Chapter 19 in Building and Sustaining Learning Communities
Edited by Sandra N. Hurd and Ruth Federman Stein, 2004
Boston, Massachusetts: Ankler Publishing Company
Edited by Sandra N. Hurd and Ruth Federman Stein, 2004
Boston, Massachusetts: Ankler Publishing Company
Amazing Growth at SUNY ESF
Janine DeBaise and Julie R. White
The State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry campus, with 1,800 undergraduate and graduate students, adjoins that of Syracuse University, and its first-year students live in SU residence halls. Creating a learning community for first-year students that connects their required botany and writing classes has improved both the students’ academic experience and their connection to their school.
Getting Started
What is the college experience? It was the answer to this seemingly simple question that guided our creation of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s (ESF) Learning Community. We quickly realized that the characteristics of learning communities translate into good education. A learning community structures the college experience in just the same way students live it: as a whole. Traditionally, we have compartmentalized and kept separate academics and student development. The ESF learning community has blurred those boundaries, and the result has been better education defined by community, personal growth, and enhanced academic performance.
Our motive for initiating a learning community was better education. But, truth be told, extraneous factors encouraged us to move quickly to this initiative. ESF students live in Syracuse University residence halls, and, traditionally, our students were clustered into three residence halls near our campus. This had been working out fine for our students in that they were housed in pockets and could find each other quite easily. Syracuse decided that as of fall 2001, however, first-year students would be randomly assigned to all residence halls. This meant that we would no longer be able to cluster our students. While the ESF student affairs staff was hearing and worrying about this new housing arrangement, academic affairs was learning about theme housing and learning communities. Our problem was suddenly met with a solution that would move us beyond old ways of doing business.
The evolution of the ESF learning community is best described by buy-in. The academic and student affairs partnership was solidified in the beginning as the deans of each division worked together to solve our housing problem. Next, we identified two courses that most of our first-year students take (botany and writing) and contacted the faculty to assess their level of interest. This was quite possibly the most simple part of our learning community initiative. We knew that the faculty members teaching botany and writing shared a student-centered philosophy that would be well served by such an effort. The faculty members not only agreed to learns more about learning communities, they enthusiastically began to identify connections between their courses at our very first information meeting.
After solidifying the academic components of the learning community, we formalized our relationship with the SU Office of Residence Life by securing a residence hall floor on which our learning community students would live. It was at this point that the concept really started to take shape and the learning community team was established. We had the support of the director of residence life who immediately put us in contact with the residence hall director (the actual go-to person). Again, this was an easy pitch. Learning communities, by their very nature, address issues of student development and link academic learning with life learning—a central mission of the SU Office of Residence Life. We met regularly during the spring of 1999 to create what we referred to as THE Syllabus, which was comprised of three complementary and integrated curricula: botany, writing, and student life.
It was at this juncture that we needed wider support and feedback regarding the initiative. How would we fund the programs we would offer? How would we inform prospective students of this opportunity? How would students react to this concept? In order to answer these and other questions, we developed a road show that we took to the executive administration, faculty governance, admissions personnel, and to student government. These efforts yielded broad-based enthusiasm and ownership. Among the biggest fans of our learning community is our college president. Needless to say, his endorsement of and excitement about this project doesn’t hurt.
Recruitment
Our admissions staff helped us to devise a recruitment plan. In addition to the normal print advertising in admissions and housing materials, we decided to do some more active advertising and recruiting. Fortunately, we had completed planning in time to promote the learning community at our spring receptions for admitted students. In our first year these presentations depended on our aspirations and plans.
Of course, the second time around, recruitment was much easier. The current learning community students were eager to share their experiences with incoming students. Several of the students had put together a Power-Point, presentation of music and photographs for our end-of-the-semester gathering in December; the dean recognized that this glimpse into student life was exactly what prospective students needed to see. During our second round of recruiting, we actually had to turn students away.
The lesson learned here is that experience is the best recruitment tool we have and the voice of participants is the most influential. During the second year of presentations, we essentially got out of the students’ way. They had experienced the benefits of the learning community membership, and they enjoyed talking about it. The pride they had in their community and their school was exemplified in their encouragement of prospective students to sign up.
In addition to this live promotion, our dean of instruction sent a letter to all first-year students inviting them to participate in the learning community. This letter highlighted the academic benefits of community involvement, and it was presented as a special opportunity for ESF first-year student that would be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. This letter included an application to be completed by interested students, and it outlined the requirements for membership (e.g., courses to be taken). Upon receipt of the students’ applications, we sent them a learning contract that documented students’ rights and responsibilities as members of the learning community. To be placed in the community, students had to sign this contract and thereby commit to being active and contributing community members.
DESCRIPTION OF THE LEARNING COMMUNITY
Interlocking Circles
The symbol we used for our learning community was three interlocking circles: one circle for writing, one circle for botany, and one circle for residence life. All 58 students were registered for two courses—botany and writing—which were integrated with each other and with residence life activities on their floor to create a seamless learning environment. The group was broken into three sections of fewer than 20 students each for their writing class—which met three times each week in their residence hall—and these same three groups made up three botany lab sections, taught by a teaching assistant who was part of the learning community team. All the students attended botany lecture as part of a class of two hundred plus students. The students were required to attend weekly floor meetings and mandatory student life activities that included such topics as stress relief, diversity, and ethics.
