toddler Credential (ITC). They’re structured to a Level One, which is like the introductory credential, and then we build up and then we have a Level Two, Three, Four, Five and Six that build on top of each other. We literally call them like ‘Level Two ECE Credential’.  Across the state of Illinois, if you are looking to hire someone, you know your funding and your expectations are connected to X level. “I need someone with a Level Four — you’re hiring a level four ECE person — and so all of our higher ed system is aligned with those credentials.

So, all of us in the two and four year programs across Illinois have said, okay, this associate of applied science degree is aligned with the Level Four ECE credential. And then if someone does our associate degree, they can apply to get that Level Four. In that way, it communicates across the system.

So it was kind of taking state and national expectations and putting it into competencies and then creating a system that we can all kind of align with. But then what we also see at the same time is each college still has their nuance of here’s what we do and we train really well on, or here’s a focus that we have or we might do this specialization, but there are core competencies that we all are aligned to.

Van

Help me close the loop when it comes to the system. So this is the production side… producing the workers with clear articulation of what level of skill they have. I can see the value in that and for both the worker and the education institutions. How do we close the loop on the hiring side? Were there any incentives or initiatives that rewarded having the Level Four skill versus a Level One, because it’s an investment for both the individual and the higher ed system, right?

Kate

One thousand percent. And I think you kind of name that sticky wicket that comes with credentials and advancing credentials which is, what’s the incentive for students or employees and for employers?  So, within our state system — depending on your funding stream, which is its own early childhood journey because we have lots of complicated funding structures — there are incentives to make sure that you’re hiring higher skilled folks so that you can look at your quality ratings or your quality assessments through the state based on your teacher training credential levels. And so that’s an incentive that we see that’s built in within the state of Illinois. So, there’s that side of it.

Now recognizing at the same time, that’s a really specific part of our workforce. Some folks, depending on funding streams from the employer perspective, you may not be curious about that. But within the state of Illinois, and if money is coming to an early childhood center, there is a way to incentivize the employer to hire folks with higher credentials.

Van

That’s helpful. Another best practice that we can learn from. Let me for a moment shift to the topic of working with adults as learners. Futuro Health is specifically focused on adult learners because we also know the high school population is shrinking or flatlining, and therefore we have to figure out how to bring adults back into the system. Talk to us about the difference in offering learning journeys to those who are adults versus our traditionally younger students.

Kate

This is where I think community colleges shine. This is what we love to do. This is what I think faculty across the country kind of know intuitively…if they work at a community college, you’re working with adults.

There’s the obvious things that everyone will say, right? We need flexible schedules. We need flexible modalities. We need folks to able to come to class on Saturdays and not just get their career technical courses, but also their general education. And there needs to be access to services, right? We know that.

What I think is also really, really powerful that I think occurs and isn’t captured in the research, or as much as I would like to see it captured in the research, is how adults’ knowledge and skills and life experiences are recognized and integrated in with the curriculum. How we tap into that knowledge?

What is really unique and wonderful about early childhood — and different than if you’re training someone to, for instance, go into nursing — is in our field, folks are already in it. They’re already in the childcare center. So, we have teachers that student and students that teacher! They are already in it. They have knowledge from the field. They have experiences

Figuring out really great ways to integrate that in and highlight that that skill set — while also building additional expertise – is, I think, the magic sauce of working with adults. This is something I did with my dissertation research as I talked with folks who were teachers in their classroom while also going to school. The teachers all talked about how they would be with their professor talking about this thing going on in their classroom, and the professor would say, “You have this assignment coming up. We should adjust the assignment to do this. So you can work in what’s going on in your classroom, and we can kind of build that knowledge while also building your classroom up.”

That reciprocal nature of integrating-in the adult learner’s life into the curriculum and being flexible, I think is something community colleges do well.  I think about conversations I’ve had with my colleagues across my system for the last twenty years, and that’s something that we just do intuitively. There’s something really powerful about that, to say, I see you, and it’s not just that I have a schedule that works for you, but you have skills and knowledge that you can add to in this class, that we’re all experts here, and that we can build knowledge in different ways.

Van

In addition to integrating the learner’s life and what they’re wrestling with into the classroom assignment, there is this concept of or this practice of honoring prior learning for credit. Prior Learning Assessments (PLA) is the technical term in the higher education world. And yet, it’s somewhat uneven and elusive, including in the California community colleges, and the state’s new workforce master plan now is asking for that practice to become more prevalent. What is your experience with Prior Learning Assessment in your career?

Kate

I feel the same way. It feels so elusive and I want to like figure this out. Like, it’s really near and dear to my heart and it’s really complicated to operationalize, right? At the core, students right now can’t utilize financial aid to pay for PLA, so if you’re trying to get PLA and it costs, you need to try to find the money somewhere and oftentimes PLA are introductory courses. So, you’re waiting to get into the term, and the course that you might be enrolled in might have been the course you could have PLA’d out of, but you didn’t have the money to pay for that. I think that’s a really complicated issue that I feel like we can get a solution on.

Van

I’m wondering, before you go on, if you could just give a little bit of a primer on the Prior Learning Assessment process. Why does it cost money?

Kate

For sure. So, in some cases, prior learning may not cost anything. Within our system, we don’t charge students if it’s an existing credential that we’ve aligned with our curriculum. So for instance, an existing credential within the care industry would be the Child Development Associate. It’s called the CDA. If a student comes to us with the CDA, they can get six credits towards their basic certificate, which is the introductory certificate within our college or within our system. As long as they have that CDA and it’s verified like a transcript, that just automatically gets processed and they don’t have to pay within our system. Sometimes they do have to pay because there’s been curriculum work and cross alignment and verification, so that really depends on the institution.

