The Four-Year Classroom: Student Development in the Liberal-Arts College
What makes a liberal-arts education more than the sum of 36 credits? Of course, much of students’ learning happens inside the classroom, but we also know that learning outside the classroom is as significant, and for some students, where the greatest transformation occurs. That truism is about space: where does learning happen? Equally important is a less common observation about time: how long does it take for learning to happen? Many of the skills and habits of mind we want to teach our students take more than a semester for them to acquire, and many of their most effective and memorable learning experiences transcend the 14-week confines of individual courses. Conducting research in a lab; carrying out a major scholarly or creative capstone project; collaborating with a community organization; forging connections between classes and disciplines; and, in the broadest sense, achieving intellectual independence—all these involve a developmental process that can span a students’ time in college.
This year, the Center for Teaching and Learning initiates a campus conversation about the developmental aspects of a liberal-arts education. Do we have a shared vision of the four-year arc of our students’ learning? Is it up to students to discover their own arc, or do faculty have a role in helping them describe it? Do materials and procedures, like portfolios or advising practices, play a role? What motivates students to pursue the kinds of experiences—research, interdisciplinary work, community engagement—that build bridges from course to course and semester to semester? Is there an intellectual gestalt that defines Trinity’s “four-year classroom,” and how do our individual classrooms and our individual interactions with students relate to it?
I. Keynote Speaker: Dan Chambliss
“How College Works: What Matters Most for Students in Liberal Arts Institutions”
Thursday, September 26 — Common Hour — Washington Room
Faculty see only a small slice of students’ total college experience—either in the space of our classes, or across the time of their years with us. Students live and study amid webs of personal relationships—with both peers and professors—that shape their decisions, raise or lower their motivations, and provide not only the means for education but also some of the most important outcomes of a good college experience. Drawing on a decade of research on liberal arts college students, Prof. Chambliss explains how faculty can often at little cost, improve what their students gain from college, both academically and personally.
“Making and Taking Opportunities in the First Year of College”
Thursday, September 26 — 4:15 pm — Gallows Hill
College students make some of their most important decisions when they are, ironically, least prepared to do so: in their first year. Faculty, administrators and staff, and college mentors however, can create opportunities to help students make more educationally beneficial decisions. And students themselves, by taking very modest action early in their college careers, can achieve a more enjoyable and profitable college experience that leads them to become self-motivated learners.
Daniel Chambliss is the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College. His research is in the social psychology of organizations, most recently on the college experience. In 1989, Chambliss won the American Sociological Association’s Theory Prize for his article, “The Mundanity of Excellence”. He is the author of Champions: The Making of Olympic Swimmers, named the 1991 Book of the Year by the U.S. Olympic Committee, and of Beyond Caring: Hospitals, Nurses and the Social Organization of Ethics, which won the ASA’s Eliot Freidson Prize in 1998 for the best medical sociology publication of the preceding two years. He is co-author, with Russell Schutt, of Making Sense of the Social World, a research methods textbook currently in a fourth edition. A former member of the Executive Committee of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, since 1999 his research has focused on higher education, culminating in a book, How College Works, co-authored with Christopher G. Takacs. How College Works, scheduled to be released in January 2014, has been awarded the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize of Harvard University Press as their best book of the year on education and society.
II. Lee Cuba and Adele Wolfson, Wellesley College
“Two Cultures or One? Student Engagement of Liberal Arts College STEM Majors within and outside of Science”
Thursday, October 24 — Common Hour
How do STEM students integrate the content and skills from their non-science courses into their major? Drawing on interviews with STEM majors participating in a panel study at seven liberal arts colleges, Cuba and Wolfson develop a typology based on patterns of course enrollment and orientation toward non-science courses. Their findings have implications for faculty and administrators seeking to expand opportunities for the type of integrative learning necessary to addressing complex, global issues.
Lee Cuba is professor of sociology and former dean of the college at Wellesley College. His research is concerned with the acquisition and meaning of place identities, including, most recently, the question of how college students acquire a sense of “at-homeness” on their campuses. He is Principal Director of the New England Consortium on Assessment and Student Learning (www.wellesley.edu/NECASL), a longitudinal study of the Class of 2010 involving seven selective liberal arts colleges funded by the Teagle, Spencer and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations. This collaboration seeks to better understand the intellectual, social and personal engagement of students as they progress through college.
Adele Wolfson is Nan Walsh Schow ’54 and Howard B. Schow Professor in the Physical and Natural Sciences, and Professor of Chemistry, at Wellesley College. A researcher in the area of protein biochemistry, Wolfson is also an educational researcher working on core concepts in biochemistry, retention of women and minorities in science. She is a collaborator in the NECASL study seeking to understand how students at selective liberal arts colleges to understand how students connect learning in science and non-science courses
Teaching and Learning with Web Writing: What’s the Buzz?
Monday, October 14th (Trinity Days) — 10 to 11:30am — Gallows Hill
Join five Trinity collaborators for a presentation and discussion of Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning, a digital book-in-progress under contract with Michigan Publishing. This edited volume explores why online writing matters for liberal arts education and illustrates how faculty and students are engaged in this work. During the fall 2013 “open peer review,” designated experts and general audiences will write online commentary on web essays to offer developmental feedback to authors and assist the editorial team in making selections for the final manuscript. Co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning, Educational Technology, and the Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric at Trinity College. Read more at: http://WebWriting.trincoll.edu