Breakthrough Strategies : Classroom-Based Practices to Support New Majority College Students

Breakthrough Strategies identifies effective strategies that faculty have used to help New Majority students—those from minority, immigrant, or disadvantaged backgrounds—build the necessary skills to succeed in college. As the proportion of New Majority students rises, there is increased attention to helping them gain access to college. Once enrolled, however, these students often face significant challenges of adjustment, with few resources for support. Specifically, there is little attention to students’ experiences within their college classrooms and their relationships with professors. At the same time, faculty who work with these students have little guidance on how to help them adjust to new expectations and identities as they engage with college-level work.
 
Sister Kathleen A. Ross, a MacArthur fellow and president emerita of Heritage University, has devoted three decades to helping New Majority students get college degrees. Based on an action-research project undertaken at Heritage University and Yakima Valley Community College in Washington State, the book highlights eleven strategies to encourage student success, including: asking questions in class; navigating the syllabus; and developing an academic identity. Written in a warm, down-to-earth voice, Breakthrough Strategies is infused with the belief that faculty can become a powerful resource for students, and that classroom instruction can be an important vehicle for supporting these students’ development and success.
 

Kathleen A. Ross is President Emerita and Professor of Cross-Cultural Communication at Heritage University, a four-year institution that she founded with two Yakama Indian women in 1982 and led for twenty-eight years. Located in Toppenish on the Yakama Nation Reservation in central Washington State, Heritage University started with 75 students and has grown into a fully accredited, independent university with 1,200 students and more than 8,000 four-year and master degree graduates. Today its undergraduates are approximately 10 percent Native American, 55–60 percent Latino/a, 85 percent first-generation, and more than 80 percent low-income. Dr. Ross has served on many boards including the Congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Aid, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU), and the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (the regional accreditation body). Currently she serves as director of Heritage University’s Institute for Student Identity and Success, focused on increasing retention and graduation for first-generation students. She holds a masters degree from Georgetown University (history), and a doctorate from Claremont Graduate University (higher education and cross-cultural communication). Her work has received recognition in the form of numerous awards, including the Harold W. McGraw Education Prize (1989), a MacArthur Fellowship (1997), and fourteen honorary doctorates. In 2012 she celebrated her Golden Jubilee (fifty years) as a Sister of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary (SNJM). She currently lives in Toppenish, Washington, with two other Holy Names Sisters.