NLCC 2021 Concurrent Sessions D

Room 1 - Informative/Panel Presentation

Jason W. Johnson (Virginia Tech)

Guiding Undecided Students in COVID-19: VIA Living-Learning Community

“If it hadn’t been for VIA, I wouldn’t have made any friends this year.”  First-year students often struggle with feelings of being out of place during their first semester in college.  Imagine that your first semester was the Fall 2020 semester when COVID-19 mitigation strategies radically altered many of the traditional programs and activities designed to welcome new students to campus.  In this presentation, I will examine the efforts VIA’s leadership team made, beginning in March 2020, to keep residents engaged (virtually) from home for the remainder of the semester.  I will also discuss how in the Fall 2020 semester, a combination of LLC activities and an embedded First-Year Experience course within the VIA LLC provided residents with opportunities to acclimate to the Virginia Tech campus, explore careers and majors of interest, and find a home at a large public university during the uncertainty of a global pandemic.

Room 2 - Informative/Panel Presentation

​Pat Cwiek, Brenden Roth, Melanie Schell (Central Michigan University) 

When Students Lead the Way: The Positive Outcomes of Engaging Student Leaders in LLCs

In 1999, a small group of passionate, committed students sought to build a strong and effective “residential college” for their peers and the students that would follow. The first priority was creating an internal structure that would achieve the goals of establishing a friendly and supportive living-learning community and designing a program that would contribute to overall student success. Since that time, our board of student leaders has served as the foundation and driving force through years of evolution and growth. The focus has expanded to build an infrastructure to intentionally contribute to participants’ personal and professional development.  Mindful of the competencies that graduate schools and employers seek in candidates, the student board focuses on engagement opportunities that intentionally build these skills. Hear the stories of two student leaders as they share their experience of serving on that board and how it has helped prepare them for their future careers.

Room 3 - Interactive Session

Teneal Pardue (Queens University of Charlotte)

Community Engagement in Learning Communities:  Building a Lasting Partnership

We describe a successful and sustainable partnership between a Queens University of Charlotte general education LC and a Charlotte neighborhood whose residents are concerned about economic mobility.  Every semester the project is evaluated and adjusted so it continues to meet the needs of the community while addressing the student learning outcomes in the LC.  Training and preparation is part of the learning community, in order for students to learn best practices in collaborating with marginalized populations, with an emphasis on avoiding paternalism.  We present the process of building a partnership, student work, feedback from the community partner, and lessons learned.  Participants will gain insight into choosing a community partner, developing and sustaining a partnership, planning community engagement activities in the context of a learning community, and assessing student work.  Attendees will be given the opportunity to explore and develop community engagement ideas with the assistance of presenters.

Room 4 - Interactive Session

Jeffrey Thomas, Sarah Fatherly (Queens University of Charlotte)

Integration across modalities: planning for on-ground, hybrid, and online learning communities in a post-Covid teaching world.

Over the last year and a half, many of us found our courses and learning communities switched from on-ground to online modalities.  As people return to campus, we want to take time to consider the ways in which maintaining online options for learning communities can be a programmatic and institutional strategy for serving an increasingly wide array of student demographics.  At Queens University of Charlotte, we launched a general education revision that privileged integrative thinking as one of the most important transferable skills for our students.  To prepare for the needs of our entire student population- traditional, post-traditional, transfer-, we developed learning communities that are intentionally flexible in design and adaptable to a variety of instructional modalities.  As a result, we offered online and hybrid learning communities within a year of the program's launch and since that time, we have been running a combination of on-ground, online, and hybrid LC’s to meet the needs of various students.
 
In this session we will highlight the institutional thinking and approach that helped us scale this practice across our curriculum and invite participants to consider the factors that are important to building a learning community in diverse  modalities.  For instance, what are the key features that make a curricular learning community successful?  How do those features work in on-ground formats?  How do they work in on-line formats?  How can digital communities be built?  How might faculty more deliberately interact with each other and the students to help build community? We will use examples from own curriculum to provide some answers to these and other questions and invite participants to share examples from their own institutions.

