NLCC 2021 Concurrent Sessions B
1:00 PM - 1:45 PM (All times ET)
Day One: Thursday, October 21, 2021
Room 1 - Informative/Panel Presentation
Ana Dison (UT Austin)
Living, Learning & Growing Together: Engineering Your World
The Women in Engineering Program (WEP) Living Learning Community provides first-year engineering women with the opportunity to live together in a supportive, residential community. Our community has 76 members and a support team of peer coaches and Resident Assistants. Students form friendships, create study groups and have special programming and academic support from the WEP staff. Members are required to enroll in a one-hour seminar in the fall and spring semesters. During the fall semester, the seminar focus is on transition and community building. Mixed in to the weekly seminar, are hands on engineering projects to build teamwork skills as well as to introduce the Engineering Design Process. During the spring semester, students work in teams to research and present on one of the Engineering Grand Challenges. A few recruitment scholarships are available to members.
Room 2 - Informative/Panel Presentation
Richie Gebauer, Nancy Watterson, Michelle Filling-Brown, Johanna Crocetto (Cabrini University)
Embracing Evolution: Ensuring Sustainability to Preserve Learning Communities Through Institutional Change
Higher education is an evolving paradigm and as this evolution occurs, institutions are challenged to transform and mature in an attempt to keep up. Occurring simultaneously to, and as a result of, this ongoing process in which the criterion for success is constantly changing, institutional leaders move on, institutional goals and priorities shift, organizational structures fluctuate, and yet learning community programs - and those that champion those efforts - may falter due to a lack of sustainability.
It is critical that learning community practitioners focus attention on the sustainability of learning community programs, ensuring a level of flexibility that allows programs to adapt to the inevitable change that is to occur. Over time, there is potential for curriculum and co-curriculum to become less effective. The emphasis on research, scholarship, and service in addition to teaching may redirect faculty to shift their attention and energy to other endeavors. Faculty may take semester- or year-long sabbaticals, interrupting the momentum of a particular community(s). As institutions experience financial hardships, a reallocation of resources may lead to reduction in learning community budgets. Unforeseen circumstances may result in a transition to online learning, challenging learning community faculty to foster community virtually. As these obstacles present themselves, how do learning community faculty and staff evolve to ensure the longevity of learning communities on their campuses?
This panel presentation will seek to discuss how designing a collaborative process that results in defining shared learning outcomes, implementing a unified assessment process, creating a multitude of spaces to review student work, establishing a culture of vulnerability where faculty are willing and excited to offer and elicit feedback on integrative assignments, engaging in ongoing faculty development tied to best practices, and carving out intentional spaces for faculty to create an integrated educational experience that promotes the intersection of curriculum and co-curriculum builds a strong foundation for sustainability to weather the constant storm that is higher education.
Room 3 - Informative/Panel Presentation
Angel Eason, Dr. Kirsten Ericksen (Norfolk State University)
Without collaboration, Learning Communities would not work! A tale of collaboration at an HBCU
Partnerships generally exist on a continuum between warm, vibrant, and effective; to chilly, stifled, and ineffective. In traditionally siloed institutions, such as colleges and universities, cross-divisional partnerships between academic affairs and student affairs have tended to be more chilly, stifled, and ineffective. Differences of organizational culture, scope of work, and type of training are some factors contributing to divisional misunderstandings (Ericksen&Walker,2015;Kezar, 2003; LePeau, 2015).
The good news is productive collaborations between divisions are possible, resulting in “seamless learning” (Kezar, 2003, p. 138). Formally launched in 2013, and relaunched in 2019, Norfolk State University’s Learning Communities program exists first and foremost for its students, but also with the broader goal of becoming a national model for supporting student success within HBCUs, and even more broadly among Minority Serving Institutions. Through collaboration and partnerships, the learning communities program has gained great momentum on-campus and in the local community.
This session will provide an insiders’ view of collaboration at one historically Black college or university (HBCU) utilizing resources in a collaborative manner to carry out the implementation of the Learning Communities program. Through collaboration we identify the significance of working together as a way of maximizing human and physical capital to deliver value to students. The social capital present at HBCUs makes this a natural fit (Arroyo, Ericksen, Walker, Aregano, 20). Establishing relationships across divisions has proven to be an effective tool in enhancing student success. Our hope is that participants will leave this session with practical ideas for implementing or enhancing their collaborative Learning Communities program.
Room 4 - Interactive Session
Jeffrey Thomas, Sarah Fatherly (Queens University of Charlotte)
An invitation to cross-institutional research about learning communities
How effective are our learning communities? That is one of the questions that many of us want to answer. One of the challenges of being at a smaller institution, however, is that while we can often look at data from before and after the implementation of learning communities, we may have more trouble developing appropriate comparison groups. How can we increase our ability to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of our learning community practices? One approach is the use of cross-institutional comparisons. When small institutions work together, we can ask better research questions and evaluate the impacts of learning communities in different ways. In this session, we will invite participants to begin the process of thinking through strategies for collaboration and potential areas for research that would be fruitful for these a cross-institutional partnerships
Room 5.A - 15-minute Quick Talk
Andrea Montalvo-Hamid (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi)
Working with your Team: The Role of First-Year Writing in Learning Communities
This session will discuss the role of First-Year Writing (FYW) courses and faculty in linked Learning Communities. FYW faculty must take an active role in Learning Community (LC) planning in order to create integrative experiences and foster a sense of community for LC students. The FYW class is an ideal place for integration as writing is malleable, and projects can be tailored to meet the Learning Community goals. Examples of past integrative projects and activities will be provided during this session.
