A unique partnership is allowing students at Red Lake Nation College in Red Lake, Minnesota, to take a Criminal Justice and Society course offered by Bemidji State University without having to leave their home campus.
“We have had professors in the past who have done adjunct work at tribal colleges, but we have never actually offered a BSU class on a tribal college campus,” said Bill Blackwell Jr., executive director of Bemidji State’s American Indian Resource Center, in a press release about the program. “There are a few disciplines that come up all the time when we talk to the tribal colleges about their needs, and certainly criminal justice is one of them.”
The criminal justice course was an ideal candidate to pilot the program because it is close to a course offered at Red Lake, a tribal college located about 35 miles north of Bemidji. The course meets twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. It is taught by Dr. Elizabeth Hagensen, assistant professor of criminal justice at BSU. She teaches from BSU on Tuesdays, and travels to the Red Lake campus on Thursdays.
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Dan King, president of Red Lake Nation College, has been closely involved in the partnership. He sat in on the first few classes on the Red Lake campus, and saw the opportunity the technology presents his students, and the possibilities it offers for the future.
“It has a lot of potential,” he said of the partnership. “We have many students here in Red Lake who complete a two-year degree and then they don’t continue. The distance barrier is too big of a challenge — they’re working part-time or they have children, and there are too many barriers. This virtual presence opportunity removes the distance barrier for a lot of our students.”
Hagensen noted that many BSU students in the course are traditional-aged college students, while those at Red Lake are working adults with children. The two colleges schedules differ, so Hagensen used the time to unify the students.
“It’s two different kinds of students coming together — so there’s not just an ethnic diversity between the two groups, there’s an age difference between two very different types of students,” she said. “We took the first two weeks to dive into what critical thinking is, get to know each other and play some games to get used to the technology.”
She used the game Scattergories as an icebreaker. The class played as a group, and had to work together to determine house rules and how points would be counted.
Other than that, Hagensen has made small changes to her teaching style to adapt to the realities of teleconferencing coursework — from where to stand so she can be seen and heard by everyone, to how to structure the presentation and guide classroom conversations taking into account that the classes are being recorded for future viewing.
So far, students at the tribal college are enjoying the course.
“The experience is the same other than the TV,” said Red Lake student Leah Kingbird. “I think there should be more of it. It’s a great opportunity.”
The partnership is made possible by a teleconferencing network that connects Bemidji State University with Red Lake Nation College as part of a consortium called “Azhoogan,” an Ojibwe word meaning “bridge.” It also includes Northwest Technical College in Bemidji, Minnesota, White Earth Tribal and Community College in Mahnomen, Minnesota, and Leech Lake Tribal College in Cass Lake, Minnesota. The network began development in 2014 thanks to a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Distance Learning and Telemedicine Program.
“The technology has allowed us to really step out of the box a little bit and think about what we want to do as far as delivery goes to some of the remote communities we service,” Blackwell said.
The technology could help reach students who may not have had easy access to a four-year bachelor’s degree previously.
“This technology pilot gives access to an extraordinarily rural area and to an underserved population,” Hagensen said. “It creates better partnerships and it extends Bemidji State into rural communities that have difficulty with access to lots of different types of services.”
The criminal justice pilot could just be the beginning of what is possible.
“This has allowed us to reach out to the tribal colleges and to really focus on becoming better partners with them,” he said. “In the future, maybe we can deliver years three and four of certain programs to them without their students ever having to leave their home communities.”
