Spring 1999
Vol 7 Issue 2
IN THIS ISSUE...
Renewing Our Commitment to Understanding and Faith
Learning Through Community
Developing Instruction that Promotes Diverse Perspectives
SEE ALSO...
The Labyrinth
Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction
Learning Through Community
Ann Brandt-Williams and Nancy Siefer, GCC
It is almost a cliché to say that our students have changed; they bring to our classrooms a complex range of ethnicity, culture, age, ability, interests, and expectations. Even our so-called traditional students are not traditional. Our students want their education to "count," i.e., take only what's required and what satisfies general education or transfer requirements. They have less time to connect to each other, to their teachers, and to the subject matter. Yet, in spite of their desire for instant education, they do want and need structures that help them to integrate information and create linkages between themselves and others on campus and to participate in activities that validate their past experiences and future aspirations.
Students do not live in a vacuum, yet we frequently treat them as isolated individuals in the classroom. In many classes, students are no more than a check on the attendance sheet or a grade on the roster at the end of the semester. Our students often leave their identity and stories at the door, and because what teachers do inside and outside the classroom has not substantially changed, students remain outsiders to the college community with little opportunity to share, extend, and reframe their stories. In addition, most students have been educated in the traditional teach/test method. This usually requires more skill in rote memorization than in synthesis and application. Indeed, our current teaching methods may encourage students to be lazy learners, e.g., "Just tell me what I need to know to pass the test!" Students have been so focused on the microcosm of testing for learning that we as instructors have inadvertently aided the atomization of knowledge. Through participation in an interdisciplinary or integrated learning experience, students can become part of a larger community that involves active, collaborative activities that help them relate to their individual communities of family, friends, and coworkers.
Learning communities link courses around common questions or interdisciplinary themes. They represent a purposeful restructuring of content and learning experiences to sustain conversations and intellectual connections between students, between students and faculty, and between faculty and their disciplines. Learning communities invite an array of pedagogical approaches, from lecture to service learning, where all participants, faculty as well as students, are learners in a multidisciplinary, collaborative community.
Learning communities models range from linking a project or an activity between two courses to a fully integrated community with two or more disciplines melded together to follow a theme or topic. For example, linking the writing assignments of a freshman composition class with a biology or a psychology course offers students the opportunity to write focused papers utilizing both instructors as resources. These linked activities may or may not involve the same cohort of students. Fully integrated learning communities, on the other hand, are team taught, fuse course competencies, and have the same cohort of students. For the next academic year, GCC will offer the "Power of Words" which link communication, English, and Powerpoint, "The Mathematics of Design" (links art and math), and "Politics and the Internet" (links political science and computer science).
Many faculty, the authors included, have been educated in a particular discipline, and we become uncomfortable when asked to "think outside our box," or how our discipline really reflects a larger theme. We feel compelled to cover a textbook full of terms and concepts or deliver content versus learning how and which themes and questions may be more relevant to student (and our) understanding. Participation in a learning community asks instructors to move beyond their safety zones into uncharted territory and to become learners along with their students.
The authors have spent the last year participating in a learning community, and we have realized that the first step is to change ourselves as instructors by how we view student learning as it relates to our combined disciplines of developmental psychology and introduction to language. The rich overlap of our content allows us to view our separate disciplines as a whole and ask questions of each other that we had not considered before. Although we have a general syllabus for the course, we print out a learning guide every two weeks, which permits the students time and opportunity to include their topics and issues. We take notes, participate in discussions, and search out answers to questions that are too complex to be adequately addressed through our individual, isolated subjects and without the help of our students. We cannot ask students to change or be more inclusive if we do not make changes ourselves.
Using a community to learn also means redefining a community. Just as faculty need to come together to connect separate disciplines around common issues, so does the greater community of the college campus. Presidents, deans, and department chairs as well as counselors, advisors, and marketing and registration personnel are key participants because learning communities challenge the current calendar, FTSE (rewarding seat time, not learning), credits, loading, and scheduling formulas used in most institutions of higher learning. Advisors and counselors, for example, are not separate roles or activities; they are part of teaching and learning and often integral parts of many learning communities. Support and student services should not be stand-alone entities but linked to academic instruction to serve a community of learners. Learning drives how long and how often a community meets, not the deadline date of the next schedule of classes. Loading is not a matter of reassigned time; it is instructional design that includes time to plan and participate in communities. Campus research and development departments can provide the statistics that tease out natural cohorts of students or the classes that students tend to take together — "natural" learning communities. At GCC, for example, many students take Philosophy 101 and English 101 or Communication 230 and Sociology 101 in the same semester.
Why participate in a learning community? From a faculty perspective, there can be no greater development or renewal than learning from one another, a learning that enhances personal as well as professional life, not to mention the daily fun and excitement of teaching with a colleague. Rather than hoping our students see connections between our courses, learning communities promote that connection. From the first day, students are part of a community that cares if they show up, who they are, and if they're ready to participate. Learning is a shared rather than isolated experience. Learning communities break down the artificial barriers between departments and units, between academic services and support services and restructures them into an organization where everyone participates in teaching and learning.
Learning communities extend beyond the classroom and beyond individual campuses. We need to redefine community as including the entire district. Faculty, for example, should be encouraged to form communities with colleagues from other campuses or participate for a semester or year in a learning community at another campus. Learning communities, as K. Patricia Cross points out, are not fads; they work because they make "college a more holistic, integrated learning experience. . . " (Cross 4).
For more information on Learning Communities at Glendale Communtiy College, visit their web site:
http://www.gc.maricopa.edu/English/learncomm/index.htm
Reference
Cross, K. Patricia. "Why Learning Communities? Why Now?" About Campus. July/August 1998.