Linking Courses With Each Other and Student Life
Linking a hard science course—botany–to a writing course sounds a bit crazy at first, but once we started discussing the idea, it made a lot of sense. Scientists cannot succeed in their field if they don’t know how to write. The biggest challenge for a writing teacher is often to get the students involved with topics so that writing is not an artificial exercise with no context. The integration with the botany course and with the residence life activities handed the writing teacher topics that had already been discussed and explored by the students. Writing class, because it was small, became the place for questions and feedback and for planning projects like retreats, coffeehouses, a student assessment project, and a collaborative art mural. It was the writing class that served as the conduit through which the other two circles were connected. Writing assignments ranged from botany-related topics such as genetics and plant diversity to residence life-related topics like alcohol use and human diversity.
We took advantage of the overlap whenever we could. For example, in September the students took a botany field trip to a nearby county park. Their assignment was to compare vegetation found on an east-facing slope to the types of vegetation found on a north-facing slope to determine whether or not the amount of sunlight the slope received affected the plant growth. While they were taking notes for the botany lab, they also took notes for a writing assignment for writing class. Botany labs are written in a highly specific and technical form for other scientists. For writing class, however, the students had to write a paper for a lay audience. They had the choice of writing a narrative of the day, explaining the lab to a high school audience, or doing something creative. In writing class the next week, students read aloud their essays and also spent some time talking about the science writing component, the formal lab that they were writing up for their botany course. By taking advantage of this opportunity for overlap, the students discovered what both the botany teacher and the writing teacher wanted them to learn — that a good writer will write in different ways for different audience.
During residence life programs, students talked about topics such as ethics, diversity, and drug/alcohol abuse. In writing class, these topics became vehicles for thinking, reading, and writing. Monday morning class often began with the teacher asking, “So how did the floor program go last night? Let’s write about it today.” The residence life programs were also a huge time-saver for the writing teacher: it’s wonderful to work with students who have been given a topic and who have already had stimulating discussion and learned lots of information about the topic.
Careful choice of reading materials for the writing course helped further emphasize the overlap among the three circles. For example, the book Dwellings by Native American poet Linda Hogan (1995) discusses traditional knowledge of plants, ethical responsibilities of humans to the earth, a community that includes plants and animals, the role of science in our culture, the idea of objectivity in science, types of human communication, ecological destruction, and the role of language. It stimulated wonderful discussions that touched both botany and student life issues.
LINKING LIVING WITH LEARNING
Integrating the three circles was often as simple as considering the physical space. Writing class was held in the residence hall, sometimes in the classroom on the first floor and sometimes up in the students’ floor lounge. The writing teacher spent one afternoon each week in the lounge, reading the group journals and chatting with the students. Before big tests, the botany teacher held review sessions in the residence hall. The study lounge on the floor was equipped with three computers and a printer. The students requested (and received) a white board so that they could hold study groups in their own lounge. Faculty members were given meal tickets so that they could go to the hall and eat meals with the students on occasion. The team–the writing teacher, the botany instructor, the two ESF administrators, and the residence director–met with the students during finals weeks for a pizza study break. To emphasize the learning part of community life on the floor, the administration supported tutors for chemistry, calculus, and botany, who held hours right in the lounge.
When we interviewed students as part of our ongoing assessment, most of them saw the integration of botany, writing, and student life as a natural fit. “I think writing is really important to botany because in botany you learn concepts that have to be applied to the world, and you have to get the information out through writing,” said one learning community student. Similarly, students often connected residence life issues with their writing class. More often than not, the content of the papers and reflections required by the writing teacher show a huge overlap with residence life: alcohol abuse, marijuana use, suicide, advice for incoming learning community students, advice on how to go camping, animal rights and veganism, hunting, tattoos and piercings, and an analysis of the positive/negative effects of the Internet. Two students, for example, wrote and performed a skit on the cultural differences between urban and rual life. After the skit, one student shared her experience growing up in a rural area, and anot6her student talked about what it was like to grow up in the Bronx. Then the presenters led a discussion about the tensions on campus between those from rural areas and those from New York City. Every topic the students chose was a topic that had been hotly debated in class, at floor meetings, and in their rooms.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
The learning community team brainstormed goals at one of the early meetings, but we soon realized that defining our learning objectives would be an ongoing process. It wasn’t until we were actually working with the community of students that many of our objectives became clear. Goals were solidified during our biweekly team meetings, our overnight retreat, class discussions, our review of student reflection papers, informal social gatherings, and other experiences we shared as a community. The learning objectives that the learning community team agreed upon fall into three categories–learning, community, and personal development.
Learning
GETTING IT DOWN ON PAPER
Part of the process of developing learning objectives was simply to put down on paper many of the unspoken goals we all had. The conversations during our weekly meetings revealed the common goals pretty quickly. “We need to get students to take responsibility for learning,” one faculty member would say, and we would all nod in agreement. At one meeting, a residence life staff member asked, “Which students are emerging as leaders?” When the writing teacher stopped to think about which students took charge of a collaborative project, she realized that developing leadership potential was a goal in the classroom as well as in the residence hall.
One thing we learned quickly is that faculty, administration, and residence life staff often do have the same goals and concerns–we just use different language. The residence life people would talk about setting community standards, the writing teacher would talk about classroom atmosphere, the botany teacher would talk about rules for the lab: we were all talking about the ways we teach these students to create an environment in which they can live and work together. Writing everything down forced us to negotiate the language and the goals.
