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Learning Communities:
An Overview |
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Learning Communities:
An Overview |
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© Copyright 2000 by Ashley Williams. The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author. |
Currents and Causes Nationally, a number of factors are cited as contributing to the development of the learning community movement (see, for example, "Introduction: Why learning communities" in Shapiro & Levine, 1999). Among the motivating factors frequently noted by faculty who teach in learning communities are the desire to create a sense of community among students, to foster greater curricular coherence, and to stimulate active learning. Concerns about connecting and retaining freshmen have been highly significant; so, too, have been concerns about the need to assist today's highly diverse student population in making the transition from "the kid culture" to academic culture. In addition, the assessment/outcomes movement has stimulated general concern about creating successful learning environments; developments in cognitive science and a greater understanding of learning environments have also added impetus to pedagogical reform (see, for example, Lave & Wenger, 1991, on learning by doing and learning from others). While various critiques of American higher education have contributed to an awareness of the need to revise teaching and learning environments, three reports have been especially influential in learning community growth. The first of these is Ernest Boyer's College: The Undergraduate Experience in America, (1987), especially in its call for connected learning. Six years later after Boyer's work, Alexander Astin published his comprehensive review of research on the college experience, What matters in college: Four critical years revisited (1993b), highlighting, among other pertinent issues, research on the social dimensions of learning (student-student and student-faculty). Of particular significance is Astin's finding that, "The single most powerful source of influence on the undergraduate student's academic and personal development is the peer group." He emphasizes that the amount of peer-interaction "has far-reaching effects on nearly all areas of student learning and development." (1993a, p. 7). The reality that critical thinking skills develop most as a result of student-to-student interaction makes creating learning environments in which students collaborate meaningfully with each other all the more important. A third highly influential report was the Wingspread Group's An American Imperative: Higher Expectations for Higher Education (1993) which called for putting student learning at the center of the academic enterprise and for encouraging meaningful civic participation. In addition, the work of Art Chickering has been important in the development of LC initiatives (see, for example, Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education, 1987, and Education and Identity, 2nd ed., 1993). Here at George Mason, where he was a faculty member in the Graduate School of Education, Chickering encouraged integration of student and academic affairs and advocated including experiential learning with classroom study (J. O'Connor, personal communication). Some LC programs respond to calls for new workplace abilities emphasizing interdisciplinarity, technology, and the social interaction skills which will be required for working in teams to integrate information and ideas from various fields of knowledge. The report of the Boyer Commission on educating undergraduates in the research university, Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities (1998), sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation, makes interdisciplinarity a major theme. This study notes that while higher education is organized by disciplinary boundaries, students need training in multiple perspectives for their career and work lives.
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