Learning Communities and Liberal Education

New ways of organizing curricula can encourage coherence and collaboration in liberal learning, while adding to its charisma.

By Barbara Leigh Smith

The connection between liberal education and learning communities is not new. The first use of the term "learning community" dates back to the Progressive Era and the establishment in 1927 of the Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin. Founded by educational visionary Alexander Meiklejohn, the college offered a two-year interdisciplinary program that remains significant in the history of general and liberal education. Meiklejohn believed that the first two years of college should prepare students for civic engagement in the expanding American democracy, but what he saw around him was an education system that fostered student indifference and docility. Specialized academic departments were gaining ascendancy and the lower-division undergraduate curriculum was rapidly becoming nobody's business.

The problem was partially structural. The university was being torn apart by a growing contradiction between teaching undergraduates and producing research. Moreover, the division of the university into narrowly focused departments and fifty-minute courses fragmented social and intellectual relationships, providing faculty and students little opportunity to build an academic community that would seriously engage pressing interdisciplinary issues.

Meiklejohn's solution was to restructure the curriculum, pedagogy, and the roles and relationships of students and faculty. Both a social and an educational undertaking, the Experimental College would help students develop the knowledge, values, and skills for civic engagement. Like his contemporary, the philosopher John Dewey, Meiklejohn believed that building the habits of mind for democratic engagement required more than book learning. Students needed an educational environment that fostered engagement both in and outside the classroom. As a living and learning program, the Experimental College would give students firsthand experience building community.

The college's curriculum, designed to give students a scheme of reference in thinking about important human issues, focused on democracy in fifth-century Athens and contemporary America. The pedagogy stressed active learning, discussion, and collaborative work, and it helped students develop analytical and problem-solving skills rather than memorize specific bits of information. Challenging assignments encouraged the students to apply the theories they read about to real-life issues. The Experimental College was short-lived, but its alumni—who are now in their nineties and continue to gather for annual reunions—are a living testimony to the power of this educational experience.

A handful of programs in the 1970s and 1980s put a similar emphasis on civic engagement and inquiry-based approaches to learning. The early programs at the University of California, Berkeley; San Jose State College (now a university); the State University of New York at Stony Brook; the University of Maryland; La Guardia Community College; and Evergreen State College are particularly notable. These efforts demonstrated that different institutional environments could sustain learning community programs.

The programs were shorter than that of the Experimental College, usually consisting of a constellation of linked courses in a single term. Other institutions found these briefer learning community programs attractive and came to see them as a vehicle for fostering student retention and faculty revitalization. In hundreds of subsequent renditions, institutions adopted the structural idea behind learning communities by linking courses, but often without a larger vision of liberal education.

The learning community movement is diverse, covering everything from simple linked classes to fully integrated team-taught programs. Their quality and scope vary. Nonethe-less, many institutions have found that learning communities empower participants to see their roles and relationships in new ways. In some colleges and universities, including those I describe in the following sections, learning communities have become powerful platforms for implementing new visions of liberal education. They go considerably beyond minimal tinkering with structure and resonate with many of the ideas put forth by Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College.

Wagner College

Learning communities have become a signature program for Wagner College on Staten Island, New York, an institution serving 2,200 students. Called the "Wagner Plan for the Practical Liberal Arts," the curriculum strives to unite deep learning and practical applications, and incorporates the liberal arts, experiential learning, and interdisciplinary education.

Wagner students complete a liberal arts core program organized through three learning communities—one in the first year, one in the sophomore and junior years, and one in the senior year. In the first year, the learning community program consists of two interdisciplinary classes, a writing-intensive tutorial, and field experience. A program focused on environmental issues, for example, might include fieldwork investigating the environmental causes of health issues in a nearby community. In the sophomore and junior years, students take a two-year sequence of courses structured around a unifying theme, such as using mathematics to "unlock the mysteries of the universe" or investigating lost civilizations through courses in anthropology and philosophy. In the senior year, the program includes a capstone course, a tutorial, and an internship or applied learning component.

Each portion of the program connects students with the world outside the classroom through community research projects, mentorships, and service learning, often drawing upon the college's location in New York City. "Reflective tutorials," a key aspect of the program, provide important venues for students to think and write about their learning experiences.