SUPPORTING EACH OTHER
The high level of interaction among the team formed an atmosphere in which we supported each other’s learning objectives and discovered many shared objectives. When, for example, students in the classroom came up with great ideas (“Let’s have a second retreat” or “Let’s do a collaborative mural”), the writing teacher would send the students off to talk to the associate dean of student life and experiential learning. Her response was exactly what writing teachers love to hear: “Put it in writing. Give me a proposal.”
The writing teacher was trying to teach the students that writing was a way to organize their ideas, think through projects, and persuade an audience–and the other members of the team supported that goal. The students quickly discovered that the way to get what they wanted–whether it was getting the administration to pay for a second retreat or the dean to pay for art supplies for a mural they wanted to paint–was to put their ideas in writing, to write a proposal that was specific and convincing. In writing class, we talked about how this is the kind of writing they will do in their careers; scientists, for example, have to learn how to write grant proposals to get money for projects.
The shared objectives of all three circles became obvious to the students as the semester progressed. The residence life staff talked about citizenship and setting standards for working together in a lab situation; the writing teacher talked about setting rules for class discussion and collaboration. It may have taken weeks of meetings for the teaching team to learn each other’s language and make these connections, but the students were quick to see the overlap.
Group Journal
Another tool for promoting the shared objectives for the three circles of this learning community was the group journal. During the first week of class, the writing teacher separated the students into groups of about five students per group, trying to keep the groups as diverse as possible. Each group was given a binder full of loose-leaf paper that would serve as the group’s journal. The journals were kept right in the lounge on the floor, and each student was required to write at least one page in the journal every week. In these pages, they responded to class discussions, to residence life activities, to the books they were reading, and to each other’s entries. They talked about being home-sick, they shared stories about their hometowns, they vented their frustrations about difficult courses, they analyzed current events, they gave each other advice, they did soul-searching about their careers and the meaning of life, and they informally assessed the learning community environment. These journal entries informed our work. The writing teacher was able to share her perceptions of student development issues with the residence life staff. She could tell–from the tone of journal entries–when students were felling overwhelmed with academic work or worried about a botany test, and accordingly, she could keep the botany teacher up to date on student morale.
Overnight Retreat
An important element of the learning community was the overnight retreat during the third week of the semester. Attendance was mandatory: We had the whole team and 100% of the students. With sleeping bags and notebooks, we piled into two big buses and drove off to spend 24 hours together. The students began bonding before we even left the parking lot: The loud songs continued the whole way. Students, divided into teams, were responsible for meals and clean up. Since the students were already divided into three groups for writing class–sections of about 20 students each–we were able to use groups that seemed natural. The 8:30 writing class was in charge of breakfast, the 10:40 writing class took lunch, and the 11:45 class made dinner.
During writing class the week before, we planned Friday night’s activity: a nature walk in the dark, some creative writing, and then a coffeehouse in front of the roaring fire. For the nature walk, the students chose to stay in their journal groups. After wandering around under the stars for half an hour or so, they stumbled back in, ready to sit on the floor of the lodge and do some writing. It’s a scene that a writing teacher has to love–all 58 students, still breathing heavily from their hike, settled down with notebooks, writing furiously, while a fire crackles in the background.
The coffeehouse, organized and run by the students, gave the students a chance to see each other’s talents. Students read poetry, sang songs, played guitars and violins and the digeridoo, and performed skits. It’s amazing how open the students will be during this kind of event: The poems (often about unrequited high school love) were heartfelt and the audience applause sincere.
The retreat continues with late night conversations, card games, and music. In the morning, the botany teacher and teaching assistants sent us all into the woods on a plant scavenger hunt. Sitting on the grass in the sun talking about the plants we’ve picked is a great way to learn botany. By afternoon, as we all participated in a ropes course, we felt like we’d known each other for years. The writing and botany teacher were just as thrilled with the ropes course as the residence life staff members were. After all, teamwork and communication are important to both writing and science.
BENEFITS OF COMMUNITY
The writing and botany teachers discovered that one of the wonderful things about teaching students who live together is that they could require them to work together outside class. In the case of the writing teacher, by the time students came to class with their essays, they has often read each other’s work and given each other feedback. The learning community situation is ideal for collaborative work. Even the floor meetings at times became an extension of writing class. For example, in class we read The Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibben (1992), a book that compares a day spend in the Adirondacks with a whole day’s worth of cable television and which lead to a spirited discussion about the effect of television on our culture. One group of students proposed turning off the television in their lounge for a whole week, much to the horror of other students. The debate found its way to a floor meeting where, after much talk and a few dramatic monologues, they all agreed to the experiment. The negotiations included talk about what students might do instead of watching television (card games, guitar playing, and even a squirt gun war, although perhaps we are not supposed to put that in print). They rearranged the furniture in the lounge and all pledged to support those students who admitted to being television addicts.
The benefits of this collaborative community also extended to the campus as a whole. The ownership students felt, not only for their learning community, but for the college was impressive. Many of the graduates of our first learning community are now the backbone of our student leadership in government and clubs and organizations. Most of the orientation staff is made up of this population, and they are the group we often look to as a barometer of student sentiment.
In addition, the learning community initiative provided the administrative team with an ideal environment for collaboration. It wasn’t long until we understood each other’s language and began to integrate others’ perspectives into our individual work. We found professional support and challenge, and the result has been a wonderful experience that we otherwise would not have had. The learning community has given us a reason to learn about each other, our work, our motives, and our aspirations.
ASSESSMENT
Our method of assessment was a bit haphazard, at least during our first year. Part of what made assessment complex was our commitment to qualitative assessment, in addition to the more easily measured quantitative assessment. Of course, the selling points of the learning community would come from the grade point average and retention data. The powers that be on campus tend to be bean counters, and quantitative data tell the type of stories they seem to be able to hear.
