Statewide Conference at BHCC Focuses on: Sustainability, the Digital Campus, and Student Engagement

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Apr 22, 2010, 03:58 ET

BOSTON, April 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- More than 500 participants came to Bunker Hill Community College on April 9th for the 13th Annual Massachusetts Community College Conference on Teaching, Learning and Student Development. The Conference, whose theme was "Student Success," offered participants sessions in three different areas: 1) Sustainability, 2) the Digital Campus, and 3) the Culture of Student Engagement.

BHCC President Mary Fifield welcomed attendees to the Conference, noting the College's strong commitment to sustainability, as demonstrated by the venue of the conference: BHCC's new Health and Wellness Center, which was dedicated on March 23rd. The Center is expected to earn a LEED Gold designation from the U.S. Green Building Council, which sets the nationally accepted benchmarks for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings.

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the acclaimed bestseller on global warming, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, gave the keynote address at the conference. In her talk, Kolbert stressed that educators have a special responsibility to teach young people about the importance of sustainability. She cautioned, however, that the environmental problems facing us cannot be solved unless we acknowledge their true scope.

The theme of "student success" was built into the Conference in a variety of ways. In one seminar, a professor of nursing, for example, constructed an algorithm involving ten questions faculty could use for assessing weaknesses in a student's approach to learning.

Four sessions at the conference were based upon BHCC's "Learning Communities," an initiative that is an outgrowth of the College's federal "Strengthening Institutions" grant and its participation in the national Achieving the Dream effort. One interdisciplinary session, for example, brought together professors of English, Science and History to discuss teaching a class on sustainable living.

Bunker Hill Community College is the largest community college in Massachusetts. The College enrolls more than 11,700 students on two campuses and at five satellite locations. BHCC is one of the most diverse institutions of higher education in Massachusetts. Six in ten students are people of color and more than half of BHCC's students are women. The College also enrolls more than 700 international students who come from more than 95 countries and speak 75 different languages.

SOURCE Bunker Hill Community College