theorists such as Martin Deutsch and Kurt Lewin. Learning communities also find recent kinship with the social-constructionist view of knowledge and feminist ...
Taking structure seriously. Smith, Barbara Leigh Liberal Education. Mar/Apr91, Vol. 77 Issue 2, p42. 7p. Reprinted with permission from Liberal Education. Mar/Apr91, Vol. 77 Issue 2, p42. 7p. Copyright 1991 by Association of American Colleges and Universities
TAKING STRUCTURE SERIOUSLY THE LEARNING COMMUNITY MODEL While "content" and "coherence" have been buzzwords in recent debate about educational reform, little attention has been paid to issues of feasibility or structure, and many reform efforts therefore run aground. A number of colleges are approaching educational reform from a different direction altogether through curricular restructuring efforts around intentionally created "learning communities." These restructuring efforts are not incompatible with efforts to reform the content, coherence, or comprehensiveness of the curriculum or, for that matter, the major. Other reform efforts, in fact, may make these efforts to reform the structure even more meaningful and enduring. The "learning community effort" is one attempt to take structure seriously. While the term "learning community" often is used loosely, it has a specific connotation: a variety of curricular models that purposefully restructure the curriculum to link together courses or coursework during the same quarter or semester so that a group of students finds greater coherence in what they are studying and experiences increased intellectual interaction with faculty members and other students. In learning communities, students and faculty members experience courses and disciplines as complementary and connected enterprises. Restructuring efforts around learning communities are guided by assumptions about rethinking organizational practices and structures. They point to a critical need to provide a rich learning environment for students and teachers. Because they recognize the difficulty and the importance of cultivating and empowering the judgment and creativity of teachers and administrators, most restructuring efforts attempt to build a culture of self-renewal partly by decentralizing authority and responsibility. Learning communities typically involve changes both in structure and in process. Their pedagogy often includes team teaching, interdisciplinary content, integration of skill and content teaching, and active approaches to learning. Learning communities are natural homes for many new approaches to teaching. Philosophically, they draw on a large literature, including the work of John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and L. S. Vygotsky, whose views on experiential learning and student-centered instruction are so fundamental; the work of cooperative-collaborative learning theorists David and Roger Johnson at the University of Minnesota, Robert Slavin at Johns Hopkins, and Ken Bruffee at CUNY-Brooklyn College; and the work of small-group theorists such as Martin Deutsch and Kurt Lewin. Learning communities also find recent kinship with the social-constructionist view of knowledge and feminist theory and pedagogy. Learning communities offer a practical avenue for reform that deals with many educational issues at once in that they are adaptable to diverse issues and varied institutional settings. The learning community experience suggests that the most meaningful reform may come, paradoxically, out of a combination of more structure-of the
right kind-and more freedom for faculty members to redesign the curriculum. Four basic models Although learning communities of one type or another have been around for more than fifty years, they have become a significant force in higher education in the last fifteen years. They take a variety of forms and usually address specific issues such as retention or integrating skills and content. They work best when they draw on an institution's strengths and needs.
Linked courses represent the simplest learning community. This model often is used to link skill and content courses: an interdisciplinary writing program, for example, that connects English composition courses with general-education courses that are usually large lectures. A program like this has been in place at the University of Washington, for example, since 1978. When a link is initiated, the English teacher usually sits in on the content course lectures to gain greater familiarity with the instructor's approach and the course's structure and content. This approach honors the distinctive discourse norms of the discipline of the lecture course, contextualizes skill development, and conveys the notion that writing is not an irrelevant task on the periphery of the "real" stuff. Linked courses probably are used most widely with composition courses, but they also work well with speech, critical thinking, mathematics, or library research methods. Some combinations do not involve skill courses: history and literature pairings are popular. At Spokane Falls Community College, links between a study skills course and introductory biology have improved student achievement. Seattle Central Community College has experimented successfully with linking writing and mathematics courses. Since general education always involves substantial emphasis on building skills, linked courses can be used in almost any institution to promote these general-education goals. By making linked classes an option within a large lecture class, the model is economically viable, even within a large university setting.
