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About Us
The Institute of Community and Civic Engagement advances education for democracy with full participation of all of our communities as its core value.
Our goals:
- Empower students to be agents of change in the social, economic, political realities of their lives, their communities and beyond.
- Define education as a transformative and deeply relevant force in students' lives.
- Emphasize the teaching and practice of democracy for advocacy and change through community-based learning and collaboration.
- Embrace the cultural and social contexts of students as learners representing different ways of knowing, understanding, and experiencing
- Foster a democratic environment in our interactions with each other and in our efforts for institutional change.
Background and Need
De Anza College is a major force in the social, cultural, and economic life of what has come to be known world-wide as the "Silicon Valley." The college is a large, regional, multicultural community college serving over twenty three thousand students per year, of whom over 73% racially identify as non-white. It regularly ranks as one of the top three institutions in California in terms of how many students it transfers to the UC and CSU systems. Consequently, De Anza has a reputation for being one of the best places for students to get a solid academic foundation. Students who transfer to a four-year institution from De Anza outperform those who begin their studies at either the UC or CSU. As testament to this, students travel past an average of two other community colleges to get to De Anza. In addition to its successful academic and transfer programs, De Anza offers more than thirty vocational certificates.
Although proven in academic excellence, we recognize that our diverse student population is still underserved and its assets are underutilized. For the past six years the college has been engaged in a concerted effort to achieve educational equity across different racial and ethnic groups. Our master plan states a goal of having not more than a 5% difference in the average success rates between racial and ethnic groups (with success being defined as the rate at which students pass a class with a grade of "C" or better). In the years of work toward this goal, we have identified two of the major reasons for a lack of equity as socioeconomic pressures and a sense of alienation faced by our students. (Rothstein, 2004; Smith, 1991).
Civic engagement can help us to reach our equity goals as well as to achieve other long-standing goals of the institution. If students see the college working in their communities, then they are less likely to see college as something separate from their everyday lives; if the college's curriculum is deeply related to things relevant to students' lived concerns, then being in school will be less alienating; if we prepare students to be leaders in their communities, they will be able to address some of the serious problems that face those communities.
Service Learning has a proven track record of boosting student achievement on a number of indicators (Eyler, Early, 1990). We expect our program of civic engagement to boost our enrollment and retention of all students by offering them exciting opportunities to work with and in surrounding communities as part of their academic growth. Consequently our college will also open opportunities for meaningful relationships with potential students and teachers, particularly from underserved communities.
In the academic year 2004-2005, under the leadership of our new college President, Dr. Brian Murphy, members of the De Anza community began to craft a plan to institutionalize an innovative and deep reaching plan for community and civic engagement at De Anza. Dr. Murphy came to De Anza with an impressive track record of nationally recognized achievement in the field of Civic Engagement. Dr. Murphy founded the Urban Institute at San Francisco State University in 1992 and was its director until coming to De Anza.
De Anza has a unique opportunity to break new ground in the field of civic engagement. Few community colleges have gone beyond extracurricular service-learning opportunities to bring civic engagement into the core of its campus culture and mission. And few institutions of any kind have done this work with student populations such as ours. Our faculty, widely known for its commitment to innovation, has been impressively responsive to the idea of community and civic engagement.
Our goal is to institutionalize community and civic engagement at De Anza College during the next five years. De Anza will be seen by its surrounding communities as a resource; where community organizations can find and/or create classes that meet their needs and recruit well-trained volunteers, and where students will learn how to play crucial roles serving and transforming the communities within which they live and work.
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