New pathway program offers vision, future plan

Lake Erie College’s Pathway to Empowerment program, also known as “P2E”, has offered a fundamental sea change to the campus’s approach toward academics.

Senior Vice President Bryan DePoy explains that P2E is “experiential and applied learning is at its core.”

“We’re trying to redefine the collegiate experience,” he says. “We always had a mission, but we didn’t always have a vision; something that looks toward the future.”

The four-year overarching program is open for students of any major or minor and seeks to provide insight into their marketable skills, abilities, and ultimate goals coming out of college.

DePoy says a mandatory firstyear class allows for “students to get to know themselves, their

strengths, their weaknesses, and goals. It’s not a cliched introductory class, either. It’s there to help students really understand what they’re good at or what they want to be good at.”

The college’s new focus on applied learning takes form in a number of opportunities.

Recently, environmental studies students were able to work alongside the Lake County Health District testing water samples. This model takes academics from the classroom to the workplaces where such learning will be used.

For Dean of the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics John Tedesco, the workplace setting allows for a more comprehensive and nuanced curriculum that cannot readily be gained from textbooks and lectures alone.

“When you go to college, often you’re a business major or a science major, you almost get too tracked and focused,” he said.

Tedesco says that students have come back after experiential learning with a wider understanding of how their course focus lends itself to the world in a number of ways.

“They come back amazed

at how their science applies to liberally different areas of study,” he said. “There was science behind the water testing, but there is also social and political impact. For example, how do you talk to landowners and communicate results that aren’t going to upset people? All of those skill sets need to be successfully be displayed to complete the project.”

Tedesco is seeing a direct effect on students.

“For the sciences, that’s where we’ve seen the biggest changes,” he said. “They’re catching on that ‘hey, it’s not just about biology and getting a biology degree’. It’s more about ‘what I can do with it’.”

P2E has also shifted the focus to provide more of a stepping stone from college to workforce settings.

“What employers are telling us is that they need employees with the skills that we value as an institution,” DePoy said. “Generally speaking, sometimes students don’t always do the best job in demonstrating how they acquired those skills along the way.”

To further bridge the gap from education to employment, the college’s communication director highlights that all of the experiences P2E students gain here are then put into a digital portfolio so when they are interviewing they have actual proof to show the experience they have already put to work.

“If they don’t have that, they find it may be hard to articulate how their education applied to actual jobs and skills that the employer is looking for,” he said.

After several years spent shaping the final version of the program alongside the Cleveland Foundation, LEC is stepping into Pathway to Empowerment as a fundamental cornerstone to the school.

DePoy feels positive about the initial launch.

“This is the first year we’re completely independent from the grant funding and the college has taken it over,” he said. “Thus far, we feel its generated some really nice results. More students are participating in internships. We’ve had one of the largest incoming classes in a very long time.

“It’s hard to link this directly to Pathway to Empowerment, but there are only a few things that we have changed structurally as an institution,” he said.

DePoy credits the effectiveness to the specificity they can afford to offer each student.

“A signature program for an institution is not that atypical, but small institutions like Lake Erie College can do it a little bit differently because we take a very personalized approach to it,” he said.