Clusters, another model, are essentially an expanded form of the linked-course model to three or four courses that speak to a common theme or topic. Classes are scheduled so that a group of students takes a cluster of courses together. Faculty members teaching in the clustered courses may or may not integrate their content with one another. Western Michigan University organizes a major segment of its honors program around clusters. CUNY-LaGuardia Community College requires all students pursuing the associate of arts degree to take one of two clusters; these are organized around themes appropriate to an inner-city student body composed largely of firstgeneration immigrants. Freshmen interest groups represent another type of learning community approach that is popular with students and parents and relatively simple and inexpensive. They also have spin-offs. Junior Interest Groups in the Major have been established at the University of Washington with a pilot linking three sociology courses: Research Methods, Symbolic Interaction, and Political Sociology. A graduate teaching assistant convenes weekly meetings to assist students with these demanding courses. Next year UW and several Seattle-area community colleges will establish another analogue, Transfer Interest Groups, to bridge the gap between the two-and four-year
undergraduate experience with an emphasis on the sciences and mathematics. The concept is strikingly simple. Freshman interest groups put into practice what often occurs informally in a good advising system. This model links three courses around a theme or pre-major topic and has a peer-advising component. Students could register, for example, for a "pre-law" group that involves Introduction to American Government, Introductory Philosophy, and English Composition. The learning community connection in the freshman interest group is provided by creating a "community" of students through the coregistration process and by the presence of a peer advisor, an upper-division student (often a student who has participted in the program). The peer advisor convenes the group of students every week for a one-credit discussion session that often includes orientation activities and becomes the basis for study groups. The peer advisor receives leadership or internship credit and sometimes a small stipend for assuming this responsibility. Freshman interest groups are a low-change model from the standpoint of the faculty because they do not involve team teaching or coordination of assignments. Nonetheless, they are important for students. They go a long way toward responding to the reports of the learned societies in AAC's Project on Liberal Learning and the Arts and Sciences Major, which call for increasing the formal and informal opportunities for students in a discipline to interact with one another.[1] Faculty members report that freshman interest group students are more active and responsible and tend to perform better academically. They also frequently become campus leaders.
Coordinated studies represent the most radical learning community model in terms of changing the traditional curriculum. Coordinated studies programs discard the notion of four-credit courses in favor of a curriculum of fully integrated sixteen-credit programs that last a full quarter or an entire year. This is the model around which the entire curriculum of Evergreen State College is built. Recent coordinated studies programs include the "Matter and Motion" program-a yearlong integrated program in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and laboratory computing-and "The Paradox of Progress," a freshmanlevel program exploring the evolution of Western civilization through the concept of "progress" with an emphasis on great books in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Because faculty members have an opportunity to redesign an entire curriculum with their colleagues, coordinated studies provide the most substantial learning experience for faculty members. That is probably why this is a popular learning community model; it is also the most expensive learning community model and the most difficult to sustain because faculty members do not teach outside courses and the class size usually is set at ratios of approximately twenty to one. Most institutions find that using a mix of different learning community models is the best approach. Learning communities generally exist alongside regular offerings within an institution. There are, of course, many possible variations on these four generic models. No one model is always appropriate. Coherence is not an all-or-nothing situation, and there are many small steps that can be taken to create it. Nonetheless, reorganizing time, space, and social relationships is necessary. What these learning community models share, to a greater or lesser degree, is the alteration of curricular structure to create new connections among disciplines, students, and faculty members. Do these structures work?
