IRSC’s QEP team is excited to offer these professional development opportunities for all IRSC employees as part of the College-wide initiative, Helping Students Navigate the River. All employees are encouraged to attend. Fill out the information in the form below and hit submit. If you have questions, please contact Rebecca Shearer at rshearer@irsc.edu
Our students come to us from a wide range of cultural and educational backgrounds, and with their own economic opportunities and personal experiences. As a result, it can be daunting to meet these students’ needs in our classrooms and offices, especially when the students subscribe to cultural norms different from our own. This panel discussion, moderated by IRSC’s partner organization New Common Ground™, will present and discuss culturally relevant teaching practices that foster an inclusive environment and create meaningful connections with members of the IRSC community.
Discover how IRSC’s Student Accessibility Services can empower you to better support students with disabilities. This session will delve into the range of accommodations, assistive technologies, and support resources available, ensuring all students have equal opportunities for success. Join us to learn practical strategies for fostering an inclusive classroom environment and enhancing your understanding of accessibility needs. Let’s work together to navigate the path to student success.
Have you ever stepped back for a moment and imagined how it feels to be a student walking onto an IRSC campus or into the college classroom for the first time? While we, as employees of the College, generally feel “at home” or secure in our environments, the experience of our students may be very different than our own. In this session, facilitators from one of IRSC’s partner organizations New Common Ground™ will walk us through what it means to take on the “tourist’s mindset” within our campus spaces and employ Optimistic Curiosity™ in order to help our students feel a sense of belonging and know that they are an integral part of the IRSC community.
Poverty is a reality for many individuals and families. But unless you’ve experienced poverty, it’s difficult to truly understand. The Community Action Poverty Simulation (CAPS) bridges that gap from misconception to understanding. CAPS is an interactive immersion experience that sensitizes community participants to the realities of poverty.
CAPS is not a game. It is based on real client experiences and exists to:
• Promote Poverty Awareness: During the simulation, role-play a month in poverty and experience low-income families’ lives.
• Increase Understanding: After the simulation, you will unpack your learning and brainstorm community change.
• Inspire Local Change: Together, you can be a voice to end poverty in your family and community.
• Transform Perspectives: The goal of CAPS is to shift the paradigm about poverty away from being seen as a personal failure and toward the understanding of poverty as structural, a failure of society.
What Happens During a Simulation?
During the Poverty Simulation, 80-100 participants will take on the identity of a family living in poverty. Each family is given a unique sheet of current circumstances and potential challenges that may arise. You will face the daily stresses and work together with your family to live a month in poverty.
Your simulated “community” is a large room (IRSC Massey Campus, V Building). You and your neighbors’ “homes” are chairs in the center. The services you need like banks, schools and grocery stores are tables that line the perimeter of the room. (Room layout attached)
A pre- and post-brief will be included to explain why the simulation is being conducted and what participants learned from it.
Students today are very different than when many of us attended college. The world around them has drastically changed as has their awareness of that world thanks in large part to hand-held technology and the omnipresence of social media. These influences, combined with the growing mental health crisis facing this generation of students and other prohibitive factors, have caused significant barriers to student success at IRSC. How can we, as a caring campus community, help students foster healthy practices to overcome these challenges? In this session, facilitators from one of IRSC’s partner organizations New Common Ground™ will share communication strategies that can help empower our students to practice help-seeking behaviors by tapping into their own potential to think through problems, resolve conflicts, and genuinely connect with others.
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