Room 5.B - 15-minute Quick Talk
Christine L. Grela (McHenry County College)
Extending the Benefits of Integrated Learning Communities
The benefits of fully integrated learning communities extend well beyond the co-taught classes. This quick talk will focus on how standalone courses benefit from learning communities through specific examples of content and ideas brought from the learning communities courses into standalone classes. Through this integration, students who don’t participate in the learning communities program at McHenry County College still derive some of the benefits. The specific examples presented will focus on psychology, philosophy/ethics, and composition, and they include informative content (i.e., bringing readings and ideas from ethics into the psychology classroom) as well as skill-based content (i.e., bringing components of the writing process from composition into the psychology classroom). This cross-course integration shows that learning communities not only benefit students, but they also function as a unique form of professional development for faculty.
Room 6 - Interactive Session
Kelsey Hirsch, M.S. & Alex Mitchell, M.L.S. (Texas A&M University)
Fostering Collaboration Between Learning Communities and Libraries
Interdisciplinary partnerships are a key part of library collaboration. Many people want to take their students to the library to do research for a specific paper, but often don’t know that they can bring their students to the library for library awareness and general information literacy sessions. The active programming that librarians develop for first year student specific outreach goes beyond applying skills to specific assignments. Librarians and learning community instructors are encouraged to ensure that freshmen students are aware of the library resources available to them as well as fundamental information literacy concepts. These skills are essential for all students, however they play an important role in first generation learning communities. The university library can be a daunting resource, but teaching students what is available to them is critical to their success. Our University Libraries work with first generation college student centered programs, as well as other first year learning communities on campus to ensure that our students are aware of the resources the library provides through fun and interactive activities. At a large state school freshmen often don not have a connection to their resources on a personal level. Repeated interactions with librarians can provide students with a sense of campus connectedness crucial in the retention of first generation learning community students. So how do you start a collaboration with your librarian? Who do you ask? What do you want your students to learn? In this session we will discuss how you and your librarian can build a working relationship to explore the possibilities and learning outcomes for your learning community. At the end of the session you will have brainstormed learning outcomes that you can take back to your university, will be able to identify a potential partner from your institution’s library, and activities that might interest your students.
Room 7 - Informative/Panel Presentation
Dulmini Barupala, PhD. (Wayne State University)
Addressing Health Disparities: A Pre-Med Learning Community Focused on Training Future Leaders in Medicine
Disadvantaged populations in the U.S. persistently face inequality in healthcare access and quality and one way to address this issue is by training medical students to become physician leaders who are sensitive to such inequities. We have created a learning community that focuses on leadership training and health disparities education. Via exposure to role models, students who participated in our learning community have shown to learn about leadership traits/skills such as having a vision, personal integrity, selflessness, passion for serving people, communications skills, listening skills, etc. Students have also exemplified that they apply the learned leadership traits/skills in their academic journey and that those traits/skills have helped shape their personal leadership goals. We educate our students in health disparities via community engagement efforts, research projects and group presentations and they have shown to develop passion in helping people, selflessness, and empathy and have shown to improve listening, communication, and teamwork skills. The success of this learning community suggests that similar programming can help create physician leaders who are sensitive to healthcare issues in their communities.
Room 8 - Interactive Session
Ted Hazelgrove, James Gould (McHenry County College)
Using Autobiographical Writing to Facilitate Moral Reflection
We have recently revamped our long-standing Heroes and Villains LC, which combines Philosophical Ethics and English Composition. In our original design, students explored connections between ethics and literature. But we have come to see that integrating the content of different courses is only part of what we want to achieve. We also want to relate theoretical perspectives to students’ personal lives. Incoming students find the critical thinking required to integrate philosophy and literature daunting. Tapping into something familiar—their own life experiences—as a way to unlock the meaning of moral concepts is less intimidating. Students write about a time they met someone different from themselves and found their hearts opening wider. They write, often in a disarmingly honest way, about their moral failures—drunk driving, shoplifting, plagiarism and vandalism. The ethics / story pairing depends on instructor-guided unpacking of how literature texts illustrate philosophical concepts. When students examine their own experience, by contrast, their comprehension is more intuitive and internalized. Philosophy both helps students understand ideas using their own experiences and reinterpret their experiences using moral concepts. Everyone struggles with anger and forgiveness, fear and courage, self-control and yielding to temptation. The universality of these experiences allows all students to write—and to write confidently and with insight—about their experience and to combine it with philosophical reflection.
The interactive workshop will include both facilitator presentation and audience participation. We will a. illustrate an instructional activity that connects personal vignette to moral theory, b. provide a theoretical explanation and several examples of how this model can be used in different classes, and c. invite participants to comment, ask questions and offer examples.
Room 9 - Informative/Panel Presentation
Lisa Angermeier, Ph.D., Heather Bowman, Cathy Buyarski, Ph.D. (IUPUI)
Capturing Student Voices: Building a Sense of Belonging Through Peer Testimonials
In fall 2018, the learning communities program at IUPUI received a Welcoming Campus Innovation Grant to support a new retention-focused institutional initiative aimed at increasing students' sense of belonging by normalizing challenges around the transition to college. All learning communities students received an invitation to participate in a short online module consisting of a video featuring real-life IUPUI students reflecting on the challenges they faced during their first year of college. Later in the semester, a select group of learning communities were identified to pilot a second series of videos featuring student testimonials about typical mid-semester challenges. In addition to the videos, LC instructional teams chose from a variety of reflective in-class activities based on the topics in the videos. By addressing and reflecting upon these challenges, learning communities students were able to feel less isolated and more a part of the campus community. Presenters will share sample student testimonial videos, topics addressed, suggested activities, and feedback from pilot teams. Structure and logistics of the pilot program will be shared for campuses that wish to replicate the project at their own institutions. Presenters will also share next steps and plans to expand the initiative.