So what did we learn? Our learning community makes a difference! During our first year, 98% of the participants in the learning community persisted to their second year (compared to an overall persistence rate of 78%). Similarly, learning community participants outperform their peers academically by an average of one-third of a point. Needless today, our bean counters are impressed with these numbers!
What the quantitative measures don’t tell us is how satisfied students are with their experience or specifically what is good or what needs tweaking. For this information we turned to qualitative methods. We engaged graduate students from the higher education program at Syracuse University to facilitate student focus groups. As anticipated, this information was valuable as we planned for year two. For example, students suggested that we have tutors on the floor especially for difficult courses. We implemented this suggestion in year two.
The student interviews reaffirmed for us that many of our objectives were on target. One student, for example, said: “Learning communities are so great for student-teacher relationships because students get to know our teachers on a more personal and relaxed basis.” Knowing that this sense of community was important to the students made us confident that this objective was an important one. Almost all the students characterized the environment on the floor as supportive and nurturing. “What I like best about the learning community is the family structure and support I get from my peers and professors,” said one learning community student.
The high level of interaction between faculty, staff, and students led to informal forms of assessment that were discussed at our regularly scheduled meetings. For example, the writing teacher was able to report 100% attendance almost every day of the semester, even during her 8:30 section. Toward the end of the semester when the students were giving presentations, students would go to other sections to see their friends presenting: Class attendance was sometimes 200%. This high level of enthusiasm toward learning has been one of our objectives. The group journals and the reflective pieces assigned by the writing teacher were an important source of continual feedback from the students. The writing teacher was able to track student satisfaction during the semester by simply reading what they wrote.
During the first year of our learning community, the students themselves were very conscious that they were part of a grand experiment. When the writing teacher suggested assessment of the learning community as a project for writing class, the students were eager to participate. During the first semester, the students were eager to participate. During the first semester, the students interviewed all the students on the floor as well as all the members of the learning community team. Each student wrote a reflective paper about his or her experiences. They held several focus groups, conducted two surveys, and then pulled all the information together with a big presentation that included numerous charts, graphs, and a slide show that showed student life on the floor. While students were critical (and fair) in their assessment, they were also very constructive and interested in helping to facilitate an even more successful experience for those who followed.
Many of the students, for example, felt that having a residence life activity in addition to a floor meeting every single week was too much of a commitment. After discussing this issue amongst the team, we concurred with the students and cut the number of required activities in half. Students also asked for stronger links to the botany course. On of their suggestions–that the huge botany lecture be split into several sections–we sent to another committee on campus because the implementation would have ramifications for the entire freshmen class. In the short term, the team came up with other ways to strengthen the links. For example, the botany teacher and the writing teacher will both include in their course the book The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan (2001). Because the book has a whole section devoted to marijuana use, the book will lead to a residence life discussion of drug use on campus.
Whenever possible, we tried to involve students in making change happen, putting the responsibility on them, giving them ownership. When the students asked for a second retreat (presenting us with a petition singed by all the floor members), we agreed to go ahead with it as long as they planned the retreat and carried it out themselves. Several outgoing students took charge. They formed committees, talked over major details at floor meetings, and approached the dean for funding. The second retreat, an overnight trip in December, included a coffeehouse, a game of Capture the Flag, a slide show, and an afternoon of improv.
The students were adamant about including a creative or nontraditional form of assessment as well: To this end, they convinced the dean to give them the money to pay for a 4’ by 8’ canvas and acrylic paints. They painted this fairly abstract work of art during the second retreat and during several late-night sessions in the lounge. The mural include quotes, images, photographs, and abstract designs–contributions from all 58 students.
Of course, the assessment continues. On a small campus, we are able to track student growth and involvement by simply watching closely. As the first group of learning community members became sophomores, we were thrilled to watch them joining clubs, becoming orientation leaders, and taking leadership positions. We continue to watch their growth with pride.
CONCLUSION
The success of our first learning community exceeded our own expectations. By the second year we had already expanded the program, and we hope eventually to have all of our first-year students involved in a learning community. Simply put, we are providing a more integrated and comprehensive experience for our students, faculty, and staff. We’ve perforated the artificial boundaries between classroom learning and residence hall learning.
At our very first meeting with the students in August, we gave them each a plant to nurture, joking that their grades would depend on whether or not the plant lived. We knew that taking care of the plants would require negotiations among community members because some of the rooms faced north and didn’t get enough sunlight. The plants moved about the floor, sometimes in the students’ rooms and sometimes in the lounge where a big window provided necessary light. There were a few difficult situations–one plant lost a lot of dirt when it got knocked over by rowdy students–but for the most part, the plants flourished and grew, reaching heights that amazed us all. And these plants remain as the appropriate symbol of our learning community: For faculty, staff, and students, this has been a time of amazing growth.
Janine M. DeBaise is a writing instructor and Julie R. White is associate dean of student affairs at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
REFERENCES
Hogan, L. (1995). Dwellings. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
McKibben, B. (1992). The age of missing information. New York, NY: Random House.
Pollan, M. (2001). The botany of desire. New York, NY: Random House.
Janine DeBaise and Julie R. White
The State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry campus, with 1,800 undergraduate and graduate students, adjoins that of Syracuse University, and its first-year students live in SU residence halls. Creating a learning community for first-year students that connects their required botany and writing classes has improved both the students’ academic experience and their connection to their school.
