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Building Communities of Active Learners
Southwest Regional Learning Communities Conference
February
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Ed Dolan (William Rainey Harper College), Lynn Dunlap (Skagit Valley College), Barbara Leigh Smith (The Evergreen State College), Marcos Cicerone (DeAnza College)
Administrators will share some of the lessons they learned while helping to promote, support and sustain learning communities on their campuses. Critical issues such as finance, loads, structure, cross college support, political realities, space and problem solving/conflict resolution will be addressed. Strategies on initiating, sustaining and institutionalizing will be discussed.
contact information:edolan@harper.cc.il.us COMBINED SESSION:
FACILITATOR: Linda Sullivan, Arizona State University
Washington State University
Al Jamison, Randy Jorgensen, David Escobar
Purpose: sharing of an inexpensive variation of a residential Freshman Interest Group (FIG) approach. Objectives: provide a brief history of living learning communities attempted at WSU, describe the creation of the Teniwe program (Teniwe is Nez Perce for "talk"), lay out the timeline for program development, describe the assessment of program impact, and outline the issues and lessons learned to date. Target Audience: Student Affairs administrators & Residence Life/Housing staff interested in an approach to Living Learning Communities not requiring extensive institutional or faculty support. Freshman Teniwe clusters are a residential FIG approach that does not include the expense of a linking freshman seminar nor faculty involvement incentives. Evidence will be given on the merits of simply using housing proximity assignments with co-enrollment in classes to help new freshmen succeed academically. The issues encountered, methods used, and lessons learned building this program will be shared.
contact information:ajamison@wsu.edu NOTE: this session is combined with the following session
Arizona State University
Ted Humphrey, Janet M. Burke
The Barrett Honors College at ASU has evolved over its first decade into a holistic living-learning community that implements numerous strategies to promote high aspirations and achievement among a self-identifying, but highly select cohort of undergraduates. Emphasizing the four-year experience, the services the college provides include residential facilities and programming for up to 850 students, internships, honors study abroad, peer academic advisement that uses an education planner to assist students who tend to pursue several interests simultaneously, and preparation for nationally competed fellowships. All of these programs exist within the context of a rigorous academic experience, the nucleus of which is an intense freshman seminar that establishes the culture of honors education. The presenters and their students will discuss the college's choice of specific strategies to include among its programs and assess their relative contribution to student success.
contact information:ted.humphrey@asu.edu  COMBINED SESSION:
FACILITATOR: Pam Davenport, Chandler-Gilbert Community College, Maricopa Community Colleges
Cal State University-Los Angeles
Suzanne McEvoy, Becky Hopkins
California State University-Los Angeles's diverse, minority students typically have serious deficiencies, along with strong negative feelings, in three areas: reading, writing, and history. The presenters will discuss how they devised a way to coordinate these areas to create a co-operative learning environment to shift and/or alter this all-too-often rigid position. They discovered that given proper tools, students rose to the occasion and were themselves impressed with their growth during the quarter in writing skills and the ability to critically read an entire novel and substantial historical readings. Students were able to critically think and connect with the material, made literary connections between fiction and non-fiction, and learned that a major event in U.S. history had more to do with their lives than they initially thought. The developmental reading skills course tied to an English 101 course was designed to increase students' critical reading skills, personal pleasure in reading, basic writing skills, and background knowledge of the U.S. Civil War period. Students were enrolled in both courses. Students read the U.S. Civil War novel Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier. The presenters researched material from the Civil War period. Using small cooperative groups, the reading instructor will demonstrate how these students read and analyzed primary Civil War documents such as letters, diaries, and journals pertaining to many of the topics and issues presented in the fictional novel. The English instructor will demonstrate how she had students write four essays during the quarter. The writing process involved significant instructor feedback through conferencing. Daily quizzes were given on the material.
contact information:smcevoy@cslanet.calstatela.edu NOTE: this session is combined with the following session
Salt Lake Community College
David Hubert, Melodee Lambert, Jamie McBeth-Smith
We will present lessons learned from piloting a fully integrated, team-taught learning community entitled "Democracy & Citizenship: Civil Rights and Civil Responsibilities," which combined American Government, Personal Ethics, and English. Specifically, we will address issues of marketing, curricular integration, cooperative learning, service learning, and trouble-shooting for success. We will analyze what worked, diagnose the problems we encountered, write a prescription for an even better experience next time, and share our thoughts on the value of team-teaching and integrated learning. Responding to audience questions will be a priority.
