Living-Learning Communities That Work

A Research-Based Model for Design, Delivery, and Assessment

Karen Kurotsuchi Inkelas, Jody E. Jessup-Anger, Mimi Benjamin, Matthew R. Wawrzynski

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781620366035
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Co-published with In 2007, the American Association of Colleges and Universities named learning communities a high-impact practice because of the potential of these communities to provide coherence to and ultimately improve undergraduate education. Institutional leaders have demonstrated a commitment to providing LLCs, but they currently do so primarily with anecdotal information to guide their work. As a result, there is substantial variation in organizational structure, collaboration, academic and social environments, programmatic integration, student outcomes, and overall quality related to LLC participation. To establish a stronger, more unified basis for designing and delivering effective LLCs, the authors of Living-Learning Communities that Work collaborated on the development of a comprehensive empirical framework for achieving the integrating potential of LLCs. This framework is designed to help practitioners guide the design, delivery, and assessment of LLCs. This book thoughtfully combines research and field-tested practice to document the essential components for best practices in living learning communities and presents them as a clear blueprint – the LLC best practices model – for LLC design. Practitioners, researchers, and institutional leaders can use the book as a guide to more effectively allocate resources to create and sustain LLCs and to realize the potential of these communities to improve undergraduate education.

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INTRODUCTION TO LIVING - LEARNING COMMUNITIES

The concept of the living-learning community (LLC), or a group of students who live together in the same on-campus building and share similar academic or special interests, is not a new one. Indeed, its roots can be found in the beginnings of American higher education itself. But its recent popularity—with one study noting over 600 LLCs currently in existence (Inkelas, 2007)—is part of an ongoing, changing, and sometimes contentious debate about both the purposes and failures of a college education. In 2007, the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) named learning communities a high-impact practice (HIP) because of the potential of these communities to provide coherence to and ultimately improve undergraduate education (Kuh, 2008). Although there is variation in thematic and organizational type, LLCs typically group students together in a residence hall, offer a shared academic experience, and provide cocurricular learning activities for student engagement with peers (Inkelas & Soldner, 2011). Institutional leaders have demonstrated a commitment to providing LLCs, but they currently do so primarily with anecdotal information to guide their work. As a result, there is substantial variation in organizational structure, collaboration, academic and social environments, programmatic integration, student outcomes, and overall quality related to LLC participation.

Despite increasing interest in LLCs as a way to improve undergraduate education and a growing research foundation, there is no comprehensive, empirically based resource that supports the development, delivery, and assessment of LLCs. Existing work on LLCs is typically encapsulated as a subset of the broader learning community (i.e., nonresidentially based) literature and thus rarely gets adequate attention. The existing paucity of LLC literature has led to a broad, largely anecdotal overview of how to create these communities. This book addresses these gaps in the literature by providing a deeper discussion of the origins of LLCs, their role in improving undergraduate education and other contemporary problems they are thought to address, the way they fit into the HIP landscape, and a synthesis of current research. Furthermore, this book offers an empirically based framework for LLC development and empirically based discussion of best practices related to each element of the framework. However, it is critically important to begin by recounting the history of LLCs in American higher education: how they have been conceived, how they have been criticized, and how they have been reinvented.

Brief History of Learning Communities and LLCs

The LLC “story” begins with the development of the broader and more curricularly based learning community. Although learning communities take a number of different structures (Gabelnick, MacGregor, Matthews, & Smith, 1990; Inkelas, Soldner, Longerbeam, & Leonard, 2008; Lenning & Ebbers, 1999; Lenning, Hill, Saunders, Solan, & Stokes, 2013; Shapiro & Levine, 1999; Smith, MacGregor, Matthews, & Gabelnick, 2004; Smith & Williams, 2007), the foundation for all of these learning community formats is shared. Names such as Dewey, Meiklejohn, Tussman, and Cadwallader are commonly referenced within the history of learning communities as their approaches to education and attempts at structuring intentional learning experiences undergird the current enactment of learning community programs.

Core concepts of education espoused by John Dewey were elements of early learning communities and remain important considerations in today’s programs. Recognizing learning as a social process, Dewey saw students and teachers as partners in learning. Additionally, his emphasis on democracy was a focus for future learning community programs, such as the program founded by Alexander Meiklejohn. Meiklejohn’s Experimental College, an LLC focused on democracy, operated at the University of Wisconsin from 1927 to 1932. Ideas about the effectiveness of learning in community, the importance of integration of multiple knowledge vantage points, the benefits of active learning, and the need for holistic learning that includes both the in-class and out-ofclass experiences of students were some of the elements of the Experimental College reflected in learning communities today (Smith & Williams, 2007).