Getting Started
What is the college experience? It was the answer to this seemingly simple question that guided our creation of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s (ESF) Learning Community. We quickly realized that the characteristics of learning communities translate into good education. A learning community structures the college experience in just the same way students live it: as a whole. Traditionally, we have compartmentalized and kept separate academics and student development. The ESF learning community has blurred those boundaries, and the result has been better education defined by community, personal growth, and enhanced academic performance.
Our motive for initiating a learning community was better education. But, truth be told, extraneous factors encouraged us to move quickly to this initiative. ESF students live in Syracuse University residence halls, and, traditionally, our students were clustered into three residence halls near our campus. This had been working out fine for our students in that they were housed in pockets and could find each other quite easily. Syracuse decided that as of fall 2001, however, first-year students would be randomly assigned to all residence halls. This meant that we would no longer be able to cluster our students. While the ESF student affairs staff was hearing and worrying about this new housing arrangement, academic affairs was learning about theme housing and learning communities. Our problem was suddenly met with a solution that would move us beyond old ways of doing business.
The evolution of the ESF learning community is best described by buy-in. The academic and student affairs partnership was solidified in the beginning as the deans of each division worked together to solve our housing problem. Next, we identified two courses that most of our first-year students take (botany and writing) and contacted the faculty to assess their level of interest. This was quite possibly the most simple part of our learning community initiative. We knew that the faculty members teaching botany and writing shared a student-centered philosophy that would be well served by such an effort. The faculty members not only agreed to learns more about learning communities, they enthusiastically began to identify connections between their courses at our very first information meeting.
After solidifying the academic components of the learning community, we formalized our relationship with the SU Office of Residence Life by securing a residence hall floor on which our learning community students would live. It was at this point that the concept really started to take shape and the learning community team was established. We had the support of the director of residence life who immediately put us in contact with the residence hall director (the actual go-to person). Again, this was an easy pitch. Learning communities, by their very nature, address issues of student development and link academic learning with life learning—a central mission of the SU Office of Residence Life. We met regularly during the spring of 1999 to create what we referred to as THE Syllabus, which was comprised of three complementary and integrated curricula: botany, writing, and student life.
It was at this juncture that we needed wider support and feedback regarding the initiative. How would we fund the programs we would offer? How would we inform prospective students of this opportunity? How would students react to this concept? In order to answer these and other questions, we developed a road show that we took to the executive administration, faculty governance, admissions personnel, and to student government. These efforts yielded broad-based enthusiasm and ownership. Among the biggest fans of our learning community is our college president. Needless to say, his endorsement of and excitement about this project doesn’t hurt.
Recruitment
Our admissions staff helped us to devise a recruitment plan. In addition to the normal print advertising in admissions and housing materials, we decided to do some more active advertising and recruiting. Fortunately, we had completed planning in time to promote the learning community at our spring receptions for admitted students. In our first year these presentations depended on our aspirations and plans.
Of course, the second time around, recruitment was much easier. The current learning community students were eager to share their experiences with incoming students. Several of the students had put together a Power-Point, presentation of music and photographs for our end-of-the-semester gathering in December; the dean recognized that this glimpse into student life was exactly what prospective students needed to see. During our second round of recruiting, we actually had to turn students away.
The lesson learned here is that experience is the best recruitment tool we have and the voice of participants is the most influential. During the second year of presentations, we essentially got out of the students’ way. They had experienced the benefits of the learning community membership, and they enjoyed talking about it. The pride they had in their community and their school was exemplified in their encouragement of prospective students to sign up.
In addition to this live promotion, our dean of instruction sent a letter to all first-year students inviting them to participate in the learning community. This letter highlighted the academic benefits of community involvement, and it was presented as a special opportunity for ESF first-year student that would be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. This letter included an application to be completed by interested students, and it outlined the requirements for membership (e.g., courses to be taken). Upon receipt of the students’ applications, we sent them a learning contract that documented students’ rights and responsibilities as members of the learning community. To be placed in the community, students had to sign this contract and thereby commit to being active and contributing community members.
DESCRIPTION OF THE LEARNING COMMUNITY
Interlocking Circles
The symbol we used for our learning community was three interlocking circles: one circle for writing, one circle for botany, and one circle for residence life. All 58 students were registered for two courses—botany and writing—which were integrated with each other and with residence life activities on their floor to create a seamless learning environment. The group was broken into three sections of fewer than 20 students each for their writing class—which met three times each week in their residence hall—and these same three groups made up three botany lab sections, taught by a teaching assistant who was part of the learning community team. All the students attended botany lecture as part of a class of two hundred plus students. The students were required to attend weekly floor meetings and mandatory student life activities that included such topics as stress relief, diversity, and ethics.
Linking Courses With Each Other and Student Life
Linking a hard science course—botany–to a writing course sounds a bit crazy at first, but once we started discussing the idea, it made a lot of sense. Scientists cannot succeed in their field if they don’t know how to write. The biggest challenge for a writing teacher is often to get the students involved with topics so that writing is not an artificial exercise with no context. The integration with the botany course and with the residence life activities handed the writing teacher topics that had already been discussed and explored by the students. Writing class, because it was small, became the place for questions and feedback and for planning projects like retreats, coffeehouses, a student assessment project, and a collaborative art mural. It was the writing class that served as the conduit through which the other two circles were connected. Writing assignments ranged from botany-related topics such as genetics and plant diversity to residence life-related topics like alcohol use and human diversity.