Other forms of Prior Learning Assessment are sometimes performance-based, where a student might, at some institutions, actually go in and role play. In other places, they might do a performance assessment within a learning management system, like a Blackboard or a Brightspace, or they might create a portfolio. If it’s a portfolio that aligns with the outcomes of the class, someone has to assess it, because in the world of Prior Learning Assessment, what we’re doing is we are giving credit to a student for a class that we offer, saying that we believe that they have now met enough competencies to pass this course, and that has to get verified if you do it through like a portfolio or assessment.

And so that’s where the cost comes I, and that’s where it gets really complicated because students often don’t have the funds to pay for it, but they may have been able to pass it if they had the ability to do it. To me — and I would love to see this reframe across the board on PLA — I think about Prior Learning Assessment as if it’s another modality of a class. So we think about a class modality in higher ed. Let’s just say the course if Child Development 10. You might take it in person. You might take it online. You might take it hybrid on Zoom. And I’d love if we thought about PLA as another modality, because I think that reframes the way we think about it as it’s not separate. You’re still capturing the learning. We’re still understanding the learning, and as an institution, we’re still confirming the learning.

I believe thinking about it as an additional modality would help us think about transfer of those courses, think about some maybe resistance we sometimes see to the courses because that re-centers it into the specific class. So, I think it’s a really powerful tool. The challenge becomes helping students understand how to communicate that they believe they should assess for prior learning – so, knowing about it even — because you have to know about it often before you get in, which is hard.

I would say on the institution side, how do you identify students? How do you know if they have a credential that counts for PLA that you should get them in? There are systems that we all have to build. There’s knowledge that we all need to kind of strengthen up in order to do PLA.

Van

That’s a good point. Everybody knows if you want financial aid, you go through the FAFSA process. There’s an application, there’s a processing period, all the above. But you’re right, it’s not on most people’s radar that there might even be a PLA process. And yet, if adults can have a few credits under their belt, they’re way more likely to actually pursue and finish a degree.

Kate

For sure. One of the things I would love to see – because I have a lot of multilingual students at my institution — is having their language that’s outside of English recognized for credit. Many institutions offer something called CLEP for that, but it’s usually around $100 to pay for it. So, you need to know about it and you need the money to pay for it. There’s gotta be a way to kind of get that co-knowledge across the board to help people get access to that.

Van

Another area that is a somewhat murky and uneven practice is this area of work-based learning, and yet every employer wants not only a fully-trained, a fully-skilled worker, but they want one with experience.  I wonder how you approach that in the world of early childhood education.

Kate

I think this is something we do pretty well when it comes to work-based experiences. So within our system, we have seven independently accredited colleges, but we all agree on our curriculum. Our students do 180 hours in the field and then a 250 hour student teaching experience. They’re in the field a ton.

Where I think the employer partnerships can fall short or be difficult is how do we frame these as reciprocal and within partnerships? In a big city like Chicago, there are hundreds if not thousands of childcare centers, so how do we really get into deep collaborative partnership is something that we also need to struggle with and sit with. But then how do we make it reciprocal? How do we co-learn together so that employers know the major assessments that we expect and faculty know big expectations of staff that employers have. I think having that be more reciprocal — and again, coming back to that co-learning idea  of understanding each other’s systems —  I think that that could be a really helpful step forward in that employer partnership.

And then sometimes really struggling with that idea of when does an employee become a student? And when does a student become an employee? What’s that line? Sometimes we have employers across fields that want to do cohort education. When that employer calls and says, ‘“Did so and so come to class? They’re enrolled in this class and this class, right? They told me they’re failing this. How are you going to help them?”’…then we need to help employers understand the lines of when they’re a student and when they’re their employee. That’s where I think we can do some more collaboration.

But if we were co-learning our assessments and employers knew in that in this class, we’re really focusing on this, and we’re going to be digging into doing this study of a child, that could be helpful for your employee. It removes it from just being about that singular employee and more about us having a structure that works for collaboration and growth long term.

Van

That’s very helpful to understand. Well, we’ve learned a great deal about the world of community colleges, and early childhood education, including its many practices. I was wondering, as we wrap up, what makes you optimistic about the future of learning?

Kate

Ooh, the future of learning, whew. You know, our students are amazing. They are curious. They are excited. They’re hungry to get to that next point, and that is something that gets me really excited about the state of learning.

I think we have lots of challenges that we can easily get bogged down into about AI, or this or that, or students have all these other obligations. Instead, we could leverage that into how could these systems, the many roles our students have, or AI, or work and all these responsibilities, be flipped into thinking about how are they our superpower for our students? How do we leverage AI to really help our students? How do we think about the many identities that our students have as a strength within the curriculum, no matter what the curriculum is? So I’m really excited about that change and when I’m having that conversation with my faculty colleagues, it gets me really excited to hear what people are doing.

We’re starting the semester this week, and thinking about students who’ve already reached out asking about this or asking about that…I feel like students are ready. They want that next step. They want that raise. They want that degree. They want to get into that job long term, and that always is exciting to me, especially this time of year.

Van

Well, thank you very much, Kate, for being with us today and sharing your knowledge and your enthusiasm.

Kate

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. This was a really fun conversation.

Van

I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in America.