CGCC Campus Team Final Report, June 2008
Team Members: David Finley, Robert Soza, Leslie Hodgson,
Heather Horn, Yvonne Reineke and Vanessa Sandoval
Report Submitted By: Vanessa Sandoval
1. Briefly, please describe what your team did this year with the protocol, the
heuristic for designing integrative assignments, and other team activities.
The team was reinvented in the 2007-2008 year with new faculty members joining and participating in the project, while other faculty members left the project for administrative duties, serving the college in different capacities. The protocol was introduced to more LC faculty members at LC committee meetings, via email and posted on the LC website, but the interest and understanding in the protocol did not fully-develop beyond the five-member team. The team members learned more about the protocol, attended meetings to discuss learning assessment, developed assignments and continued the project work with plans for upcoming learning communities.
David Finley and Robert Soza learned about the protocol and attended the Seattle team meeting in October while thinking about application for assignments and team teaching in the spring of 2008. David Finley and Robert Soza relied heavily on the heuristic for designing integrative assignments. The most significant alteration was the shift from a single teacher (Finley) to a co-taught (Soza and Finley) Learning Community. With the addition of Soza, the LC (ENG 102 and ENH 202) moved from a literature and literary analysis focused course to one that retained the elements of literature and incorporated significant social science elements (primarily, historical and ethnic studies). This transformed not only the content, but assignment design, the sequence of assignments, and classroom presentations. The application of the heuristic enabled both profound and positive transformation.
Leslie Hodgson and Vanessa Sandoval worked in developing and thinking about the assessment of joint assignments only to have the learning community dissolve due to low enrollment in the midst of planning. Nevertheless, Leslie went on to develop assignments informed by the protocol connected with the college “One Book, Garbage Land” and linked with other classes at college co-curricular events, although not as a formal learning community. The process provided insight into how the idea of a campus learning community and co-curricular events can add to the established, two or three class models currently offered at CGCC. By scaffolding assignments, Leslie was able to incorporate her understanding of interdisciplinary perspectives into her own class. Leslie Hodgson used the learning garnered from the protocol to facilitate her role as a Writing Fellow. The information offered was centered with the application and use of rubrics in the classroom. Leslie gathered key information for how to write a rubric and how to assess rubrics, and then applied that information to real situations in several classrooms on campus. Some faculty members who benefited from this application were representatives from the Communications, Mathematics, Social Sciences, and English faculty. The planning of joint assignments from the dissolved learning community also helped Vanessa when teaching her COM263 Intercultural Communication course solo. The research and development of writing rubrics became a strong part of the course because the work with Leslie and writing supplements were added to the course because of working together with Leslie. Overall, the dissolvement of the learning community was disappointing, but beneficial to teaching the courses, assessing student work and thinking about the interdisciplinary nature of the courses taught independently.
Heather Horn and Vanessa Sandoval revised the first two major papers and developed a variety of assignments to increase the integrative nature of the learning community which they have been teaching together for the last five years. On the second major paper, Heather and Vanessa paid close attention to making both disciplinary and interdisciplinary expectations more explicit to students. After attending the meeting for this assessment project in March 2007, the instructors realized that students had struggled with the second paper, not only because it was the first structured essay of the semester, but also because students were asked to integrate three disciplines—communication, rhetoric/composition, and literary studies—without making that integration specific. Heather and Vanessa have moved to explaining and foregrounding the particular disciplinary rationale for each classroom activity so that students see how these build into major interdisciplinary assignments. The integrative assignment report provides the details of the transformation of this second assignment.