We took advantage of the overlap whenever we could. For example, in September the students took a botany field trip to a nearby county park. Their assignment was to compare vegetation found on an east-facing slope to the types of vegetation found on a north-facing slope to determine whether or not the amount of sunlight the slope received affected the plant growth. While they were taking notes for the botany lab, they also took notes for a writing assignment for writing class. Botany labs are written in a highly specific and technical form for other scientists. For writing class, however, the students had to write a paper for a lay audience. They had the choice of writing a narrative of the day, explaining the lab to a high school audience, or doing something creative. In writing class the next week, students read aloud their essays and also spent some time talking about the science writing component, the formal lab that they were writing up for their botany course. By taking advantage of this opportunity for overlap, the students discovered what both the botany teacher and the writing teacher wanted them to learn — that a good writer will write in different ways for different audience.
During residence life programs, students talked about topics such as ethics, diversity, and drug/alcohol abuse. In writing class, these topics became vehicles for thinking, reading, and writing. Monday morning class often began with the teacher asking, “So how did the floor program go last night? Let’s write about it today.” The residence life programs were also a huge time-saver for the writing teacher: it’s wonderful to work with students who have been given a topic and who have already had stimulating discussion and learned lots of information about the topic.
Careful choice of reading materials for the writing course helped further emphasize the overlap among the three circles. For example, the book Dwellings by Native American poet Linda Hogan (1995) discusses traditional knowledge of plants, ethical responsibilities of humans to the earth, a community that includes plants and animals, the role of science in our culture, the idea of objectivity in science, types of human communication, ecological destruction, and the role of language. It stimulated wonderful discussions that touched both botany and student life issues.
LINKING LIVING WITH LEARNING
Integrating the three circles was often as simple as considering the physical space. Writing class was held in the residence hall, sometimes in the classroom on the first floor and sometimes up in the students’ floor lounge. The writing teacher spent one afternoon each week in the lounge, reading the group journals and chatting with the students. Before big tests, the botany teacher held review sessions in the residence hall. The study lounge on the floor was equipped with three computers and a printer. The students requested (and received) a white board so that they could hold study groups in their own lounge. Faculty members were given meal tickets so that they could go to the hall and eat meals with the students on occasion. The team–the writing teacher, the botany instructor, the two ESF administrators, and the residence director–met with the students during finals weeks for a pizza study break. To emphasize the learning part of community life on the floor, the administration supported tutors for chemistry, calculus, and botany, who held hours right in the lounge.
When we interviewed students as part of our ongoing assessment, most of them saw the integration of botany, writing, and student life as a natural fit. “I think writing is really important to botany because in botany you learn concepts that have to be applied to the world, and you have to get the information out through writing,” said one learning community student. Similarly, students often connected residence life issues with their writing class. More often than not, the content of the papers and reflections required by the writing teacher show a huge overlap with residence life: alcohol abuse, marijuana use, suicide, advice for incoming learning community students, advice on how to go camping, animal rights and veganism, hunting, tattoos and piercings, and an analysis of the positive/negative effects of the Internet. Two students, for example, wrote and performed a skit on the cultural differences between urban and rual life. After the skit, one student shared her experience growing up in a rural area, and anot6her student talked about what it was like to grow up in the Bronx. Then the presenters led a discussion about the tensions on campus between those from rural areas and those from New York City. Every topic the students chose was a topic that had been hotly debated in class, at floor meetings, and in their rooms.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
The learning community team brainstormed goals at one of the early meetings, but we soon realized that defining our learning objectives would be an ongoing process. It wasn’t until we were actually working with the community of students that many of our objectives became clear. Goals were solidified during our biweekly team meetings, our overnight retreat, class discussions, our review of student reflection papers, informal social gatherings, and other experiences we shared as a community. The learning objectives that the learning community team agreed upon fall into three categories–learning, community, and personal development.
Learning
- Students will show enthusiasm for learning and writing will be measured not only by the quality of the work they produce, but also by the process they use to create their work
- Students are aware of and can demonstrate the connection between in-class and out-of-class experiences.
- Students will be enthusiastic and take responsibility for learning.
- Students will express enthusiasm about being an ESF student.
- Student demand to participate in ESF learning communities will increase.
- Students will feel a sense of ownership for their community.
- ESF will become a more caring community—one that fosters the appreciation of diversity as well as provides a forum of discussion on diversity.
- Students will gain confidence in their ability to learn and feel empowered to take on risks and new challenges.
- Students, faculty, and student affairs staff will develop authentic relationships.
- Students will develop their leadership potential.
- Students will develop a sense of power and authority in their environment; they will move from buy-in of the learning community to a sense of ownership.
- Students will discuss and understand the long-term consequences of drug/alcohol use. We will create a culture in which drug and alcohol use is not a taboo topic.
GETTING IT DOWN ON PAPER
Part of the process of developing learning objectives was simply to put down on paper many of the unspoken goals we all had. The conversations during our weekly meetings revealed the common goals pretty quickly. “We need to get students to take responsibility for learning,” one faculty member would say, and we would all nod in agreement. At one meeting, a residence life staff member asked, “Which students are emerging as leaders?” When the writing teacher stopped to think about which students took charge of a collaborative project, she realized that developing leadership potential was a goal in the classroom as well as in the residence hall.
One thing we learned quickly is that faculty, administration, and residence life staff often do have the same goals and concerns–we just use different language. The residence life people would talk about setting community standards, the writing teacher would talk about classroom atmosphere, the botany teacher would talk about rules for the lab: we were all talking about the ways we teach these students to create an environment in which they can live and work together. Writing everything down forced us to negotiate the language and the goals.
