Veritas, Vol. 40, No. 06, March 1998

              Veritas
March 1998
Volume 40 • Number 6
For the Faculty and Staff of the University of Miami
Learning communities prove everything is relative
Though they go back
decades, learning communities are fairly new to the University of Miami. On the micro level, a learning community is a linking of two or more courses and helping students understand the relationships. But to John Masterson and everyone who’s experienced these microcosms, they’re worlds more.
After teaching as a University professor since 1977 and serving as associate dean of the School of Communication, Masterson was named vice provost for undergraduate academic affairs in 1991. “When I came to this position, I was told my job was to help UM become a better place for undergraduate students to go to school,” says Masterson. So he started doing his homework. “I discovered that the faculty thought teaching was very important but terribly undervalued by the institution,” he says.
Masterson thus began his quest to enhance teaching by visiting learning community pioneer Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
There he learned about their coordinated studies program, in which all classes are connected. Students there do not take individual courses but may take instead “mind and matter,” which might be six credits or the entire semester. Based on a central issue, theme, or problem, different courses are team-taught and team-planned. “Each professor helps students see that problem or theme through the particular disciplinary lens that he or she represents,” says Masterson. “Mind and matter could encompass philosophy, psychology, physics, or biology—almost anything you could study.”
The first learning community at the University of Miami began in Mahoney Residential College in the spring of 1993. It was two psychology courses taught by the master and associate master of Mahoney. While students were studying the great psychological studies of history in one class, they were learning how that data had been processed in their methods class. “They set up one another,” says Masterson, “and it was very successful.”
Eaton Residential College housed the second learning community, a nine-credit course on humanitarianism, “Why do people do good things for other people?” Three faculty members teamed up and taught a psychology class, a public relations writing class, and a film class. Students made a documentary film, wrote about it, and studied it from a psychological perspective. They engaged in service learning, visited the Daily Bread Food Bank and Habitat for Humanity, sheltered the homeless, and fed the hungry.
The next theme was “Why are
your parents so weird?” subtided “The 1960s.” Held at Stanford Residential College, it included an American studies course, which was the history of the Vietnam War, a social problems class, and a political communication class. “They watched Easy Rider; listened to the music of the ’60s, studied the civil rights movement, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War,” says Masterson, “all the interesting his-
the first part of the semester at sea on a research vessel with faculty. Over spring break, they conduct field research in marine labs in the Florida Keys. “It makes sense,” says Masterson. “What better place to study The Old Man and the Sea than at sea?”
“Learning communities force us to rethink the curriculum, which at a university needs to be a living thing, an evolving structure,” says Glaser. “Ulti-
"It is much more an attitude than it is a program You start with outcomes. What is it we want every student to know, think, feel, be able to do?"
In addition to his duties as vice provost, John Masterson teaches a communication theory course each semester, which was paired with a composition class for a learning community in the spring of 1997.
tory and culture that I and most of the students’ parents had lived through.”
In the meantime, the College of Engineering began the IMPaCT (Integrated Math Physics and Communication Track) Program in order to facilitate students’ comprehension of their more difficult courses. All first-year engineering students now take a coordinated curriculum, which is team-planned, so that the operations they’re learning in classes such as physics and calculus have their applications in essential engineering courses. “Students are happier, they’re learning better, and we have a very enthusiastic faculty wondering why we didn’t do it sooner,” says Executive Vice President and Provost Luis Glaser, “and that is evolution; that’s wonderful!”
Though a number of different proposals are in the works, one popular ongoing learning community is the Saltwater Semester. Offered in the spring, junior marine science students take marine science, a literature course, biology course, and statistics, spending
Peter Glynn, professor in the Division of Marine Biology and Fisheries, conducts a hands-on class at sea during last year's Saltwater Semester, a learning community where students and faculty spend part of their semester on a research boat.
mately what we want to do is help the student and not ask ‘Gan a student pass an examination?’ but ‘What skills do we expect the student to have?’ The nitty gritty details of what students learn will no longer matter by the time they’re 50. What will matter is if they got a sense of how to adapt or continue to learn outside the classroom setting and develop new skills as need be. That’s the core of what we need to teach students, and learning communities help us do that.”
Another strength of learning communities—positive interaction—
became evident at a focus group held with students who were veterans of the first two or three learning communities. “Some students hadn’t seen each other since the previous spring or fall, but it was like a family reunion,” says Masterson. “Having taught a learning community, you see very quickly that they do become like a family—more willing to criticize each other, be open and frank, tolerate conflict, exchange ideas, even exchange sweaters!” After the focus group’s success, Masterson secured a $ 150,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which extended the experience to 60 faculty mem-.	bers, teaching assistants, and
ever-growing numbers of students, and will help make it self-sustaining over time. “Within a couple of years I expect that the experience will be available to most of our students at some point in their career,” says Masterson.
The University of Miami is one of 20 institutions that are part of a national learning community development and dissemination project run by The Washington Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning. After two years, participants will report their findings at a national conference. The University recently held its own conference at the Coral Gables campus, which attracted over 600 educators from across the nation.
According to current research, students and faculty report higher levels of satisfaction; students who learn to connect knowledge, like cross-disciplinary boundaries, will continue to do so on their
own; students are more likely to persist as students; and they are likely to have better mastery of the content of each of the participating courses.
“It is much more an attitude than it is a program. You start with outcomes. What is it we want every student to know, think, feel, be able to do?” asks Masterson. “This is really about becoming a learning community more broadly by changing the way we think about education, moving from a model that is primarily faculty- and teaching-oriented to student- and learning-oriented. ”