Nearly all faculty at Wagner participate in learning communities, and the courses are team planned, although only a few are team taught. At monthly meetings, learning community faculty and selected administrators discuss best practices and skill building, and at the end of the year, faculty participate in a two-day retreat. An extensive assessment process informs and refines the program's implementation.

Wagner dean Ann Love commented to me in October that learning communities help students who come in with a profession in mind see the purpose of the liberal arts courses, because they see courses, such as economics, in an integrated way, not just in a vacuum. Undecided students gain a much larger sense of the possibilities available across majors. For faculty it has been tremendous, a real breaching of the walls and silos of the campus. They've come to know many other colleagues across departments and gained so much from teaching-focused collegial interactions.

St. Lawrence University

St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, developed learning communities with a focus on transforming the university's academic culture. The program, which perceives liberal education as preparation for responsible global citizenship, relies on an epistemology designed to help students understand global issues. "This is a model of knowledge and practice that we owe our students," vice president and dean Grant Cornwell says.

The program is for first-year students and has four integrated components: multidisciplinary team-taught courses focusing on enduring questions of the human experience; extensive attention to writing, speaking, research, and critical reflection; an enriched advising system; and residential colleges in which students live and learn together. Themes of the living and learning communities include the "evolution of the American family" and the "cultural construction of communities."

The St. Lawrence program has well-defined goals, and ongoing faculty development deepens the ability of professors to deliver a curriculum that makes appreciation for diversity and globalism a centerpiece of a modern liberal arts education. In what ways do learning communities strengthen liberal education? Cornwell stresses the importance of community and the living-learning environment, the interdisciplinary nature of the curriculum, and the use of collaborative, problem-based pedagogical approaches that encourage students to bring multiple perspectives to bear on important issues.

In addition to the first-year program, St. Lawrence offers upper-division living-learning communities. In one such community, students take an integrated curriculum in the social and natural history of the Adirondacks, comparative philosophies of human relations to nature, and expressive arts and nature, all while living in a mountain yurt village dedicated to the praxis of sustainable living. In another recent learning community, the Intercultural House, students took a course in the history and contemporary dynamics of multicultural America, while exploring and negotiating their commonalities and differences in day-to-day life.

North Seattle Community College

Nearly half of the nation's students start college in community colleges, making it important for such institutions to embrace a clear vision of how to provide general and liberal education. Many community colleges do so through learning communities; North Seattle Community College, which introduced learning communities in 1985, is a leader in this effort.

The college adopted a general education, outcomes-based associate's degree in 1995, which requires students to participate in a learning community focused on "discovering the interdisciplinary nature of knowledge" and "learning how to explore primary sources and other good books." Cultural pluralism and active learning are also stressed. Most learning communities at the college are team-taught, theme-based interdisciplinary programs of ten to fifteen credit hours. They aim to transcend the narrowness of disciplinary courses, broaden students' perspectives, nurture their love of learning, and develop basic academic skills. The dialogue involved in book seminars and small-group work helps to turn these aspirations into a reality.

The underlying goal is to introduce students to the culture of the liberal arts and to train them how to do close reading of texts, and engage in "structured dialogue around complex ideas that leads to the discovery of new knowledge and an experience of becoming an independent learner," faculty member Jim Harnish said in an interview this fall.

North Seattle's learning community programs vary from year to year, but a "beginnings" program, aimed at entering students, is offered each fall. The fall 2002 version, titled "The Shaping of Cultures, Myths, and Identities," combined perspectives from history, communication, literature, and women's studies. It encouraged students to examine their own experiences while looking at broader issues about our origins, values, and identities (especially focused on gender, race, and class) and ways that such issues have been shaped by history and myths. A second regularly offered program, called "Ways of Knowing: How to Choose What to Believe," explores classic epistemological questions from different disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy and science.

North Seattle is explicit about the ways in which learning communities differ from traditional courses. Seminars are a key feature of the learning community program, student participation is stressed, expectations for collaboration are high, and self-reflection is encouraged.

Over the years, students at North Seattle have consistently reported that their learning communities stand out as peak educational experiences. They praise the role of the programs in building their knowledge, academic skills, confidence, motivation, and commitment and interest in civic engagement. What specifically makes the difference?

