Dual Enrollment faculty receive praise at meeting

Adrian Suarez Avila/ News Director

adrian.suarezavila@fiusm.com

The University department overseeing the dual enrollment program met on Feb. 5 to recognize the efforts of three faculty mentors who have contributed significantly to the program.

The honored mentors were Kimberly Harrison, an associate professor of English, Professor Martha Barantovich, an instructor in the Department of Leadership and Aurelio Baldor, a senior instructor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages.

Baldor was the only faculty mentor to receive the accolade present at the reception.

“It’s not just about me being recognized, it’s about a lot of people here that need to be recognized as well,” Baldor said.

An early enrollment option, the program allows high school students the opportunity to take college-level coursework for free in order to accelerate credit accumulation.

Despite the fact that the event was intended to honor the team members of the dual enrollment mentor team, more attention was placed on the current status of the program and strategies to improve it.

Maricel Cigales, associate dean of undergraduate studies for the College of Arts & Sciences, mentioned that one of the targeted goals for the program was growth of enrollment.

According to Jorge N. Zumaeta, director of Continuing Education and Dual Enrollment Programs, although the program has been around at the University for some time, it took off in full force around the 2009-2010 academic year.

When the program started, it was just offered in private schools.

Starting with over 300 students, the dual enrollment program currently hosts around 6,700 high school students from both Broward and Miami-Dade Counties.

The department of Undergraduate Education oversees the on-campus component of the program, which is when the high school students come to the University to take courses, and another department oversees the program as it is taught on-site at the high schools, according to Zumaeta.

In order to highlight the growth and impact of the program, Zumaeta invited Marcus Ghent to speak.

Having participated in the dual enrollment program while he was a student at Miami Northwestern Senior High, Ghent, a junior criminal justice major, admits that the program allowed him to strengthen his time management skills and provided him with the opportunity to become more self-disciplined.

He believes that expanding the resources to other schools in the area will allow other students to take advantage of the same benefits he received, the biggest being the chance to get a head start on his college career.

Ghent admitted that the dual enrollment program influenced his decision to attend FIU, commenting that it was his professor’s methods of teaching that attracted him.

“It brought some sense of confidence,” Ghent said. “I had my introduction to college in high school, so I came to college with a better understanding of what I needed to do and I was better equipped to succeed.”

Loubna Bouamane, assistant director of Program Evaluations, oversees the quality control component for the dual enrollment program.

Her duties include training the team of faculty mentors and evaluating the college-level courses being taught in high schools to ensure that they meet the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ standards upheld in the University setting.

According to Bouamane, the principals of the respective high schools served in the dual enrollment program are the ones who express interests in having the program offered at their school.

The next step involves identifying potential high school instructors to teach the courses.

In order to teach the college-level courses, teachers must either have a master’s degree in the discipline under which the course in question is offered or a minimum of 18 graduate credit hours in the course’s discipline.

Bouamane offered a course in mathematics as an example.

If the interested instructor doesn’t have a master’s in mathematics but one in math education, then his or her graduate-level transcript will be evaluated to ensure that he or she took at least 18 credits in math-specific courses.

Some principals are concerned that high school instructors don’t have the skills to teach the courses, referenced Zumaeta.

One of the challenges that Bouamane referenced was the difficulty of managing the resources of the program, considering its rapid growth in four years from serving around 300 students to over 6,700.

However, the biggest challenge, in her opinion, is aligning the courses taught in the high school with the ones taught in the University.

Participation in the program appears to have its benefits.

Bouamane admits that after conducting research on the performance data of students in the dual enrollment program she found that the graduating GPA of high school seniors who participated in the program was higher than that of those who didn’t take part in the program.

She also cited a national research statistic that revealed that participation in dual enrollment courses increases the chances of staying in college and graduating in a timely manner.

According to her, although the dual enrollment program offers benefits to the participating students, it also benefits the University directly.

Among these benefits are that the University’s name may be publicized and that the participating students may be attracted to the idea of attending the University full-time after graduating from high school.

Bouamane hopes to potentially offer online dual enrollment courses in the future, considering the displayed demand for such course offerings. “I would like to see this program grow and offer different opportunities.”