When Jazmine Kelley arrived at the College of Communication and Information to fill the newly created role of CCI’s Director of Access and Engagement, she came ready to observe, absorb, and plan.
Kelley knows first-hand what it is like to be a first-generation student without guidance on navigating the college process and journey. She didn’t even have a good idea of what types of majors were out there, and initially was on a pre-med track as “doctor” was a career with which she was familiar.
But she found her way to higher education administration and eventually earned her PhD in education with a concentration in higher education, all while working as Division of Diversity and Community Engagement at the University of Mississippi. Her research interests are student success, identity-consciousness, and institutional effectiveness.
All this experience—academic, professional, and personal—has aligned to make her a perfect fit for the type of work she is now doing in access and engagement at CCI. Now that she has been at the college for a few months, she’s starting to build out short and long-term plans to make CCI a more accessible and inclusive place for students, staff, and faculty.
“My focus really is on four major areas: access, engagement, support, and partnership. Those four umbrellas are where all the initiatives are focused on for the next few years,” she explained.
Access
When Kelley speaks about access, she is encompassing everyone CCI touches: alumni, prospective students, future employees, community partners, and everyone already working or going to school in the college. It’s a complex, dynamic body of people with many different goals and needs.
“We don’t want to be only focused on students and not focused on faculty and staff. I’m looking for that sense of community, belonging, and creating a culture of togetherness,” she said. “I think of us really as a community; we’re not always going to agree and see things the same way, but we can still move forward with the mission of the college, the academic mission, the land-grant mission. We’re promoting active engagement and participation to make sure people can show up as an authentic version of themselves.”
Engagement
This area is straight-forward, Kelley said. It’s simply finding the best ways to get everyone to utilize the resources at CCI to network and engage with each other, and to not get stuck in a bubble or feel left out of activities.
“Engagement is really about building the culture of togetherness and belonging and helping to celebrate them and elevate them to be their authentic selves. That’s something that is ongoing,” she said. “I’m hoping to do activities and programs to help them see this is a space that supports them and helps them reach their goals, whether that is personal or professional.”
She is exploring seed grant programs for faculty who are researching topics that fall under access and engagement, with the idea that they can access larger grants once the seed grant gets the ball rolling on their research. She also wants to build a faculty mentorship program as CCI’s faculty hiring continues to increase every year and new hires need guidance from senior faculty who have experience.
For everyone, Kelley envisions launching affinity groups that are more focused. For example, she would like to create the Lavender Collective, which would be a group for faculty, staff, and students who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community or see themselves as allies of that community.
Support
This is an area with lots of heavy lifting and one in which Kelley is already setting solid plans into motion. It is more focused on the academic side of the college, focusing on students both in a pre-collegiate phase and after they arrive on campus.
She is currently in the process of creating a “living learning community” that will be for first-year students, which essentially creates a cohort of students who live on a floor or wing of a dorm together and take the same courses.
“The reason for this is, one, to help students feel more connected to their peers – if you’re all taking the same general communication classes together you can take notes together, study together, and you’re living in the same space, and you can literally just go next door for help. It’s meant to be a learning-living environment that promotes academic excellence, professional development, and personal growth,” she said.
Kelley said she has seen these types of communities be successful in retaining students who may otherwise struggle in their first year of college, which in turn can lead to dropping out. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, already has robust living learning communities tied to other colleges on campus, so she has submitted the request for CCI to have one, as well.
“What I like is they have peer mentors where you’re connecting first-year students with upperclassmen who have been in those shoes and been successful. Hopefully we can use that as a recruitment tool. There’s a lot of evidence out there that shows these types of communities are beneficial, especially from an academic side,” she said.
Partnership
This is the part of Kelley’s strategy that reaches beyond CCI to create more relationships with partners on campus and the broader community.
“It is cultivating positive, collaborative, mutually beneficial partnerships and relationships with our campus partners, with community partners, and even within the college between the different units, whether that’s the schools, the centers, and all the units we have. We need to try to see all parties involved and elevated to become better,” she said.
While all her initiatives will take time, Kelley said this area of focus is an especially long-term undertaking. She hopes that building up a strong network will eventually result in word-of-mouth that will bring people to CCI, instead of CCI being the one to seek out partners.
This area includes everything from building a more in-depth and robust Intercultural Week celebration that pulls in more partners, to expanding the Communication and Information Leadership Collective, which just became an official student organization this year. She’s also looking forward to building out the pre-collegiate programs that will hit on almost all four areas she is focusing on, including developing week-long summer camps that will feature team-building workshops, college readiness activities, and cameos by industry partners.
In that same vein, she wants to build up CCI’s relationships with UT’s flagship high schools and focus on under-served and under-represented high school students so they can get into college and thrive there.
“Had I been exposed to this, I could have done things differently, so a lot of the activities that are going to be included in the pipeline program are college preparation and financial guidance. So even if we’re not their choice or pick, we’re still exposing them to the possibilities,” she said.
Inclusive Excellence
Now that Kelley has familiarized herself with CCI and UT, and the goals and challenges encompassed within her role, she said the next step is to roll out an assessment to guide her office’s goals.
“There are some things that I know we’re going to need based on what I’ve observed and also from my background in access and engagement, but there’s more information I need to get what I observed,” she said. “I’m observing with the intent to foster sustainable change, whether that is listening or asking intentional questions or trying to blend into the background to see how people act.”
Laying out the mission and vision of CCI’s access and engagement priorities, objectives, and strategies is key, she said. To keep people engaged means giving them a route to practical application, so everyone can move beyond “feel-good words” and get into action.
Kelley is confident in her ability to build this plan for the college and says she can focus on issues at present while simultaneously planning for the long term.
But, if she could sum it up into one goal, it is to make being actively involved and thinking about access and engagement a priority for everyone at CCI.
“It’s everyone’s responsibility to help promote this work and move it forward. Leading now how I want to lead later will help us get there. If I want an inclusive and equitable space, I need to be leading and guiding now as though we have achieved all those areas and pieces. It’s in my job title, but everyone’s responsibility,” she said.