John's Story

John and I are about the same age.

I've gotten to know him a little bit since he became a student here a year ago or so. We are both dads, although he has more children than I do, and we are both vertically challenged (read, not tall). I look forward to seeing him any time I run into him at school because of his energy and enthusiasm. Our lives start to diverge when you look back at our childhoods. John's education ended after 9th grade and even though I took a very, very crooked path, I eventually graduated from college and eventually went on to even more school, much to my surprise. Neither of us liked school very much, but somehow, I ended up spending my career in education and eventually John returned to school to complete high school with us.

My college has some unique ways to complete high school in addition to the tried and true GED exams. The one we think is the most poverty informed is our competency-based program, which we call Adult Diploma. No standardized testing is required, and students spend a year with us building their future. The first term is centered around a spiraled curriculum which meets the requirements our state asks of High School Equivalency Diploma (HSED) programs. The second term asks students to take a college course alongside what we call our Transition class and somewhere over the year we require students to take the college's placement exam as well. It's a recently redesigned program and has been transformational for several students who have participated. John is one of them. He arrived at our door with a fairly simple goal of completing high school. He left with an HSED, six college credits, and admission to our Precision Machining program. Let's talk about how a poverty informed program helps that happen.

Our first premise is that we operate from a strengths-based perspective. That means when John came to us, we talked about what he had done, not where he had failed. We tried to understand his dreams and maybe even help him find new ones. As an example, John had worked for some time as a commercial fisherman, which he viewed as just manual labor, but we helped re-frame that work as a rather unique set of transferable skills. In fact, John went from not wanting to include that era of his life on his resume, to seeing it as a badge of honor and something that set him apart. His teachers told him the number of former commercial fishermen competing for jobs in the Midwest was likely to be small and he would stand out as both hard-working and unique. Maybe the difference is subtle, but I really believe this strengths-based, forward looking perspective grants respect and legitimacy to our students and increases their self-efficacy. That is powerful...

We also believe that a poverty informed program does everything it can to propel students toward a better economic situation quickly. Poverty has many elements, but the fundamental one is lack of resources, specifically money. I have said in the past that we sell delayed gratification to people who can't afford that luxury. I don't have much time any more for hearing how adults in the crisis of poverty just need to delay gratification. It's disrespectful to ask that of someone who's been solving multiple problems daily just to get to the next day. Instead we try to identify tangible steps that can get them the stability we all use to plan our futures. That means we don't do things that lack a clear point. You can improve your reading and writing while creating a portfolio that showcases your accomplishments and earns you a chance for college credit. John not only improved his skills, his portfolio started to validate the things he had learned through a lifetime of work. A poverty informed approach does not force unnatural academic sequences on students, rather it seeks every chance to integrate and contextualize learning in ways that can change students' economic reality. In our evolution, these things are non-negotiable. Our students have given us their time, we should not waste it.

John's story could have ended with his HSED and good feelings. But, our commitment to changing economic reality for students tells us the HSED is a checkpoint, not an endpoint, if we want them to have access to family supporting wages. We steadfastly believe that all of our students can earn industry recognized credentials through our college and the way we start that process is through Credit for Prior Learning. The portfolio students develop includes evidence of all the learning they've acquired in navigating life so far (building self-efficacy), and the portfolio provides endless opportunities to improve your reading and writing and presentation skills (always doing more than one thing at once). And at the end of the program John got a chance to present his portfolio not only to his instructor and our associate dean, he shared it with a faculty member in the Sales Management program who agreed John had met the requirements for six college credits and a Customer Service Representative certificate. John had an industry recognized credential and a new perspective. After nearly 50 years on the planet, he saw himself as a college student! And as mentioned earlier, he enrolled in Western's Precision Machining program and changed the arc of his future story and I suspect his children's too.

In my early days, I would have thought of John's story as some sort of Horatio Alger fable and exceptional. Our evolution to a poverty informed approach tells us that John simply shows us our possibilities. A technical college like ours is this perfectly built little engine for changing people's lives. When we let go of figuring out who can and can't succeed and commit ourselves to our students and their strengths, we start to become partners in their work. We don't do things for them, we do things with them. Strengths based, forward looking, relentless belief, unconditional support without judgment; that's poverty informed, and I can't go back to whatever else we used to be. It means too much to my friend John.