contact information:david.hubert@slcc.edu COMBINED SESSION:
FACILITATOR: Osaro Ighodaro, Arizona State University
James Madison University
Ronald J. Cereola, Kenneth R. Wright, Tim Ball
The goal of the panel presentation will be to share with the other conference attendees how James Madison University is utilizing interdisciplinary methodologies to provide an environment that is designed to enhance the critical thinking, writing, communication, and technology skills of our students while at the same time building upon the students' commitment to serving the community. All of this will be accomplished with the support structure of a learning community comprised of approximately 20 first-year students. A graduate student will be the hall director of the dormitory where the learning community will be housed and will serve as the liaison between the teaching team and the students. We believe that faculty and staff from other colleges and universities that have either learning communities or service-learning experiences built into the curriculum (or both) will benefit from a discussion of how three faculty members from different university colleges and departments brought this model into being with the help of staff members from the Center for Leadership, Service, and Transitions and the Office of Residence Life. Our hope is that we may inspire colleagues at other colleges and universities to experiment with a similar model at their home institutions.
contact information:cereolrj@jmu.edu NOTE: this session is combined with the following session
Purdue University Main Campus
Kim Wilson, Marne Helgesen, Matt Small
We expect the graduates of the Landscape Architecture Program to possess highly effective skills in communicating, collaborating, critical thinking, and design and technical skills specific to the profession. The fifth-year urban design studio is designed to facilitate the learning of these valued skills through a complex service learning project, where teams engage in critical thinking. In the fall semester the class worked on a two-mile portion of Chicago's Michigan Avenue. Ignored by the city and described by most professionals as a difficult physical problem, seven teams engaged in a process to understand, develop alternatives, and present their solutions to Central Michigan Avenue Association. Our presentation will focus on the following aspects of complex service learning teams: how student demographics impact team composition and selection of the service learning project; how to create and support learning teams by forming teams based on learning style assessment, skill assessment, and preferences; and supporting teams by building team awareness skills, developing team contracts, team impact/feedback, and on-going counseling; how selection and design of a service learning project assures critical thinking; and best versus re-thinkable practices on teams, assignment, process, and assessment.
contact information:wilson@hort.purdue.edu
Chandler-Gilbert Community College
Pam Davenport, Darby Heath, Kim Chuppa-Cornell, Chris Schnick, Bill Mullaney
Learning communities grow like organisms in a symbiotic relationship: each participant benefits from and contributes to the environment. The presenters, who have planned and taught in different models of fully-integrated learning communities, will share what they have learned about the interdependent elements of relationships, collaborative learning, technology, service learning, physical space, and course content in this interactive discussion. Together we will look at benefits and challenges through stories, practical applications, and diagrams.
contact information:pam.davenport@cgcmail.maricopa.edu
University of Texas at El Paso
Andrew Swift, Thomas Brady, Helmut Knaust, Benjamin Flores, Connie Kubo Della-Piana, Carissa Flores, Cesar Rodriguez
In response to the growing recognition that programs must be established to improve undergraduate education, The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) established the Circles of Learning for Entering Students Program. CircLES, which is in its fifth year, has learning communities as one of its essential components. Drawing on the experiences of key "players" involved in learning communities on at this urban commuter campus, speakers will discuss lessons learned, surprises, and challenges involved in the creation and continuous improvement of learning communities for entering students. Panel members include deans, an associate dean, faculty members, peer facilitators, and evaluator. Each member of the team represents a "key ingredient." In the past, students entering UTEP with an interest in engineering had to wait until they completed prerequisite coursework. Recognizing this as a problem and the need to have a parallel intervention in science, the program, with support from the National Science Foundation, provides a "home" for pre-engineering and pre-science students during their first semester at UTEP until they are admitted to the program of their choice. Panel members will describe the concept and challenges of learning communities for students attending an urban commuter campus, the administration and structure of the program, the implementation of learning communities at the course level, and the evaluation of the program for improvement and accountability. Panel members and participants will examine how institutional policies, practices, and structures, as well as culture can assist in and create barriers for change in undergraduate education.
contact information:connie@eng.utep.edu |
