ACC is committed to supporting the workforce needs of our region. To that end, we are partnering with Texas Workforce Solutions, the City of Austin, unions, and local employers to develop the Infrastructure Academy to ensure that our region has the skilled workers needed to meet our mobility and infrastructure goals in the next decade – or two. Project Connect, the I-35 expansion, and the airport expansion will all require skilled workers, and ACC stands ready to ensure workers can develop entry-level skills to meet the needs of those projects.
We have monthly “mobility and infrastructure” (M&I) meetings to ensure that we are developing courses and programs that train workers on the skills our local employers need. As with all career and technical education programs, we have an advisory committee made up of area stakeholders (unions, employers, public partners) to tell us what we need to know as we develop our curriculum.
At our most recent “M&I” meeting, as we were reviewing the learning outcomes recommended by our advisory committee, there was a reference to “slump”. Of course, I asked about “slump” and discovered that slump measures how much a pile of concrete falls when left to stand on its own. Apparently it tells you if you’ve mixed the concrete correctly because you fill a cone with concrete, remove the cone, and measure the “slump”.
Picture credit: Avenafatua, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I love this concept. You pour into something, remove the supports, and see how well it stands on its own. Isn’t that the essence of what we do in community colleges? We pour into our students – our interests, our passions, our knowledge, our compassion, our support, our wisdom, our experience, our commitment – and then we remove our supports at the end of the semester or program and hope that they have the strength, durability, skills, and knowledge to be workable, consistent, successful, adaptable, and ready for what comes next.
Our students are the concrete, and we are the mixers. Our goal is to help them be “fluid”, “consistent”, or “workable” when we remove our supports. So let’s pour into them in ways that work for us and for them, and let’s make sure they leave us reflecting our best efforts at “mixing” along with the supports that we provided. Let’s make sure that they don’t slump beyond recognition when they leave us. That is our mission and our calling.