New CIEL Website: Check It Out
The Consortium has a completely revised website at its old address: www.cielearn.org. The site includes a growing collection of resources for educators, the student on-line journal that includes the 2005 edition, the impressive collection of powerpoints from the spring student symposium, information about upcoming events, and more.

New CIEL Member
CIEL welcomes Johnson C. Smith University to its group of founding members. Located in Charlotte, North Carolina, Johnson C. Smith University is one of the HBCU’s, and it emphasizes learning communities in the freshman year and in most majors. The university maintains a service learning requirement for all students and has developed a strong integration of community service across the curriculum. There is a new campus technology initiative that supports all students in having a personal computer.

Annual Fall Conference: October 13, 14, 15
The fourth annual Fall Conference will be held at Daemen College in Buffalo, New York. The conference theme is “Teaching for Social Justice and Responsibility.” In keeping with the Consortium’s mission to foster and reflect innovative practices, the fall conference will be a working meeting, with participants working together in small groups to produce a book on the conference theme. Panel presentations and course showcases in the mornings will help to stretch our thinking about what we do and what we should be doing to teach for social justice and responsibility, while afternoons will be focused around planning this unique writing project.

For information about the conference agenda, contact your campus coordinator, or get in touch with Karen Spear, CIEL Executive Director, at spear@lorenet.com. For information about lodging, transportation, and other logistics, contact Mary Fox at Daemen College, at mfox@daemen.edu.

First CIEL Student Exchange
How I Spent (Part Of) My Summer Vacation: My CIEL Exchange at Evergreen
by Tawyna Bissell, New College

I had no idea what CIEL was and I had never been to the Pacific Northwest before my advisor at New College, Heidi Harley, invited me to travel to The Evergreen State College in October 2004 for a CIEL conference.  I loved the Pacific Northwest, and I thought that Evergreen was awesome.

I met faculty, staff, and students, and everyone was engaged in and excited about Evergreen's mission and programs.  I liked the interdisciplinary approach; a single course explores a topic from several integrated disciplines.  Evergreen also pioneered "learning communities" to create specific connections across disciplines. 

The CIEL student exchange program allows CIEL students to pay tuition at their home college and study at another CIEL school.  As soon as I got back to New College, I started talking to Heidi about going back to Evergreen.  I was really committed, persistent, and probably a pain in the ass.  I talked to Julie Morris, our CIEL coordinator at New College, and I emailed Evergreen's coordinators.  No one had ever used the agreement before, so it was hard for everyone to figure out how to implement the exchange. 

I hoped that my enthusiasm gave everyone an incentive, but I could see that this would be a difficult process. I tried to make this first exchange easier by taking summer classes to avoid conflicting semesters.

In February, I started emailing Evergreen professors about summer courses; I know that they thought I was insane.  I usually had to explain what CIEL was before I could explain why I wanted to come to Evergreen, but everyone was responsive and helpful.  Barbara Leigh Smith did so many things for me; she
tackled the bureaucracy, she put me in touch with the registrar and other staff members, and she arranged for my housing in a dorm on-campus.  Barbara really made my exchange possible, and then she generously invited me to her home on Dabob Bay for the Fourth of July weekend.  It was great!

A CIEL exchange is an opportunity to go to another college that has a shared commitment to student-centered education, but expresses that commitment in a different way. New College has about 700 students, so at Evergreen I was able to experience a larger, more diverse student community.  I was struck by the similarities between both faculty and student roles at each college.

I was most intrigued by the courses that offered a uniquely “Evergreen” experience. Evergreen has an MPA program with a Tribal Governance concentration that is revolutionary. I had met Linda Moon Stumpff at a CIEL meeting in January; she helped create that program. Linda told me she would be teaching graduate classes in the summer and she offered to include me in field trips. When I read about her Natural and Cultural Resource Management course, I wanted to take the class! Linda graciously gave her permission and I joined a group of ten graduate students.

I was embarrassed by my ignorance of Native American history, but everyone encouraged my curiosity and my naïve questions. Our class, led by Linda, who is a member of the Apache tribe, included members of the Quinault nation and a native Chamorro student from Guam. We had rich cultural resources just in our classroom. The class as a group visited the Squaxin cultural center and museum, and some of the class traveled to visit the First Nations exhibit at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, BC.

