DENVER, Colo. — Last week, 2,100 community college faculty, administrators and advocates gathered in the mile high city for the League for Innovation in the Community College’s Innovations 2008 Conference, hosted by the Community College of Denver. Conference sessions were broken down in eight tracks focusing on topics like “Learning and Teaching” and “Leadership and Organization.” One of the tracks was also dedicated to “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”

In his opening keynote, Valencia Community College President Sanford C. Shugart addressed the perception among many community college educators that some students just can’t learn, and are in community colleges to go through a sifting process determining who can and can’t keep up with college-level work.

Shugart said Valencia launched a learning initiative that was founded on the notion that even the most underprepared and underprivileged students can thrive and succeed in college, given the right circumstances.

“We changed our belief about students. We decided to believe anyone can learn anything under the right conditions. We believe that our institutions are organized around the assumption that lots of people can’t do the work, and they shouldn’t be here, but it’s hard to know which ones they are, so lets give them a chance and then we’ll know. It’s a sifting function,” Shugart said.

After having studied the issue of whether the most disadvantaged students can actually thrive in college-level mathematics courses, for instance, Shugart said “the truth is, none of those that we’re sifting out are incapable of learning everything we have to teach them — that’s the truth.

“Under the right conditions, if you’re not brain damaged, you can learn anything. A tiny fraction of people have the damage, and even they will surprise you. The brain is an amazing thing.”

Also during the opening session, Dr. Christine Johnson McPhail, professor and graduate coordinator in the Community College Leadership Program at Morgan State University and former president of Cypress College in Cypress, Calif., was awarded the ETS 2008 Terry O’Banion Prize for Teaching and Learning.