Yvonne Reineke worked with Lee Garza in Business to integrate a more loosely linked learning community: Introduction to Business and First-Year Composition. Previously, the link focused on business writing, as well as an analysis of a commercial space. The larger project, a reverse business plan based on a business of the student’s choosing, was broken down into smaller parts during the semester. Yvonne and Lee are redesigning the course to look at business issues explicitly from an interdisciplinary and thematic perspective: specifically, the themes will be Food, Oil, and Shelter (the latter looking at the markets and the housing bubble). In another instance, we will look at the distinctions between industrial food production vs. local food sustainability (slow food), examining this critically from historical, economic, social, cultural, and business points of view. We plan to use readings, YouTube and NPR interviews with such authors as Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and others, as well as respondents to them from major corporations like Whole Foods and Archer Daniel Midland Company. This spring, our One Book CGCC will be Oil on the Brain; students will be doing a shorter research project on this in ENG101 during the fall and then will be able to use that essay as a basis for a deeper interdisciplinary project for ENG102 and Legal and Ethical Business Environment course in the spring semester at which point the author will be a guest speaker on our campus and numerous co-curricular events relating to the book will be taking place.
2. Overall, what have been the most significant learning(s) for your team, based
on your experience in the National Project?
LEARNING OUTCOMES: One challenge has been to identify and develop common, yet specific learning outcomes across courses: these are crucial yet sometimes difficult to pin down as clearly as one would like. However, the protocol, the interdisciplinary rubric, and our discussions of the distinctions between integrative and interdisciplinary work have been invaluable to thinking through designing outcomes that distinguish between integrative and interdisciplinary understandings and practices. The Middendorf and Pace article “Decoding the Disciplines” is also helpful for thinking through where a “bottleneck” may occur with interdisciplinary learning (i.e. pinpointing where students may try to rely on one discipline when a synthesis of two or more is actually needed to address the issue. Trying to identify where students may face such a bottleneck can help co-teaching faculty plan an explicit outcome and prepare several ways students may practice to overcome it.
DISCIPLINARY UNDERSTANDING: When we met to discuss the dimensions of disciplinary understanding in Seattle, the in-depth conversation provided a solid foundation of the elements needed to work with students as instructors integrated disciplines together. The nature of learning communities seemed to be obvious in the past, since students were often writing and/or speaking about the subject matter of the paired class, but addressing the purpose of writing and the greater interdisciplinary understanding required did not seem to be apparent to students. The specific purpose of assignments from a clear demonstration of understanding to the application of content is becoming part of every discussion, which starts with the instructors working together and then progresses to the explanation of the work in the classroom. In addition, the collaboration, thinking and time dedicated to learning community assessment are a significant part of understanding the complexity within evaluating the work of students and with purposeful assignment design.
PURPOSEFUL DESIGN: While discussing the protocol and its application to course design, it became evident that an effective interdisciplinary course begins months prior to students setting foot in the classroom. Effective purposeful design necessitates a commitment to pre-planning: what is the courses theme? What texts are desirable? What are the desired learning outcomes? What assignments best meet the thematic direction and desired learning outcomes?
Additionally, there is a widespread feeling among our project participants that there must be careful consideration of the inclusion of a local public issue, and a direct and clear connection between the local issue and global question. Thus, purposeful design means the co-teachers must meet, research, meet again, research more, develop mock syllabi, craft mock assignments, and commit to regular meetings in the months leading up the class. In these on-going discussions, the co-instructors will hopefully delegate disciplinary approaches, and each participating instructor will assume the responsibility for infusing the curriculum with her/his disciplinary focus. This is to ensure that from the courses genesis, at least two disciplines shape the course, its themes, learning outcomes, etc.
However, the process of purposeful design does not end with the production of a final syllabus. The meet-and-confer process must also continue during the academic cycle in which the course is offered. Careful collaboration will ensure that the necessary disciplinary principles are introduced, and that students are instructed in how to apply the multiple disciplines to the texts being studied. Additionally, this on-going collaboration will ensure that the assignments and learning outcomes are tailored both to the multiple disciplines, but also the pace of the course.
ASSIGNMENT EVALUATION: The protocol was an invaluable tool by which all written assignment sheets could be examined and assessed for clarity and outcome. Instructors at the community college have expressed the frustration that many times the desired outcome of an assignment would fall short of the actual end product. Previous to the protocol the reason for that outcome was hard to pinpoint; however, the protocol gave a ‘real’ option for the assessment of writing assignment sheets. Clear understanding of what was asked in the assignment sheet was revealed – plus an additional bonus, the need for the grading rubric assigned to the writing sheet to be handed to the students as the assignment is made. Evaluating the assignments led to higher quality student writing with final papers and the ability for the instructor to provide more detailed, concrete evaluations of the writing.