SUPPORTING EACH OTHER
The high level of interaction among the team formed an atmosphere in which we supported each other’s learning objectives and discovered many shared objectives. When, for example, students in the classroom came up with great ideas (“Let’s have a second retreat” or “Let’s do a collaborative mural”), the writing teacher would send the students off to talk to the associate dean of student life and experiential learning. Her response was exactly what writing teachers love to hear: “Put it in writing. Give me a proposal.”
The writing teacher was trying to teach the students that writing was a way to organize their ideas, think through projects, and persuade an audience–and the other members of the team supported that goal. The students quickly discovered that the way to get what they wanted–whether it was getting the administration to pay for a second retreat or the dean to pay for art supplies for a mural they wanted to paint–was to put their ideas in writing, to write a proposal that was specific and convincing. In writing class, we talked about how this is the kind of writing they will do in their careers; scientists, for example, have to learn how to write grant proposals to get money for projects.
The shared objectives of all three circles became obvious to the students as the semester progressed. The residence life staff talked about citizenship and setting standards for working together in a lab situation; the writing teacher talked about setting rules for class discussion and collaboration. It may have taken weeks of meetings for the teaching team to learn each other’s language and make these connections, but the students were quick to see the overlap.
Group Journal
Another tool for promoting the shared objectives for the three circles of this learning community was the group journal. During the first week of class, the writing teacher separated the students into groups of about five students per group, trying to keep the groups as diverse as possible. Each group was given a binder full of loose-leaf paper that would serve as the group’s journal. The journals were kept right in the lounge on the floor, and each student was required to write at least one page in the journal every week. In these pages, they responded to class discussions, to residence life activities, to the books they were reading, and to each other’s entries. They talked about being home-sick, they shared stories about their hometowns, they vented their frustrations about difficult courses, they analyzed current events, they gave each other advice, they did soul-searching about their careers and the meaning of life, and they informally assessed the learning community environment. These journal entries informed our work. The writing teacher was able to share her perceptions of student development issues with the residence life staff. She could tell–from the tone of journal entries–when students were felling overwhelmed with academic work or worried about a botany test, and accordingly, she could keep the botany teacher up to date on student morale.
Overnight Retreat
An important element of the learning community was the overnight retreat during the third week of the semester. Attendance was mandatory: We had the whole team and 100% of the students. With sleeping bags and notebooks, we piled into two big buses and drove off to spend 24 hours together. The students began bonding before we even left the parking lot: The loud songs continued the whole way. Students, divided into teams, were responsible for meals and clean up. Since the students were already divided into three groups for writing class–sections of about 20 students each–we were able to use groups that seemed natural. The 8:30 writing class was in charge of breakfast, the 10:40 writing class took lunch, and the 11:45 class made dinner.
During writing class the week before, we planned Friday night’s activity: a nature walk in the dark, some creative writing, and then a coffeehouse in front of the roaring fire. For the nature walk, the students chose to stay in their journal groups. After wandering around under the stars for half an hour or so, they stumbled back in, ready to sit on the floor of the lodge and do some writing. It’s a scene that a writing teacher has to love–all 58 students, still breathing heavily from their hike, settled down with notebooks, writing furiously, while a fire crackles in the background.
The coffeehouse, organized and run by the students, gave the students a chance to see each other’s talents. Students read poetry, sang songs, played guitars and violins and the digeridoo, and performed skits. It’s amazing how open the students will be during this kind of event: The poems (often about unrequited high school love) were heartfelt and the audience applause sincere.
The retreat continues with late night conversations, card games, and music. In the morning, the botany teacher and teaching assistants sent us all into the woods on a plant scavenger hunt. Sitting on the grass in the sun talking about the plants we’ve picked is a great way to learn botany. By afternoon, as we all participated in a ropes course, we felt like we’d known each other for years. The writing and botany teacher were just as thrilled with the ropes course as the residence life staff members were. After all, teamwork and communication are important to both writing and science.
BENEFITS OF COMMUNITY
The writing and botany teachers discovered that one of the wonderful things about teaching students who live together is that they could require them to work together outside class. In the case of the writing teacher, by the time students came to class with their essays, they has often read each other’s work and given each other feedback. The learning community situation is ideal for collaborative work. Even the floor meetings at times became an extension of writing class. For example, in class we read The Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibben (1992), a book that compares a day spend in the Adirondacks with a whole day’s worth of cable television and which lead to a spirited discussion about the effect of television on our culture. One group of students proposed turning off the television in their lounge for a whole week, much to the horror of other students. The debate found its way to a floor meeting where, after much talk and a few dramatic monologues, they all agreed to the experiment. The negotiations included talk about what students might do instead of watching television (card games, guitar playing, and even a squirt gun war, although perhaps we are not supposed to put that in print). They rearranged the furniture in the lounge and all pledged to support those students who admitted to being television addicts.
The benefits of this collaborative community also extended to the campus as a whole. The ownership students felt, not only for their learning community, but for the college was impressive. Many of the graduates of our first learning community are now the backbone of our student leadership in government and clubs and organizations. Most of the orientation staff is made up of this population, and they are the group we often look to as a barometer of student sentiment.
In addition, the learning community initiative provided the administrative team with an ideal environment for collaboration. It wasn’t long until we understood each other’s language and began to integrate others’ perspectives into our individual work. We found professional support and challenge, and the result has been a wonderful experience that we otherwise would not have had. The learning community has given us a reason to learn about each other, our work, our motives, and our aspirations.
