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Best
Practices
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Undergraduate Research. Until 1985, only a small number
of seniors, perhaps 15 out of 300, did year-long honors projects.
Since then, that number has tripled. The growth began with a Ford
Foundation grant to provide students headed for graduate school
with summer research grants (modeled on the old NEH Younger Scholars
Program) and also with teaching internships and workshops on graduate
school. Parts of the Knox Ford Program later were replicated in
the ACM Minority Scholars Program. Knox then went on to secure
federal funding for a McNair Program and support from the Richter
Memorial Trust to help students engage in independent work before
the senior year. Today, the College's Undergraduate Research Program
consists of the Senior Honors Program, the Ford Fellows Program,
the Ronald E. McNair Program, and the Richter Memorial Trust grants
(to any student conducting independent research). The strength
of the overall program is clear. Our strong students become stronger.
The Program may at times draw heavily on faculty time, but it
can also promote faculty development.
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Capstone Courses in the Major. These are determined by
the individual departments. The trend has been towards one- or
two-term required senior research courses (often with a preparatory
term in research methodology). The work the students do is presented
to classmates and to outside visitors in the spring and allows,
or even compels, the students to prepare and deliver a scholarly
presentation.
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Support for Learning Beyond the Classroom. Many classes,
particularly ones in mathematics and laboratory science (as well
as first year preceptorials) have a student teaching assistant.
But beyond that first line of defense, there is also the Teaching
and Learning Center, with nearly 100 trained student tutors. And,
for those eligible, there is a Trio-funded Educational Development
Program (with four professional staff members).
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The First Year Preceptorial. A one term course required
of all new students, the preceptorial constitutes an introduction
to work in the liberal arts, with particular focus on class participation
and essay writing. The educational goals of FP, as it is called,
include: skills acquisition (particularly writing and speaking);
introducing students to liberal learning; helping students understand
the nature of diversity; and fostering a sense of personal and
academic responsibility. In addition, the course provides a common
bond for all new students.
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Upper-Class Advising. The evaluations that juniors and
seniors submit of their major advisors strongly suggest that they
receive assistance not only with course selection, but with planning
of internships and career and educational plans after college
as well.
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Curricular Flexibility. Knox students have a good deal
of freedom when it comes to shaping their own major or creating
an independent major, and this says nothing as to the work they
do in individual courses.
Challenges
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Strengthening underclass advising. Currently the Associate
Dean makes a match between entering student and faculty member
based on the student's admission application. The system is not
hopeless but students change their minds as to what they are interested
in and faculty tend to be less interested in students who are
not their students. There is considerable variation among the
faculty as regards their commitment to providing academic counseling
to students, and we have provided little development (or incentive
to faculty) to become better advisors-and this does not begin
to address the question of time demands upon faculty.
Linked to this is something which does not quite fall in the area
of academic development but is inextricably linked to it. That,
of course, is the general welfare of students. It is far from
clear that the problem is limited to Knox and equally far from
clear that Knox College or any other college is responsible for
it. There seems to be a dramatic increase in the personal problems
students experience. Depression does not seem to be on the wane,
nor does anxiety. Faculty cannot be expected to deal with this,
but it may be that they should know more about it and recognize
it more (some faculty already do). And often the levels of dysphoria
or apprehensiveness on the part of students are not critical.
Where this is so, faculty may be able to help (by knowing the
right questions to ask and by showing sensitivity to the general
welfare of their students while not going beyond reasonable limits).
Put in plain English, it is astonishing how much benefit a student
can derive from a good 10 or 15 minute talk, and often a faculty
member can pull this off and redirect a student towards his or
her studies.Expanding
the scope of advising to students' general welfare also exacerbates
the need for coordination between faculty, academic deans, and
Student Development staff. While all three are committed to student
academic success, support efforts are not always integrated and
responses to student contact are not always coordinated. Faculty,
in particular, are not always sure about who is responsible for
what.