Room 5.A - 15-minute Quick Talk

Elizabeth Shaffer-McCarthy & Laura Burt-Nicholas (College of DuPage)

Teaching Science in the Age of Social Media

This session will focus on a learning community between a non-majors biology course and an information literacy course, both targeted to a general education audience. Co-presenters describe their approach to teaching scientific reasoning and information literacy in their learning community through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic.  The pandemic illustrated many public misconceptions about the process of science as it related to an emerging infectious disease.  Equally destructive was the rampant spread of misinformation and disinformation.  We will describe the scaffolded research assignments created to help dissect and evaluate these co-pandemics. Students culminated their research efforts with social-media-sharable content that addressed a major public misconception and supplied accurate information on the topic.

Room 5.B - 15-minute Quick Talk

Jillian Eslami (Texas A&M University)

A Library Sponsored LLC: From Then to Now

Follow a librarian’s journey in creating the campus’s first Library focused and sponsored Living Learning Community. From establishing a need to identifying the stakeholders, the logistics of building a LLC from the ground up will be shared and discussed. The overall goal with the creation of this LLC is to create a space where the library can help create connections and between information literacy skills in the classroom and into the real world, where students will ultimately need to use those skills. The LLC will create a more holistic approach to start to bridge the gaps between evaluating academic material and critical thinking skills and then helping students apply those to “real life”, to help prepare them for life after college.

Room 6 - Informative/Panel Presentation

Bernadette Marie Flores, Chelsie Hawkinson, Amanda Marquez, & Jimena Burnett (TAMU-CC)

Welcome to the Matrix: Claiming a Learning Community Identity with OER

High Impact Practice taxonomies can help institutions to better define, evaluate and develop the quality of HIPs implementation. IUPUI has leveraged its learning communities taxonomy to assess program quality, fidelity, and student success outcomes. This session will focus on the development of the learning communities taxonomy, and specifically on ways that the taxonomy has fostered higher quality out-of-class activities for LC students, created a common campus understanding of out-of-class activity expectations, served as a tool for planning and professional development of LC instructional teams, and assisted program administrators in evaluating funding allocation requests.  Presenters will provide a brief overview of the taxonomy development process and discuss how the learning communities taxonomy has been utilized to improve the quantity and quality of out-of-class activities. Participants will have the opportunity to practice using a sample taxonomy to evaluate real life examples of out-of-class activities.

Room 7 - Interactive Session

​Susan Meshulam & Heather Bowman (IUPUI)

Supporting Student Success in Math through an Integrative Learning Community

The success rates for college introductory math students have been a long-standing challenge.  This session will provide information and data to further the development of a math-linked learning community.  Specifically, a curriculum was written and math mindset literature was utilized to create a gateway learning community that includes a first year seminar and a math class. Presenters will share a curricular outline, example assignments, and data on the outcomes of this effort to help attendees create an action plan for implementing math-linked learning communities on their campuses. Presenters will conclude by sharing the planned next steps for the expanding program.

Room 8 - Informative/Panel Presentation

Jennifer Simpson & Kristen Ruggles (Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi)

Best Practices in Integrating the Writing Center into Learning Communities

Integration of other departments into the Learning Community is imperative for a well-rounded basic education.  It increases higher thinking (Parisi & Graziano-King, 2011) and models collaboration, a soft skill that will benefit students as they enter the workforce.  It also teaches students to seek out and use the services and facilities that are made available to them on the college campus and further creates community among the students, as writing centers typically employ student writers. The writing center can also be viewed as the epicenter of functional writing education outside the composition classroom and can act in a crucial role in teaching principle discourse variation to students (North, 1994; McKay & Simpson, 2013).  Many freshmen come into college with an assumption that writing is only for the English classroom and are shocked when they are introduced to their first research papers outside that field.  This presentation will explore the integration and collaboration of the writing center into the seminar classroom to assist students with their writing assignments in classrooms outside the English composition classroom setting.  It will discuss real life examples of writing center and seminar collaboration and integration as well as offer best practices and suggestions on how to further collaborate with writing centers to assist students with their research.