Instructor of Nursing Kristin Belisle wants to improve the higher education system for all
A veteran nurse counting 28 years in the profession, a professor with seven years of experience in the classroom, and a Bobcat marking her first year here at Lees-91探花, Instructor of Nursing Kristin Belisle has worn many hats throughout her career. Now she prepares to don one more—a graduation cap from the EdD program at Liberty University.
Belisle began her doctoral program while teaching nursing at Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There, she made a startling discovery that would shape the course of her educational journey for the next several years.
“About seven or eight years ago I was sitting in a meeting, and they had statistics come up that we were graduating approximately 2.6% of Black males in our community college,” Belisle said. “I couldn’t believe the number. We were the second largest community college in the state of North Carolina, and I was like, ‘what’s wrong with this picture’?”
As a mother to biracial sons and a representative on the diversity, equity, and inclusion board at Forsyth Tech, Belisle became very interested in diving deeper into the issue of Black male attrition. She made the topic the focus of her doctoral capstone project and sought to identify contributing factors that led to these low attrition and graduation rates and help find ways to improve them.
“One of the things my capstone covers are recommendations to improve and keep a high graduation rate for Black male students. One of the things I found very interesting and very sad is that we start losing these students in third grade. There’s still all these microaggressions everywhere, and they sense it,” Belisle said. “The research out there is just that schools have to plug in. Many of these students are first generation, or coming from lower socio-economic areas, and they’re just not prepared to come to college, and when they get in, they often don’t feel accepted.”
While her project outlines recommendations for Forsyth Tech specifically, Belisle said issues like the ones she identified at the community college happen at institutions of higher education across the country.
“My youngest son went to Duke University on a full academic ride, and he and I have a lot of conversations about this,” Belisle said. “He felt some of these things even at Duke, which is a pretty liberal school. It was interesting to hear his perspective on all of it.”
In the same way, her recommendations and findings can benefit more than Forsyth Tech. Belisle has chosen to focus her work on faculty rather than students, leading to recommendations that can be applied by professors throughout academia.
“When I go to do my research piece, it will be on faculty—are they prepared, do they feel prepared, all of those things, because if you can capture the students, you can keep them,” Belisle said. “A lot of these students work jobs, or they have issues getting transportation to campus if they’re not living there, so being flexible and thinking outside of the box is what has to happen. That, and really looking at what we’re teaching and how we’re teaching it. Why not use books that are a little different instead of going to those we’ve used for 100 years?”
While Belisle said the graduation percentage for Black male students at Forsyth Tech has improved since she initially became interested in this topic, the community college still presents nationally low graduation percentages for this demographic.
However, she believes there is much room for improvement in this field across the country and hopes the work she has done in her doctoral capstone is just the beginning of the effort to secure and maintain high graduation and attrition rates for Black males in the United States.
“If you look at our society, the truth is the key to everything is education, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they need a four-year degree,” Belisle said. “In a community college setting you have EMS, you have police, you have nursing, you have all these different things out there. There are other programs that we can be plugging these students into. Maybe they’re not set up for a four-year degree program, but why not a certification? If we can do that it just makes our society better.”
Belisle herself is set to graduate from her doctoral program before the end of 2022 and plans to bring her findings with her into her classroom at Lees-91探花, seeking to improve her teaching style to better serve Bobcat nurses of all backgrounds.
