Sharyl A. Majorski has come full circle in the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program. Her first involvement began 15 years ago when she attended an ATE professional development program for tribal college educators. She was then an adjunct instructor. Now she is the tribal college consultant to Environmental and Natural Resources Technology (EARTh) Center.

To community college educators who want to build effective partnerships with Indigenous communities, Majorski suggests attending a tribal event and showing respect. “True respect values the people from the very beginning of a concept and listens to what they have to say throughout,” she said.

Majorski’s outreach efforts for the EARTh Center are informed by her work with students as an adjunct chemistry and physics instructor at the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College and as a chemistry lab coordinator at Central Michigan University (CMU).

In 2009 and 2010 Majorski participated in the Tribal College Fellows Institutes offered by the National Partnership for Environmental Technology Education (PETE) with ATE support in collaboration with the Advanced Technology Environmental and Education Center (ATEEC).

She used what she learned at the institutes in multiple ways. First, she added an undergraduate research project at the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College where students studied the Chippewa River. Students examined water quality through various chemical tests and collected aquatic macroinvertebrates as water quality indicators. Then she helped the college obtain a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. At CMU she and colleagues wrote a proposal that received a $190,688 Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement grant from the National Science Foundation to purchase equipment for undergraduate researchers to use.

In spring 2024 Majorski moderated discussions at the EARTh Center’s summit with 12 tribal college educators and a tribal community elder. Summit participants’ insights are being incorporated into a best practices guide that the EARTh Center is developing. The summit participants also recommended topics for the weeklong Fellows Institute for Tribal Faculty that the EARTh Center will offer in June 2025 on Beaver Island, Michigan.

Majorski provided written responses to questions about building relationships with tribal college educators and how she sustains partnerships. She also has multiple suggestions about things that educators can do to improve their connections with Native American communities.

As dual enrollment (DE) programs continue to grow, with nearly 2.5 million students participating, DE programs offer a pathway to higher education for historically underserved communities. However, despite the potential for DE to create more equitable access to college, many students from low-income and marginalized backgrounds face barriers that limit their participation. To better understand the needs of these students, the Community College Research Center (CCRC) conducted a study in 2022-23, interviewing 97 predominantly Black, Hispanic, and low-income students across Florida and Texas. The findings revealed six key "wants" that educators can use to think about when participating or developing courses for DE.

1. Students Want to Know About DE Earlier

Many students first hear about DE through family members or by chance in high school. Early awareness can help underserved students better prepare for college-level coursework and take full advantage of DE opportunities. Community colleges should start outreach in middle school, using community resources like local media, community centers, and even elementary school events to spread awareness. Outreach efforts like short videos, such as ATE's Student Success Stories, can grab attention more quickly and inform young students about pathways. 

A geographic information systems (GIS) project has gained extraordinary momentum in the two years since its Advanced Technological Education grant funding ended.  

The project led by J. Scott Sires, a geospatial technology professor at Dallas College’s Brookhaven Campus, has had these recent achievements:    

• A service learning experience that involved students in mapping part of Brookhaven Campus led to Dallas College hiring students as interns to create three-dimensional floor plans of facilities on   seven campuses and at 15 centers.
• During the first 16 months of this floor-plan mapping project, 10 interns completed scans of 80% of the college’s 5.5 million square feet of property. College administrators are pleased with the high quality, multi-use data that the interns have gathered more quickly than anticipated.  
• In July the college hired one of the interns as a facility space analyst. Sorting the field data to make it useful to facility managers and first responders is one of the tasks of this newly created role. The college’s chief facilities officer reports he would like to hire more GIS program alumni in the future.  
• The sequence of stackable GIS credentials—including an 18-hour dual-credit, high school program—that Sires developed from his ATE grant work was approved recently by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board for statewide use.
• Other Texas higher education institutions are evaluating the intern training materials and the GIS curriculum for potential adoption and adaptation.
• Sires received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the GeoTech Center this summer.

Sires said the Mentor-Connect mentoring he received in 2017 to prepare the ATE grant proposal, which won a $224,000 grant by the National Science Foundation in 2018, has “led to some opportunities that now are blooming ... And so that’s exciting.”