Preliminary studies demonstrate that learning communities do work.[2] They result in more intellectual interaction among students and between students and faculty members. They increase student involvement and create a sense of community. The programs show impressive results in terms of student academic achievement, student intellectual development, retention, transfer, and student motivation. Learning communities increase curricular coherence and provide ample opportunities for the integration and reinforcement of ideas. They promote an understanding of complex issues that cross disciplinary boundaries. Students are not the only beneficiaries of this type of educational restructuring. Faculty members find teaching in learning communities rich and revitalizing, especially in the models that demand extensive collaborative planning and teaching. It puts them in touch with their colleagues in a creative endeavor and allows them time to invest deeply in their students. Institutional payoffs are also large. Implementing learning communities requires new levels of cross-institutional support to address issues of student recruitment, publicity, advising, and registration. These programs bring diverse elements of the campus community together, often creating a renewed sense of involvement and common purpose. As a result, they frequently improve the climate of the campus. Learning communities seem to achieve many of the needed reforms in higher education, all at once, and in an economically feasible way. Why they work Understanding why learning communities work offers important clues about educational change. The global answer is that learning communities work because they represent a complex, educationally sound, and practical solution to a complicated set of educational issues. They represent a coordinated response to the issues of curriculum reform and staff development. They address critical "people issues" in our colleges and universities by providing an effective structure for rebuilding dialogue within our institutions. Learning communities also succeed because they are led by wellestablished, capable teachers-faculty members who are broadly educated and well-trained in their disciplines, mature educators with clear educational values and a strong sense of their own authority. Teachers do make a difference, and we need better ways to leverage the talent of gifted teachers to the benefit of the larger community. Through team teaching, learning communities provide one avenue for amplifying that talent. Efforts to recognize and reward exemplary teaching, unfortunately, often have relatively narrow goals focused on the individual. We need a program that goes one step beyond a program such as the one sponsored by the Burlington Northern Foundation to recognize exemplary teachers. We need not only to recognize gifted teachers with awards but to leverage their talents, perhaps through a mentor program that pairs them with new teachers. Learning communities have been particularly attractive to midcareer faculty members, which suggests readiness on their part to assume larger or different roles. The tedium that comes from assuming the same old roles and teaching the same old courses is an important and neglected issue at many institutions. As one educator put it after sixteen years at the same institution, "If you don't see new challenges,
you get worried about losing your edge." Clearly, learning communities rekindle the creative side of teaching and provide new challenges for well-established teachers. One has noted, "They work because they turn everyone into a learner again. They remind us why we went into this business in the first place." How learning communities rekindle faculty members' commitment is important. By asking faculty members literally to re-create the curriculum (as is done in the more radical forms of learning communities), these programs establish a climate of growth, trust, permission, and personal responsibility-key elements in self-renewal. In a very real sense, learning communities demand that we again become professors who "profess" what we think is worth teaching while providing a coherent and supportive teaching environment. Learning communities, however, let us "profess" in a way that works, through a creative process of curriculum design rather than a process of political negotiation in a curriculum committee. This suggests that faculty vitality and empowerment is critically bound up with questions about the balance between responsibility and control. Patricia Cross has noted, "The most long lasting reforms of undergraduate education will come about when faculty adopt the view of themselves as reformers within their immediate spheres of influence." We need to acknowledge that our institutional environments are not always perceived as supportive of this kind of reform. Learning communities often change that. They empower faculty members. By concentrating the curriculum and the time spent together, learning communities encourage faculty members and students to immerse themselves deeply and assume more responsibility. The typical teaching and learning environment diffuses teaching and learning energy and fragments responsibility. With only a fraction of the student's time, even the most committed teacher feels the frustration of partial commitment. Joseph Tuss-man emphasized this many years ago: "The student presents himself to the teacher in fragments and not even the advising system can put him together again. . .to pursue one thread is to drop another. . .[the student] seldom experiences the delight of sustained conversations."3 Gerald Graff has said something similar more recently about the state of the humanities curriculum, arguing that the problem of curricular reform is primarily an organizational dilemma of too much fragmentation.[4] But there are some deeper lessons here. At more than two dozen institutions in Washington state and at institutions like Ball State and Western Michigan University, which are using the cluster model extensively, it is clear that learning communities work because they go beyond the individual and are a basis for coming together to build the "larger educational enterprise." They provide a powerful associative structure-a structure for bringing people together-in an environment with few effective centripetal forces. Learning communities seem to represent an effective bridge among us. At the individual level they help release and leverage new energy by framing anew what is possible; they also provide an empowering group structure that works in a way that our more individualistic approaches to faculty development and educational reform often do not. Some years ago in these pages Joseph Katz noted, "Continuous learning on the part of the faculty seems to be a prerequisite for the needed transformation of teaching."[5] We would build on his insight to say, "Associative structures that support continuous learning on the part of groups of faculty seem to be a prerequisite for the needed transformation of our colleges." Learning communities are one of these associative structures.