Following a period when higher education’s focus shifted from teaching to research and graduate education, learning communities resurfaced. With the expansion of higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, a renewed interest in educational innovation led to new learning community efforts such as those spearheaded by Joseph Tussman at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1965 to 1969 and Mervyn Cadwallader’s similar program at San Jose State College during the same period. Like Meiklejohn’s Experimental College, Tussman’s and Cadwallader’s programs focused on democracy. Tussman, a former student and friend of Meiklejohn, was influenced by his mentor’s experiment in Wisconsin and encouraged the integration of course content and multiple perspectives recommended by Meiklejohn. Community was a key element of these initiatives, which also had a physical space near the campus. Although Cadwallader’s Tutorial Program incorporated the focus on democracy, a central element of the program was team-teaching in a coherent curriculum, an approach Cadwallader took with him when he moved to the State University of New York College at Old Westbury to institute a similar program there. Unfortunately, this was a tumultuous time at the institution, which shut down the following year (Smith et al., 2004).

The sustainability of learning communities was as much a problem in their early iterations as it is today. Often reliant on a single champion to usher the curriculum and organizational structure into the collegiate environment, these communities faded when the community’s champion left the institution or moved on to other projects. To expect a learning community to sustain itself without adequate structure, support, or resources is not realistic nor sufficient for postsecondary institutions. Whereas early learning communities were created as a result of pedagogical beliefs by individuals who championed them into the university environment, a national cry for undergraduate educational change arose in the 1980s and 1990s, reinvigorating the learning community approach. As a result of the need for innovative and reformed undergraduate education, heralded by national reports such as A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (United States National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), the Returning to Our Roots series of the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities (2001), and Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College (Association of American Colleges & Universities, 2002), learning communities resurfaced in the late 1980s (Lenning & Ebbers, 1999) and have proliferated ever since that time. Many of these reports provided recommendations for improvements to the undergraduate experience that could be implemented through learning community structures. Some even specifically suggested the designing of learning communities (Fink & Inkelas, 2015) in the spirit of the early communities highlighted previously.

Since the 2008 AAC&U publication High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access, and Why They Matter, in which learning communities were categorized a HIP, greater attention has been paid to ways to incorporate this construct into undergraduate education. A variety of learning communities, many of which are modeled on the historical communities mentioned previously, exist, and some of them involve students living in proximity to other learning community students in the same residence hall with the intent of capitalizing on that common location. On-campus housing has a history of its own in the United States, shifting from the learning-community-like experiences during the earliest founding of higher education institutions, through the dormitory phase, to today’s attempts at creating intentional academically supportive environments.

Residential Learning Communities

Residential learning communities were actually the first learning communities. Early residential experiences in higher education, mirroring what are now called LLCs, were transplanted from England in the form of the Oxford and Cambridge residential college models. In this “collegiate model” (Blimling, 2015, p. 3), students lived, ate, and studied with their peers as well as faculty members, experiencing a holistic university experience similar to the objectives of today’s LLCs. Then, with the rise of the Germanic model of education focused primarily on research and graduate education in the 1900s, a more “impersonal approach” (Blimling, 2015, p. 5) followed. During this time, attention to the “living” element of the student experience changed as faculty viewed students as adults and preferred resources to be focused on academic as opposed to residential spaces. Because students needed places to live, dormitories were constructed in order “to house and feed students and to maximize the number of beds constructed for the dollars available, with little or no regard for the quality of students’ educational experiences and personal development. Dormitories were designed for low-cost maintenance, not livability” (Frederiksen, 1993, p. 172), and most were clearly not designed with academic integration in mind. The “student development approach” (Blimling, 2015, p. 13) and the “student learning approach” (Blimling, 2015, p. 17) emerged as dormitories eventually transitioned to residence halls, “designed to provide students with low-cost, safe, sanitary, and comfortable living accommodations and to promote students’ intellectual, social, moral and physical development” (Frederiksen, 1993, p. 175). Residence halls were operated by staff informed by student development literature, with later additional emphasis on student learning (Blimling, 2015). Thus, the transition to residence halls marked renewed recognition of the integration of living and learning for students residing on campus. This refocusing on students’ combined in- and out-of-class experiences has resulted in attention to intentional environmental elements of living on campus.

