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| Professor Darin Jensen meeting with student Makenzie Zundel. |
The bookshelves in Professor Darin Jensen’s office are packed full of graphic novels, some that he uses to teach with, and posters hang on his wall of pop culture references to connect with his students and help them feel comfortable when they visit.
His first teaching job was at a community college in Omaha, Nebraska in 2009. He fell in love with the students and with the mission of community colleges. Now at Salt Lake Community College since January of this year, he teaches classes such as American Lit and Pop Culture. This semester he expanded that class to include Queer Lit, since he has a large group of students who identify as LGBTQ+.
“[Community college are] the best place,” says Darin. “Doing this kind of work with working class students, students who are raising a family on their own, in helping them navigate post-secondary education is enormously satisfying and challenging.”
Darin, a first-generation college student himself, has spent much of his research focused on the importance of two-year colleges. One of the problems he sees is that graduate programs train people to go on to be professors, but they often do not provide a pathway to getting them ready for post-secondary teaching, specifically in two-year colleges.
“Typically, our students come in who have certain literacy needs, and those transitions from the reading that you have to do in high school to the reading you have to do in college are big. Learning to teach right at that transition is really what community colleges do well, and actually one of the things SLCC does really well,” says Darin.
Which is why he applied, along with Christie Toth, associate professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies from the University of Utah, for a grant sponsored by Modern Language Association of America (MLA). The grant is part of a summer institute program to train community college teachers and graduate students who are interested in teaching at a community college and provide weeklong courses in best practices in reading and writing pedagogy.
They are receiving $10,000 from MLA to take over hosting an annual summer institute for the western region beginning in summer 2023. This past summer the program was held at places such as the University of Missouri, California State University and Princeton University. Next year the training for this region will be held at SLCC.
“One of the great reasons to have it here is because we have fantastic faculty who can all come in and give an hour-long lecture, give readings and over the week they'll develop a whole pedagogy project, but then they'll have all of those extra expert voices that we're inviting in from SLCC,” says Darin.
Darin and Christie will create the curriculum, co-teach and bring in people from SLCC’s English department to talk about the specialization that is unique to the college. They will have speakers such as SLCC’s Assistant Professor Joanne Giordano to talk about integrated reading and writing developmental literacy.
This grant will be providing development and training for community college teachers, an area they say has often been overlooked. They would like to see more organizations funding programming such as this, not just in the English discipline, but in all disciplines
“Because there's a real need to think about when you come [teach] here, you have different students, and you need to have a different skill set,” says Darin. “It's important that MLA, which is a flagship organization, is doing this now.”
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