I felt that this class exemplified the educational challenges and risks that the CIEL colleges support. While it was sometimes sad and painful, I learned so much about my own heritage, and I learned a lot about myself. This was an incredible experience that represents the unique opportunities at each CIEL college.

Outside the classroom, I loved exploring different ecosystems.  I am an Environmental Studies major, and I found that experiential learning about the local issues was a significant part of my exchange.  You can read about salmon, but seeing the migratory waters, the fish ladders, and the cultures that depend on the salmon gives you a holistic understanding of the issues that you can't get from a website.

Study abroad has always been recognized for the depth and intensity of experiential learning, but I think that traveling in the US is just as rewarding.  There are many cultures and languages to learn, and the immersion experience is just as profound.  I'd recommend a CIEL exchange to anyone and I offer this advice: show a commitment to your exchange, understand the difficulties for administrators, and be persistent. CIEL is an amazing group of dedicated and generous people. If you want to make an exchange, you will get great support, and it will happen!

Principles of Good Practice in Using Electronic Portfolios
Last March, amid a spring snowstorm that grounded a great deal of airline traffic and stranded a number of Evergreen faculty, CIEL members gathered at Alverno College to continue a conversation on electronic portfolios that had begun six months earlier at the Fall Conference. Judith Patton, Director of University Studies at Portland State University, was our guide for the day in a rich and stimulating workshop. Here is a synthesis of what we learned:

For students, electronic portfolios:

• Provide opportunities for ongoing self-reflection and assessment
• Cumulatively preserve student work along with faculty and peer feedback
• Serve as a longitudinal, qualitative, dynamic record of learning
• Foster deep technological, rhetorical, and critical literacies
• Students must operate in multi-media domains, engage in and demonstrate metacognitive awareness of learning, integrate learning from multiple courses over time, represent learning to a variety of audiences, translate content learned into behaviors, and set personal and academic goals.
• Make academic achievements public in a richer context than merely course titles and grades awarded
• Allow academic achievements accessible, any time and any place, and transportable
• Create bridges between personal and academic growth
• Push students toward more autonomous learning through processing self, faculty, external, and peer feedback and the transfer of that learning to new contexts

For faculty, electronic portfolios:

• Operationalize the ideal of using assessment-as-learning
• The building of the portfolio is embedded in diagnosing student learning needs, analyzing progress, and reflecting on course outcomes for each student against clear criteria
• Require agreement on learning outcomes – what they are and what they look like
• Create a model of teaching and learning based in collaboration, individual growth and improvement, description, and long term development
• Substantive commentary on each student’s history as a learner is available in the portfolio, and course outcomes are detailed for subsequent faculty members teaching that student.
• Offer opportunities for good qualitative research on student learning
• Gaps in learning, plateaus in development, ways of knowing and thinking become visible through the data represented in students’ self-reflections about what they think they have learned.
• Open up a holistic and integrated view of the curriculum in academic programs and departments (exposing overlaps, redundancies, or gaps), and the connections of the curriculum to pedagogy and student learning
• Such a bird’s eye view is not typically possible where academic programs and evaluation are designed around discrete courses. The electronic portfolio provides a tool for greater coherence in designing academic programs.

For institutions, electronic portfolios provide a cost-effective, value-added means of embedding assessment in learning and demonstrating student achievement to multiple publics

New Publication Worth Noting

Disciplines as Frameworks for Student Learning; Teaching the Practice of the Disciplines, Tim Riordan and James Roth, eds. Stylus Publishing, 2005

This provocative collection of essays from faculty at Alverno College asks us what it means for students to learn the practice of the disciplines, and consequently what it means for faculty to teach disciplinary practices and not just disciplinary material. Key questions that focus this collection include:

• What should students be able to do and how should they be able to think as a result of study in a discipline?
• What does learning in the disciplines look like at different developmental levels?
• How do faculty design learning and assessment in the discipline?
• How do faculty approach study of their disciplines with student learning as their primary focus?
• What institutional structures and processes can assist faculty to engage and teach their disciplines as frameworks for student learning?

Chapters include teaching history, mathematics, philosophy, economics, literature, and chemistry. The collection concludes with a student’s perspective on how learning literature as a discipline of inquiry helped her make sense of her major, inform her work after completing her degree – as a writer, editor, and businesswoman, and enrich her life as a parent and a reflective human being. This is a book that will help faculty think through what really matters in their fields.

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