"Developing Curriculum for a Multi-Course Interdepartmental Learning Community to Promote Retention and Learning for Underprepared Engineering Students"

About the Authors

Rachel A. Milloy is a Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric and Professional Communication program at New Mexico State University where she teaches first-year writing and technical communication courses. She serves as a writing program assistant and as a co-writer for the English department’s first-year composition textbook, Paideia 14. Her research interests include online pedagogy, composition pedagogy, writing technologies, writing program administration, and student success. When not teaching, she enjoys reading, running, and spending time outdoors.

Matthew Moberly is a doctoral student in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at New Mexico State University where he has taught first-year composition and technical communication.  His current research interests include writing center administration, incorporating information literacy into first-year writing curriculum, and assessment in higher education.  Outside of teaching and research, he enjoys cooking, watching reality television, and figuring out ways to design productive classroom activities based on the reality television he watches.

Rebecca Powell is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at New Mexico State University. She revised this article with a baby in her lap. When the baby is not in her lap, she teaches, writes, gardens, runs, and bikes. Her publications include chapters and articles on the intersections of literacy and place, expressivism pedagogy, discourses surrounding motherhood, online instructor identity, and teacher inquiry. Her research interests include writing-across-the-curriculum, literacy, place studies, and composition pedagogy.

Contents

Introduction 

The ILC: Interdisciplinary Collaboration

The ILC: Interdisciplinary Collaboration (cont.)

Collaborative Curriculum Design for Learner Independence

Dependent Learners Become Active Participants

Active Learners Gain Confidence

Confident Learners Collaboratively Investigate Real World Issues

Self-Directed Learners Take on Complex Tasks

Formative and Summative Assessment: Gathering Stories and Numbers

In Their Own Words: Assessment Outcomes

Looking Back and Looking Forward: Instructors Reflect

Works Cited

Introduction

Graduate students say “yes” to almost anything, even when that “yes” means extra work and extra meetings. In the spirit of that “yes,” we volunteered to teach in a learning community for engineers, thinking we would bring our collective expertise on writing to our classrooms. In short, we imagined ourselves as teachers, much as we had been in our traditional courses. Contrary to our expectations, we found ourselves engaged in an active collaboration across disciplines that fostered a spirit of inquiry into our teaching practices and curriculum. This inquiry and subsequent curriculum development was possible because of the interdisciplinary support available in the learning community structure.

Learning communities have historically been developed as interdisciplinary support programs for student cohorts entering the university. On its most basic level, a learning community is “a course of study designed by two or more faculty, which includes work in different disciplines and integrated around a particular issue or theme” (Bystrom 247). Jones, Laufgraben, and Morris explain that individual courses are “taught as discrete sections” but teachers “collaborate to integrate course content” (251). More specifically, learning communities, according to Jones, Laufgraben, and Morris, strive to improve students’ first-year experiences by:

1) enhancing the curriculum; 2) supporting the transition to college by creating connections between and among students and their peers, teachers, and disciplines; 3) extending learning beyond the classroom; and 4) empowering students to be more active participants in their learning and in their academic decision making. (249)

Since the early 1980s, scholars have recognized the many benefits of cohort membership. For example, Lei et al. explain that cohort education can “promote retention, graduation, and success rates of students” (497). For Harbour and Ebie, “democratic learning communities” provide a space for marginalized students to develop “deeper and more extensive relationships between members” (13). According to Mahoney and Schamber, learning communities “utilize constructivist learning, a view that knowledge is developed in community, not solely as an individual process” (234). For these reasons, learning communities foster integrative learning that “assists students with finding relevance in a curriculum” (236). Although the literature addresses the many benefits that learning communities offer students, less has been written on how learning communities foster curriculum transformation and instructor engagement. Our expectations for the learning community echoed the literature—we expected student engagement and success. We could not have predicted our own growth.

At New Mexico State University, a designated Hispanic Serving Institution, learning communities have served underprepared first-year Engineering students, offering a supportive network of peers and faculty to promote success and retention. Interdisciplinary programs such as learning communities promote the kind of learning advocated by Murnane and Levy who argue that in order to succeed in the 21st century, students need to “direct their own learning, work with and listen to others, and develop ways of dealing with complex issues and problems that require different kinds of expertise” (qtd. in Bielaczyc and Collins 272). Traditionally, first-year composition courses do this kind of work, making them perfect candidates for learning communities where students can actively participate in their learning, collaborate with peers across courses, and begin thinking about real world problems through several disciplinary perspectives.

Engineering departments around the country have been using innovative curriculum integrations to boost student achievement and communication skills (Ford and Riley 325). After one such innovation at Texas A&M, developers noted that integrated curriculum contributes to increased student motivation and performance (Everett et al. 175). To foster such student motivation and performance, the NMSU English department has worked with the College of Engineering to further develop the Integrated Learning Community (ILC) for freshmen engineering students who enter the university unprepared for required entry-level math courses. The ILC moves beyond the common two-course model, including a first-year composition course (English 111), an applied math course for engineers (EE 109), a developmental math course (Math 120 or 121), and an introductory Engineering and study skills course (SMET 101). Within this article, we explore the challenges and considerations for adapting a writing course to meet the needs of an interdepartmental learning community. We begin by providing an overview of the ILC and then examine how we adapted our writing course to meet the needs of the ILC. We end with a review of formative and summative assessment practices that informed our curriculum and teaching and a discussion of future considerations for teachers and learning communities. It is our hope that readers will use our experience as a way to either develop new interdepartmental partnerships or improve existing programs.