Although the current philosophy of residence halls situates them as venues for student growth and development as opposed to solely places where students reside, not all residence halls share the same resources and characteristics as LLCs. Schuh (1999) defined living-learning centers as “specific interventions designed to tie living in a residence unit (floor, hall, wing) to a specific program sponsored by the institution” (p. 12). Thus, LLCs are more than theme housing, a residential environment with its own types of benefits for students. Additionally, LLCs require more than simply acknowledging the academic within the residential experience, instead calling for the intentional integration of the two. For the purposes of this book, we define LLCs as cohorts of students intentionally grouped together in a residence hall who have a shared academic experience along with cocurricular learning activities for engagement with their peers (Inkelas & Soldner, 2011). This definition distinguishes LLCs from theme and other special-interest housing because of the intentional emphasis on academic content within the LLC.

Continuing Challenges LLCs Can Address

Learning communities remain relevant in higher education because educational issues addressed by previous learning communities still exist today. Gabelnick and colleagues (1990) stated, “In a time of widespread criticism of higher education, learning communities constitute an unusual reform effort because of their focus on the structural features of our institutions and our curriculum as both the problem and the solution” (p. 5). Following numerous national reports in the 1980s and 1990s calling for educational reform, concerns in the 1990s surfaced regarding educational quality and standards, accountability, attrition, student learning (and what they were not learning), curricular coherence and rationale, declining rewards for and valuing of faculty teaching, and the growing diversity of student demographics (Gabelnick et al., 1990). In the 1998 About Campus article “Why Learning Communities? Why Now?” Hutchings noted learning communities can address philosophical, research-based, and pragmatic concerns in higher education. Philosophically, “a fundamental revolution in epistemology” (Hutchings, 1998, p. 7) led to the recognition of knowledge as socially constructed and belief in the educational benefits of active and collaborative learning, which are hallmarks of learning communities. Additionally, Hutchings (1998) highlighted research on student development, student learning outcomes, and motivation and cognition, suggesting learning communities attentive to these elements may lead to important gains. Finally, learning communities provide opportunities for developing talents such as independence and citizenship that are needed in and outside the workplace, helping colleges and universities achieve their missions.

Higher education scholars believed organizational aspects of colleges and universities were hurdles in the educational process. Gabelnick and colleagues (1990) noted:

The learning community reform effort is distinctive in its focus on structural barriers to educational excellence, pointing to the structural characteristics of many colleges and universities as major impediments to effective teaching and learning. Large, impersonal, bureaucratic, and fragmented, the American college is often an educational community only in theory. (p. 9)

Tinto (1998) touted community as a primary factor in student persistence, noting students who are involved and integrated tend to persist. He also indicated involvement in the first year matters most—“especially during the first ten weeks when the transition to college is not yet complete and personal affiliations are not yet cemented” (Tinto, 1998, p. 169). Tinto’s suggestions for restructuring higher education organizations reflect elements of learning communities, including active and integrated learning. In fact, Tinto recommended outright that learning communities be part of the solution to the issues of student learning, persistence, and citizenship. These structures encourage staff and faculty collaboration, bringing the two aspects of the student experience together with a focus on shared goals. Although Tinto noted that learning communities, as he termed them, are well suited for commuter students, the components of these programs can be applied to residential students as well.

Considering the “ideal” academic experience, Gabelnick and colleagues (1990) remarked,

The vision of the collegiate learning community refers to an idealized version of the campus of the past, where students and faculty shared a close and sustained fellowship, where day-to-day contacts reinforced previous classroom learning, where the curriculum was organized around c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction to Living-Learning Communities
• 2 Best Practices Model for Living-Learning Communities
• 3 Building the Infrastructure for Living-Learning Communities that Work
• 4 Academic Environment: Intellectual Hub of the Program
• 5 Cocurricular Environment: Reinforcing Goals and Objectives
• 6 The Pinnacle and Mortar of the Pyramid: The Final, Yet Crucial, Components
• 7 Logistics and Costs of Living-Learning Communities
• 8 Sustainability and Concluding Thoughts
• Afterword
• Appendix
• References
• About the Authors
• Index
• Backcover