According to a recent unpublished student survey, students say that certain elements make learning communities successful: a culture that builds trust and encourages students to get to know one another, high expectations and challenging assignments, interdisciplinary themes, and collaborative activities. In addition, students praised longer-than-usual class periods, an emphasis on writing and critical thinking, seminars, and instruction by multiple professors who are both experts in their fields and co-learners on a team.

Fairhaven College

In 1991 Fairhaven College at Western Washington University in Bellingham established the law and diversity program, a rigorous two-year learning community for students who want to go to law school; the college makes a special effort to recruit students from underrepresented populations who aspire to be leaders in their communities. Students enter the program as a cohort and serve as an important support system for one another. The program, which explores the gap between the ideals and the practices of justice in an increasingly diverse society, emphasizes the development of skills essential to the study of law: critical reading, writing, research, oral communication, and analytical ability. Seminars link the course's themes, while internships and mentor relationships provide students with support and experiential learning.

Interdisciplinarity and community are critical elements of this learning community's notion of liberal education. As faculty member Marie Eaton put it in a telephone conversation last fall:

The big issues of the world are interdisciplinary. Learning communities help students connect the big issues and move out of the microfocus on small issues and disciplines. They provide a playing field for students to practice this kind of thinking. . . . Liberal learning is about citizenship. To foster this kind of understanding, students need experience in community working on shared issues, and they need to learn to negotiate differences. The . . . program . . . has tried to both work with an interdisciplinary perspective and across some of the most challenging areas of difference today—race and justice.

Lessons

In its 2002 report Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, the Association of American Colleges and Universities urges all colleges to embrace liberal education. The association conceives liberal education as a "philosophy of education that empowers individuals, liberates them from ignorance, and cultivates social responsibility. [It is] characterized by challenging encounters with important issues, and [is] more a way of studying than a specific content."

Learning communities can help forge new visions of liberal education suitable to a broad range of institutions. The experiences of Wagner College, St. Lawrence University, North Seattle Community College, and Fairhaven College teach us several lessons.

First, learning communities offer a transformative framework for thinking about liberal education, one that goes beyond the tired old debates about content versus process and the major versus general education versus liberal learning. Learning communities can bring general education, liberal education, and, sometimes, the major together. By concentrating time and energy, learning communities give faculty and students greater coherence in their work lives.

A clear sense of purpose guides successful programs, and the process of their establishment is important. The programs described in this article developed out of faculty dialogue, collaboration, and invention. The result was a shared vision of liberal education with explicit learning outcomes, often institutionalized through general education or graduation requirements or through connections to the major.

At the same time, the learning community program is purposely dynamic. Having clear goals does not limit innovation. On the contrary, faculty can often propose new learning communities, thereby ensuring that the program is a venue for ongoing faculty creativity and reinvention. Balancing reinvention and maintenance of common goals is an important feature of these efforts. When faculty create new learning communities, they must ask each other fundamental questions about what is important and how students can best learn what they need to know. This collaborative dialogue, essential to learning communities, makes liberal education a living experience for students and faculty alike.

Of course, building learning communities requires investments in faculty development and ongoing venues for faculty collaboration. Assessment continually informs and refines the implementation process, fueling reinvention and continuous improvement.

Another benefit of learning communities is that they provide a comprehensive framework for change that gets beyond the piecemeal nature of most reform efforts. Learning communities foster implementation of inquiry-based approaches to learning (such as service learning, multicultural education, and collaborative writing and research projects) that are not easily accommodated in fifty-minute classes. Most learning communities also rely on experiential learning and forms of reflective practice, something they could not easily do with a conventional course structure.

Most institutions carefully plan when to introduce students to learning communities. The programs at North Seattle and St. Lawrence, for example, emphasize the first year, recognizing it as a key opportunity to set the culture and expectations for new students. Given that nearly half of the nation's college students drop out after their first year, many institutions could learn from these compelling examples focusing on the initial year. Meanwhile, upper-division learning communities at Fairhaven, St. Lawrence, and Wagner demonstrate that liberal education doesn't have to be limited to the first year, and can infuse the entire educational experience. Across the nation, colleges and universities are finding that learning communities can be a powerful vehicle for creating undergraduate education that builds community and promotes student learning.

Barbara Leigh Smith is co-director of the National Learning Community Dissemination Project at Evergreen State College. She served as Evergreen's provost from 1994 to 2000 and is the founding director of the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education.

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