News from CIEL - Winter 2007

CIEL Presentations at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities; New Orleans.

Preparing Junior Faculty for Interdisciplinary Teaching: Workshop for Faculty and Administrators

In a half-day workshop, a panel of CIEL members helped participants explore a range of questions about the nature and practice of interdisciplinary teaching. Interdisciplinary work helps students engage what the most recent AAC&U report calls “the big questions” that go beyond disciplinary learning. “Big questions” include enduring questions about “science and society, cultures and values, global interdependence, the changing economy, and human dignity and freedom” (National Leadership Councile for Liberal Educationand America’s Promise, College Learning for the New Global Century, AAC&U, 2007).

Focusing primarily on the impact of interdisciplinary teaching on faculty, the workshop showed how interdisciplinary teaching helps to build rich networks of faculty colleagues and to preserve institutional memory about key courses and pedagogical practices. It helps to create a culture of learning for faculty as well as students when interdisciplinary teaching gets beyond a rotation of the disciplines each faculty member represents to explore dimensions and modes of inquiry.

To engage the audience in the shift from disciplinary to interdisciplinary teaching, presenters worked through an exercise in designing a team-taught learning community. The process illustrated the intellectual and interpersonal challenges of working in an interdisciplinary space, but it also revealed how an interdisciplinary focus on questions, themes, or problems shifts inquiry from what we know to how we know. Drawing on the rich history of CIEL member schools in fostering interdisciplinary learning, panelists helped the audience imagine a range of possibilities for supporting faculty, especially junior faculty, in this kind of work.

Marie Eaton of Fairhaven College and Rita Pougiales of Evergreen College chaired the program; other panelists included Maribeth Clark of New College, Paul Burkhardt of Prescott College, Lara Evans of Evergreen College, and Steve Weisler of Hampshire College.

Assessing Experiential Learning: Panel on Lessons Learned and Emerging Questions From Five Innovative Colleges

CIEL colleges claim experiential, interdisciplinary learning as a defining characteristic. Ranging from self-designed courses of study, field study, clinical practice, labor programs, study abroad, and service learning, CIEL members make independent learning outside the traditional classroom central to their instructional missions. Experiential learning is both a process and a value, rooted in the conviction that learning-in-action is a more fully engaging mode of learning that promotes, among other things, sophisticated problem-solving, critical thinking, and judgment. CIEL’s panel on assessing experiential learning was an effort to present the current state of our understanding of its outcomes and to initiate a sustained effort within the Consortium to push us to better understand our own practice.

Chaired by Ed Clausen of Daemen College, the panel included Dawn Balistreri of Alverno College, Scott Steele of Berea College, Steve Weisler of Hampshire College, Nance Lucas of New Century College, and Maribeth Clark of New College. The presenters offered a rich sampler of assessment processes, findings, and emerging questions in the ongoing effort to inform and substantiate claims about the value of experiential learning. The panel made clear how much the Consortium has to offer to the assessment conversation in bringing together individual campus activities. Collectively, CIEL schools are aiming toward more robust analyses of experientially-based teaching and the difference it makes for students -- analyses that go well beyond narrow foci on data collection and external accountability.

Evergreen State and Daemen Colleges Collaborate on Urban History Project: Urban History through Story Telling

At the CIEL conference in 2005, Dr. Joye Hardiman, Executive Director of Evergreen State College-City Campus and former Buffalo resident, and Sharon Benz, Special Projects Coordinator for Daemen College Center for Sustainable Communities and Civic Engagement (CSCCE), found a similar interest in the history of the Hamlin Park and Fruit Belt neighborhoods of Buffalo. Joye Hardiman wanted to examine the impact of an urban renewal project, the building of the Kensington Expressway, on the bordering neighborhoods. Sharon Benz was involved with community projects in the Fruit Belt, including a history of the area from 1950-present, and welcomed the opportunity to add the urban renewal aspect to her study. The project would also compare urban renewal projects in Cape Town, South Africa and Tacoma, Washington, to the ones in Buffalo, NY.

Design of the Urban History Project

The project has four distinct phases and will take place over 3 years. Phase I involves college students and staff interviewing residents, government officials and community leaders about the history of these communities and the impact of the Kensington Expressway. There also will be teleconferencing between Evergreen and Daemen College classes to compare notes and progress. The final product will be in documentary form.

During Fall 2005, Joye and Sharon interviewed Hamlin Park residents to establish a protocol and begin a data base. During a summer school course at Daemen College in 2006, four students did over 22 interviews with residents of the Fruit Belt. The interviews from the summer course are in the process of being transferred to DVD.

Phase II is the design of a community mural and brochure highlighting the neighborhood’s history. Work on this phase will be done by college students and neighborhood children. Phase II Iwill be the development of an elementary curriculum about the rich history of the Fruit Belt and Hamlin Park neighborhoods and the local elementary school. Phase IV will be a community event to document the project and celebrate the completed product. The project is projected to extend to an examination of urban renewal projects in Tacoma, Washington, and Cape Town, South Africa, depending on funding.

Students involved in the project developed a rich and nuanced knowledge of urban and neighborhood life, interviewing skills, and a genuine appreciation and admiration of the Fruit Belt residents.

Spring Student Symposium Note

Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, will host the third annual CIEL Student Symposium on March 30 and 31. Students from all CIEL campuses will share their research by participating on panels and in informal discussion. The Symposium theme is Pushing the Frontiers of Knowledge: Social and Environmental Justice through a Futuristic Lens.

Additional information about the Symposium, including abstracts from the presenters, can be found on the CIEL website, www.cielearn.org, and on Johnson C. Smith’s website, www.jcsu.edu.

CIEL On-line Journal of Student Work Call for Submissions

Beginning in spring of 2003, students in CIEL institutions shared their work with each other and the wider community in an on-line journal. You can view last year’s exciting journal at http://www.cielearn.org/journalhome.htm

It’s time to gather submissions for the 2007 edition. Please submit or nominate student work from your institution. Submissions from each campus should come through your CIEL campus coordinator. See submission guidelines below.

This year’s theme is Frontiers and Borders: Translating the World, interpreted very broadly.

Submissions might be identified in a number of ways:

develop an assignment in one of your classes targeted toward this publication – a writing assignment that asks students to consider the theme and speak to it in their own voices.
select/nominate work that students have already done that fits the broad theme.

The deadline to submit is May 1, 2007, with a targeted July 1 publication date.

Guidelines for Submission

Each campus makes its own decisions about submissions. Develop whatever review process seems appropriate for your campus culture.
Submit no more than five works in each category.
Submit pieces to Marie.Eaton@wwu.edu by May 1, 2007. (Electronic submission is preferable.)
Include 50-100 word author bio with each submission.

The deadline to submit is May 1, 2007, with a targeted July 1 publication date.

Guidelines for Submission

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