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Fostering an integrated first year experience. In
the past, a three-term common course, and shared enrollment patterns
in "freshman composition," and language courses helped create
an integrated and common experience for first year students. Today,
the agenda of entering students are more wide open. What kinds
of mechanisms would work today to foster greater continuity and
integration in the first year experience? Would more "explicitly"
first year courses help? How can residential learning and experiences
nurture the continuity that more prescribed and integrated academic
experiences provided in the past?
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Making students learners.
We live in an age in which college education is seen as providing
certification and facilitating advancement toward careers. Learning
for its own sake has a lot less panache than it used to, and it
may well be that any effort to talk about the liberal arts solely
in these terms is condemned to failure. But students still can
catch fire, despite all the careerism of the present day. The
faculty face a constant challenge: how can they get students to
think and study (not just "do homework"), and to explore ideas
(and not just "prepare for tomorrow's class")? Our best faculty
see teaching as more than a performance art, and the task may
be to encourage all of us to encourage in turn our students to
become engaged in learning.
The
Project
Many
of Knox's best practices are guided by clear-cut goals; the
challenges that Knox faces rest on less obvious objectives.
We propose a project that will (a) establish a set of shared goals
for the full first year experience, and (b) situate existing first
year programs, such as Orientation and FP (and suggest new ones),
in ways clearly attached to specific goals in order to address the
challenges we have described above: to strengthen our non-major
advising system, to help establish an ethos of liberal learning
among new students, and to more closely coordinate academic and
student development efforts.
Part
of the project will involve campus ethnography. Many of the best
moments in a college are ones in which something like an epiphany
comes in the middle of a class discussion, a research project or
(arguably) even a lecture. But there are other moments that grow
out of discussions about education. Several successful exercises
of recent years carried out by Anthropology-Sociology students have
demonstrated the usefulness of field-based studies of campus culture.
The
project, then, is twofold:
(a)
The Knox project will be one where students, faculty and staff form
a team that will look at how the college actually works. The students
should be at the beginning of their years at the College so that
the group (students, faculty and staff) can stay on task for at
least three years. Through periodic discussions, the team will monitor
the experience of students to assess how they actually "experience"
the goals and objectives of College programming points, focusing
both on the academic and residential experiences. In miniature this
approach has been used for 15 years for one to two week workshops
given at Knox as part of the Ford Foundation Program. The students
who have participated (they read books about higher education and
they talk candidly about their own experiences) say the experience
is one of the best they have at the College. And the faculty present
learn a good deal too. Students are extraordinarily willing to talk
openly and often with insight and concern about the educational
enterprise (as anyone who has done exit interviews with seniors
can attest).
(b)
The project will also be one through which the project team will
situate the College's educational goals within a four-year timetable
in order to strengthen the College's programming to support, and
sharpen expectations of, student growth and development. In particular,
the team will have at least the following tasks:
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to look at how Knox is doing; this might focus on the classroom
and the student experience but would look at larger issues as
well;
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to review existing documents recently developed by the faculty
regarding four-year educational goals and the nature of Knox's
liberal education in the new century;
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to review student development four-year educational goals and
articulate them with the academic goals;
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to identify from the above reasonable goals for the first year
experience and to review and revise first year programs and activities
as appropriate;
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to monitor changes as they are implemented; Knox is redefining
the curriculum, replacing its old requirements with ones that
have meaning, and is also on the brink of revising its advising
system and changing the First Year Preceptorial.
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to look beyond the College to see what other schools are doing.
Team
Members
- Lawrence
Breitborde, VP for Academic Affairs & Dean of the College
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Stephen Bailey, Associate Dean of the College (Liaison)
- Diana
Beck, Associate Professor & Chair of Educational Studies
- Thomas
Clayton, Associate Professor of Chemistry & Director of the First
Year Preceptorial
- Konrad
Hamilton, Associate Professor of History
- Laetitia
Luke, student
- Xavier
Romano, VP for Student Development & Dean of Students
- Debbie
Southern, Assistant Dean of Students
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