COLLABORATIVE CROSS-DISCIPLINARY TEAM-TEACHING / INTERDISCIPLINARITY: Another of the most significant realizations to come out of the experience of the National Project was the underestimated benefit of collaborative team-teaching on a variety of levels, including achieving interdisciplinarity. Naturally, team-teaching has its benefits in the most practical sense of dividing the labor and having another point of view present in both curriculum and assignment design as well as classroom discussions and group work, where the student-to-teacher ratio is cut in half. Additionally, and perhaps even more importantly in terms of the National Project, team-teaching collaboratively across disciplinary expertise accelerated and seemed to deepen students’ interdisciplinary learning and critical awareness. In terms of significant learning, it seems that team-teaching provides an added benefit, especially when that team is a cross-disciplinary pairing, not simply a “content” course and a “skills” course as is often the case with CGCC’s traditional composition and humanities (literature) pairings. This more traditional combination lends itself certainly to greater integrative learning but not necessarily interdisciplinary learning, with composition/literature pairings, for instance, especially when taught alone and/or without the proper background, prior experience, and/or pre-planning by faculty. Strategically, encouraging faculty pairings with an interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary focus as well as compatible personalities seems to be another important consideration for creating future Learning Communities that can achieve a greater interdisciplinarity, which can enhance students’ learning outcomes, such as critical thinking and literacy.
3. Based on our shared two-year conversations about learning in learning
communities, what is your team’s current thinking about the relationship between integrative learning and interdisciplinary learning in the context of learning community programs?
To build upon the significance of the benefits of team-teaching, mentioned above in question #2, especially across disciplines, “collaborative cross-disciplinary team-teaching” also seems to strengthen the relationship or accelerate the transition between achieving integrative and interdisciplinary learning. Many of our LCs are so-called “content” courses (literature or humanities) tied to “skills” courses (composition). In addition, many of the faculty who teach these particular pairings teach both classes, and even though they are often talented faculty with a wide-range of experiences and interests, even interdisciplinary training in some cases, it seems only a higher degree of integration takes place as opposed to interdisciplinarity. Integration seems to demonstrate a student’s understanding and application of concepts but without the deliberate critical awareness of a discipline’s or concept’s underlying assumptions. In contrast, team-teaching across disciplines and the exposure of the constructs of certain types of knowledge, as well as the continual dialog between disciplines or the practitioners of particular disciplines, allows students to see how knowledge is constructed and the need for a critical awareness of choice in terms of their use of certain disciplines, concepts, texts, evidence, and even language in general. Though certainly not innate to team-teaching, it does seems that collaborative cross-disciplinary team-teaching increases the likelihood of achieving interdisciplinarity and the benefits to students that come with it.
At the start of the project, the words “integrative” and “interdisciplinary” were often used interchangeably in terms of how subjects were balanced and blended in the classroom. As our team began work with the protocol, a recurring question centered on the differences and similarities of integrative and interdisciplinary learning in LC classes. Two years later, the relationship and distinction between the two is much more explicit to team members. The challenge is to focus on faculty development in our learning community program initiative here at CGCC, particularly with the many new faculty who have been hired in the last two years and who are interested in creating new learning community combinations. What we have learned as a team is that integrative experiences in learning communities have been fostered here at CGCC and are happening, but interdisciplinary learning is more varied. We need to be intentional and explicit about interdisciplinarity and engage in faculty development that helps foster this goal. CGCC’s focus on service-learning, globalization, sustainability, and civic engagement often are part and parcel of our learning communities and help integrate the classroom and our students’ lives, but we can do more intentional work to show how interdisciplinary understandings allow for new understandings and solutions to twenty-first century challenges.