ASSESSMENT
Our method of assessment was a bit haphazard, at least during our first year. Part of what made assessment complex was our commitment to qualitative assessment, in addition to the more easily measured quantitative assessment. Of course, the selling points of the learning community would come from the grade point average and retention data. The powers that be on campus tend to be bean counters, and quantitative data tell the type of stories they seem to be able to hear.
So what did we learn? Our learning community makes a difference! During our first year, 98% of the participants in the learning community persisted to their second year (compared to an overall persistence rate of 78%). Similarly, learning community participants outperform their peers academically by an average of one-third of a point. Needless today, our bean counters are impressed with these numbers!
What the quantitative measures don’t tell us is how satisfied students are with their experience or specifically what is good or what needs tweaking. For this information we turned to qualitative methods. We engaged graduate students from the higher education program at Syracuse University to facilitate student focus groups. As anticipated, this information was valuable as we planned for year two. For example, students suggested that we have tutors on the floor especially for difficult courses. We implemented this suggestion in year two.
The student interviews reaffirmed for us that many of our objectives were on target. One student, for example, said: “Learning communities are so great for student-teacher relationships because students get to know our teachers on a more personal and relaxed basis.” Knowing that this sense of community was important to the students made us confident that this objective was an important one. Almost all the students characterized the environment on the floor as supportive and nurturing. “What I like best about the learning community is the family structure and support I get from my peers and professors,” said one learning community student.
The high level of interaction between faculty, staff, and students led to informal forms of assessment that were discussed at our regularly scheduled meetings. For example, the writing teacher was able to report 100% attendance almost every day of the semester, even during her 8:30 section. Toward the end of the semester when the students were giving presentations, students would go to other sections to see their friends presenting: Class attendance was sometimes 200%. This high level of enthusiasm toward learning has been one of our objectives. The group journals and the reflective pieces assigned by the writing teacher were an important source of continual feedback from the students. The writing teacher was able to track student satisfaction during the semester by simply reading what they wrote.
During the first year of our learning community, the students themselves were very conscious that they were part of a grand experiment. When the writing teacher suggested assessment of the learning community as a project for writing class, the students were eager to participate. During the first semester, the students were eager to participate. During the first semester, the students interviewed all the students on the floor as well as all the members of the learning community team. Each student wrote a reflective paper about his or her experiences. They held several focus groups, conducted two surveys, and then pulled all the information together with a big presentation that included numerous charts, graphs, and a slide show that showed student life on the floor. While students were critical (and fair) in their assessment, they were also very constructive and interested in helping to facilitate an even more successful experience for those who followed.
Many of the students, for example, felt that having a residence life activity in addition to a floor meeting every single week was too much of a commitment. After discussing this issue amongst the team, we concurred with the students and cut the number of required activities in half. Students also asked for stronger links to the botany course. On of their suggestions–that the huge botany lecture be split into several sections–we sent to another committee on campus because the implementation would have ramifications for the entire freshmen class. In the short term, the team came up with other ways to strengthen the links. For example, the botany teacher and the writing teacher will both include in their course the book The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan (2001). Because the book has a whole section devoted to marijuana use, the book will lead to a residence life discussion of drug use on campus.
Whenever possible, we tried to involve students in making change happen, putting the responsibility on them, giving them ownership. When the students asked for a second retreat (presenting us with a petition singed by all the floor members), we agreed to go ahead with it as long as they planned the retreat and carried it out themselves. Several outgoing students took charge. They formed committees, talked over major details at floor meetings, and approached the dean for funding. The second retreat, an overnight trip in December, included a coffeehouse, a game of Capture the Flag, a slide show, and an afternoon of improv.
The students were adamant about including a creative or nontraditional form of assessment as well: To this end, they convinced the dean to give them the money to pay for a 4’ by 8’ canvas and acrylic paints. They painted this fairly abstract work of art during the second retreat and during several late-night sessions in the lounge. The mural include quotes, images, photographs, and abstract designs–contributions from all 58 students.
Of course, the assessment continues. On a small campus, we are able to track student growth and involvement by simply watching closely. As the first group of learning community members became sophomores, we were thrilled to watch them joining clubs, becoming orientation leaders, and taking leadership positions. We continue to watch their growth with pride.
CONCLUSION
The success of our first learning community exceeded our own expectations. By the second year we had already expanded the program, and we hope eventually to have all of our first-year students involved in a learning community. Simply put, we are providing a more integrated and comprehensive experience for our students, faculty, and staff. We’ve perforated the artificial boundaries between classroom learning and residence hall learning.
At our very first meeting with the students in August, we gave them each a plant to nurture, joking that their grades would depend on whether or not the plant lived. We knew that taking care of the plants would require negotiations among community members because some of the rooms faced north and didn’t get enough sunlight. The plants moved about the floor, sometimes in the students’ rooms and sometimes in the lounge where a big window provided necessary light. There were a few difficult situations–one plant lost a lot of dirt when it got knocked over by rowdy students–but for the most part, the plants flourished and grew, reaching heights that amazed us all. And these plants remain as the appropriate symbol of our learning community: For faculty, staff, and students, this has been a time of amazing growth.
Janine M. DeBaise is a writing instructor and Julie R. White is associate dean of student affairs at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
REFERENCES
Hogan, L. (1995). Dwellings. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
McKibben, B. (1992). The age of missing information. New York, NY: Random House.
Pollan, M. (2001). The botany of desire. New York, NY: Random House.