Winter 2022 / Reach Out

Reach out.  Do that extra step to advance your mission.  Reaching out led to amazing growth in mission for American education, via our featured Winter Clever Chicas.  Every time someone shares a well-crafted idea, the culture wins. Every day, these three Chicas strive for those ideas.  Thank you, Chicas, for your continued spotlight on the merits of critical thinking.

We begin with Jenna, External Relations Manager for Colorado State University’s Global Campus. Her job is to tell the world what CSU-Global faculty and students are up to.  Everyone there is remote—working all over the world. Jenna communicates almost solely via email through a series of group and individual exchanges. In one specific role, she is a one-woman middle man between faculty and publisher.  Such a position requires objectivity and kindness, concurrently.  Jenna has both, concurrently, consistently.  Thank you, Jenna, for giving Instructors a collaborative way to share our ideas on education with so many new audiences. 

Our second Chica, Rebekah, works to advise online college students at the same university.  Additionally, she’s a graduate student and member of Rocky Mountain College English Association.  She’s conducting research on writing in American higher education.  She’ll use that research to inform her conversations with students at work and with college English teachers around her region when she presents her work at the RMCEA annual conference.   

And rounding out our Chica Trilogy, Kassidy, Undergraduate Writer heading towards her online degree.  In American higher education, almost everyone has to take a writing course. But not everyone understands how important that writing course is to their future online success. Kassidy realized it.  While working and going to school and trying to push her dreams forward on so many fronts, she took that rarest of online steps. She actually used the teacher’s phone number and reached out to talk her ideas through with the teacher.  She took the class with a growth mindset. That’s hard to do when someone is telling you that something so personal is not very good.  But she did it. And she learned how to revise her own writing and ideas by making those phone calls. 

As our culture grows more and more adept at living in a remote world, may we celebrate the Chicas who never miss a chance to make those extra connections that lead to…