Art Gallery Coordinator Rich Bergeman Lands Art Residency

Contributed story
Edited by Lori Fluge-Brunker

Sink Site by Rich Bergeman.

LBCC Art Gallery coordinator Rich Bergeman was chosen to participate in a four-week art residency at Playa in Eastern Oregon, a nonprofit organization supporting creative work in the arts, literature, natural sciences and other fields.

Stratton Root Cellar by Rich Bergeman.

Rich has spent the past several weeks working on a photo project in nearby Fort Rock Valley, where he is looking for homestead sites and early towns that sprang up in the early 1900s, only to disappear within 10-15 years when the realities of farming in the desert finally sank in for those early settlers.

"An area that now looks like a sparsely populated sage-brush covered desert for a brief time sported a dozen small towns and a couple thousand homesteaders," wrote Rich in a recent email. "Today it's hard to find a trace of any of that, so my project is to find what traces there are and make some pictures."

Rich actually began work at the college in 1976 as a media writer (writing press releases for the college) in what is now College Advancement, then moving to the position of public information coordinator in 1979.  He quit to, as he puts it, "regain my sanity" and get a master's degree at OSU, after which he promptly returned in 1981 to teach journalism -a job he held until his retirement in 2007.

"I was lured back to run the galleries part-time in 2009 with a package of incentives that included my own office (aka storage closet) and wastebasket," wrote Rich. "Overall, I guess that's something like 33 years. It's kind of depressing when you add it all up - I need to get a life!"

Located in Summer Lake in Lake County, Playa manages a two residency programs, and supports those who are committed and passionate about their work and who will benefit from time spent in Playa’s remote location. Fellowship Residencies are Playa’s primary program, which span two multi-month sessions each year.

For more information on Playa, visit: http://www.playasummerlake.org/

(Lori Fluge-Brunker is a communications specialist in the College Advancement Marketing office.)

Destination Graduation Update

By Susan McNaught

The first round of the new Destination Graduation, a one-credit mandatory class, got off to a great start this fall. We had 73 sections and about 1,220 students!

For most sections, the first day of class was on Welcome Day, planned that way to give students a chance to get acquainted and feel more confident maneuvering the system and the campus. Winter term, all classes will start the first week of regular class—nobody really wants to come back during Christmas Break!

The class met two hours a week for five weeks—the idea was to provide some transition and support early in the term so that students got off to a solid start. This structure will continue.  A few sections met for an hour a week for eight weeks because their program had some other scheduling. 

Students were provided course-books at no cost. While the class was only one credit hour, we packed as much as we could into the curriculum. The focus was on helping students get familiar with available resources on campus, establishing a relationship with an advisor, and developing an educational plan—a guide for the time students are here at LBCC, not just a schedule for next term. The idea is that long-term planning will help students be more successful - which is what DG is all about.

Faculty who taught DG in the fall will have the chance to come together to talk about what worked, what did not, and what changes they would like to see for next time. We will revise accordingly.

Most of the plans went well. There were some bumps. A major component of DG is the advising piece. All students were supposed to be assigned to an advisor and the original intent was that each DG instructor would have only his or her advisees in his or her class. That did not work; too many students needed different times because of work or class schedule conflicts. So DG sections turned out to be more diverse that we had expected.

The college purchased AdvisorTrac to help with assigning advisors, scheduling, & tracking visits to advisors. AdvisorTrac took more time to get set up than we had anticipated. Between these two bumps, advising did not go as smoothly as we had hoped. Next term will be better. AdvisorTrac will be in place, we have figured out how to make sure all students have advisors assigned, and we know now that students will not automatically have their advisor as their DG instructor. This may turn out for the better—they will have both their advisor and DG instructor going to bat for them!

All in all, this was a good start. The faculty members who taught DG this term deserve a special thanks for being willing to invest their time and effort into our first venture. They are the ones who made it fly.

For more information on Destination Graduation: www.linnbenton.edu/admissions/destination-graduation

(Susan McNaught is the associate dean of Academic Development, Communication Arts and Mathematics, and lead team member of Destination Graduation.)

Helping Students Achieve Their Dreams

By Dale Stowell

Linn-Benton Community College was a major step in achieving my dream. Now LBCC is part of a program that can measure if the things that contributed to my success can also help others through a national initiative called Achieving the Dream.

Achieving the Dream isn’t another project to add to our workloads. It’s a method that lets us measure whether ideas to increase student success or completion work here – and if they do work, who they work for. It also enables us to adjust to increase that success and broaden its reach for all kinds of people with all kinds of backgrounds.

The ability to do that is meaningful to me for many reasons. My own experience is one of them.

My success as a college student was far from assured. I didn’t even make the internal commitment to be a college student until two months after my high school graduation, and during my senior year, because of a lack of sophistication and knowledge, I hadn’t done even something as basic as taking the SAT to prepare for college entry. It’s fair to say that I wasn’t focused.

But that didn’t matter to the people at LBCC. I remembered that the journalism advisor at the time, Jenny Spiker, had visited my high school newspaper class in Philomath, and for that reason more than any other, I became a journalism major here.

I had a connection, and that connection deepened because I saw Jenny either in class or at the Commuter office every day. I developed a relationship with her and my teammates on the newspaper staff. Some terms I was a great student, and during terms when my life got in the way, I was a not-so-great student, but I was never anonymous or alone at LBCC.

Even when I didn’t believe in myself, people believed in me. The responsibility and accountability I felt in relationship to others kept me coming back every day whether I was tired or rested, struggling or excelling, or cheerful or depressed.

There’s research that suggests that this is a kind of experience that supports student success. When I look at Destination Graduation (DG), I can see LBCC actively trying to ensure this experience happens to more students, regardless of who they are or what program they choose.

In fact, DG looks similar to a program initiated and measured at the Achieving the Dream college I worked at before coming to LBCC. That initiative helped increase fall-to-fall retention by 10 percent.

Achieving the Dream will give us the tools to figure out if things like DG are working, and in what ways we can make them better. It can help validate – or help to refine – work that’s already been done through Foundations of Excellence, outcomes, the completion agenda, and others. We not only have two coaches from Achieving the Dream helping us, we have the experience of 160 Achieving the Dream schools from which to draw ideas and experience for what has and hasn’t worked.

Achieving the Dream is just getting started here. A data team is collecting three years of data so we can better understand the places we lose students. We are putting the pieces in place so we can begin to measure things, and pick out the key initiatives we want to measure in the next year.

If you want more information about Achieving the Dream, check out the New Directions page at http://www.linnbenton.edu/about-lbcc/new-directions. You’ll find an Achieving the Dream link and other information about the ongoing efforts to increase student success at LBCC.

You can find a list membership in the Core Team and the Data Team. Chances are you know someone, so feel free to ask them questions and learn more about this new support for student success at LBCC.

(Dale Stowell is executive director of Institutional Advancement, a member of LBCC ATD Core Team, and LBCC Alum.)