Looking to the future Will learning communities replace traditional courses and disciplines? I don't think so. Will they become increasingly widespread? Yes, certainly. There is a crying need for adaptable educational solutions that address different issues and diverse institutional realities. With proper nurturing and support, learning communities will grow and prosper and provide one practical small-scale avenue for reform. We think of these curricular restructuring efforts as a kind of "skunkworks" for educational reform. "Skunkworks" is a term from industry for small centers of innovation that exist within larger companies. In the corporate world, skunkworks provide an important structure for focusing on new visions away from the day-to-day pressures of the organizational mainstream. As Peter Senge points out, industrial skunkworks create alternative learning environments that circumvent the unrelenting organizational tendency toward business-as-usual and crisis management that gets in the way of both diverse visions and mnovation.[6] In thinking about possible higher education analogues, however, we must remember that skunkworks always run the risk of becoming marginal. They succeed only if they are nurtured and protected. They only benefit the larger organization to the extent that structures are found to communicate and transfer their lessons to the mainstream. In my state, learning communities have prospered partly because support systems have been built within and across institutions to encourage reflection and ongoing learning. The Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Under-graduate Education, a statewide public service initiative of Evergreen State College, advances learning community work with support, in turn, from the state legislature and forty-three institutions, including two-year and four-year public and private institutions. This center offers conferences, consultants, faculty exchanges, publications, seed grants, and assessment assistance. Staff members, committed to building an inter-institutional community, focus on face-to-face relationships among faculty members and administrators on each campus. Long-term commitment, organizational savvy, and assiduous encouragement have helped learning communities grow and prosper in my state. Beginning in academic transfer curricula, they are now spreading to vocational, developmental, and technical curricula in the community colleges. Twenty-three of the state's twenty-seven community colleges are now experimenting with learning communities. Even at huge research institutions like the University of Washington, the learning community effort is also prospering. There are some important lessons here about expanding people's sense of what is possible and then carefully building skills and channels for both initiative and continuing dialogue. When people feel empowered to take charge and change educational structures, they discover lots of solutions to old problems. As one faculty member put it, "For the first time, I think teachers and administrators recognize that it is in their power to shape college education. I don't think most of us had seen it quite that way before. So much of it seemed pre-cast, dictated, inherited, and assumed. Now people are looking for methods to solve problems together. We are discovering that people need people in education as elsewhere." What are some of the next steps for these learning community "skunkworks"? Clearly, any institution would profit from the careful,
strategic development of learning communities. Learning communities provide a versatile approach to many issues: concerns about retention, curricular coherence, transfer, and integration of skills and content. We need to think about the critical issues in each of our institutions and ask whether some form of curricular restructuring might provide a solution. We might begin by examining some of our critical filter courses-prerequisites that have large numbers of students not succeeding-to see whether they can be restructured for greater success. At a time when our institutions are experiencing rapid faculty turnover and need to infuse new scholarship from a variety of interdisciplinary areas, we must be more intentional about building the campus culture, the climate, and the support systems for our faculty members. On most campuses, the campus culture is nobody's responsibility; it is created by default. Learning communities can help build the culture and address such issues as the increasing segmentation of the faculty. Team teaching provides a terrific way for veteran faculty members to pass their wisdom on to their younger colleagues while the veterans, in turn, benefit from the currency and fresh perspectives of their younger, more recently educated colleagues. Learning communities also provide important lessons about the structure of our dialogue. We are searching for new structures. Many existing ones, from the faculty senate to our curriculum committees, do not seem to be working well. Compared to the acrimonious wrangling and minimal change that often results from all-campus curriculum reform efforts, a team of four faculty members can designrelatively quickly and relatively harmoniously-a challenging and coherent year-long general-education program. Some of the neglected issues in the debates over educational reform really are about the character of our communities, our ways of making decisions, our willingness to trust one another to experiment within reasonable boundaries, and ways we can build our common identity while still respecting our increasing diversity. Learning community programs are modest but powerful educational restructuring efforts, suggesting that genuine reform requires us to be smarter about structure and more intentional about how we build our communities. 1. Reports from the Fields, "Liberal Learning and the Arts and Sciences Major," Volume One (Washington: AAC, 1991).
2. Faith Gabelnick, et al., Learning Communities: Creating Connections Among Students, Faculty, and Disciplines (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1990). Gall Wilkie, "Learning Communities Enrollment Study: 1986-1990 North Seattle Community College" (unpublished report). Kirk Thompson, "Learning at Evergreen: An Assessment of Cognitive Development Using the Perry Model" (Olympia, Wash.: Washington Center for Undergraduate Education, unpublished paper, 1991). 3. Joseph Tussman, Experiment at Berkeley (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). 4. Gerald Graff, "How to Deal with the Humanities Crisis: Organize It," ADE Bulletin 95 (Spring 1990): 4-10. 5. Joseph Katz, "Learning to Help Students Learn," Liberal Education 73 (January/February 1987): 28. 6. Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday, 1990). PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Mackinaw Bridge, Michigan
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Covered bridge in Warren, Vermont ~~~~~~~~ By BARBARA LEIGH SMITH BARBARA LEIGH SMITH is academic dean at Evergreen State College and director of the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education.
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