{"id":811,"date":"2018-10-11T14:02:10","date_gmt":"2018-10-11T21:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/donofrio\/?p=811"},"modified":"2018-10-17T01:06:24","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T08:06:24","slug":"multi-disciplinary-approach-to-experiential-learning-in-first-year-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/donofrio\/multi-disciplinary-approach-to-experiential-learning-in-first-year-program\/","title":{"rendered":"Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Experiential Learning in First Year Program"},"content":{"rendered":"

2016 Symposium on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in and across Disciplines, Banff AB (Abstract)<\/h3>\n
\n

From Learning Objectives to Experiences:\u00a0 Community-Engaged Learning Across Disciplines<\/em><\/h4>\n

Christine D\u2019Onofrio and Kathryn Grafton<\/p>\n

What is revealed about student learning when conventional teaching boundaries are expanded from within to across disciplines, from theory to praxis, and from classroom to community? In this presentation, we share our experience designing a cross-disciplinary, community-based learning unit for 100 students in UBC\u2019s Coordinated Arts Program (CAP), a multidisciplinary cohort program for first-year students. We focus on learning objectives: how we developed objectives that met both the program\u2019s outcomes and the disciplinary needs of two courses, how we designed activities and assignments to meet these objectives, and how students\u2019 experiences aligned with, and departed from, our pedagogical aims.<\/p>\n

Our work on community-engaged learning is located in the curricular context of CAP, which brings together courses into broad research streams, such as \u201cGlobal Citizens\u201d and \u201cLaw and Society.\u201d CAP is a learning community, a group of students taking connected courses (e.g., Evenbeck and Ross 214). These communities foster integrative learning: multi-modal pedagogy that encourages students to think critically across contextual boundaries through diverse practices (e.g., Huber, Hutchings, and Gale 4), including community-engaged learning. While there is scholarship on community learning in higher education (e.g., Bringle and Hatcher), there is a gap in published research on community-engaged pedagogy for learning communities as well as cross-course, community-learning initiatives.<\/p>\n

Our initiative is the first to apply CAP\u2019s multidisciplinarity to community learning: we designed the unit for the Media Studies stream, which includes our courses, Academic Writing\/English and Visual Arts. With colleagues, we designed the 2015\/16 community-learning experience in partnership with the New Media Gallery (New Westminster). Students and faculty visited the exhibition, 5600K: Temperature of White, featuring contemporary artworks on the physiology of light, accompanied by a curatorial lecture. Students then examined this experience through two disciplinary lenses. For Academic Writing, students summarized a scholarly article, using the exhibit to illustrate and complicate how the theory works in practice. This summary addressed a learning objective to synthesize and take a persuasive position in a scholarly argument. For Visual Arts, students executed two appropriated artworks, visually responding to their experience with the exhibit. This assignment addressed the objective of poiesis, the transfer of intuition to intellect. Students also responded to critical reflection questions before and after the unit. These reflections helped students to \u201cmake meaning of experience\u201d (Bringle & Hatcher), self-assess their engagement with praxis\u2014unifying theory and action\u2014, and identify how the two disciplines informed their research projects.<\/p>\n

We present how our program and course objectives overlap and diverge, the challenges we faced with our initial pilot and how we revised the curriculum accordingly. We then engage the audience in questions of cross-disciplinarity by asking them respond to an interactive experience from their own disciplinary positions and compare responses. We show works from the exhibition, our assignments, and a summary of student reflections. We highlight patterns of student experiences in relation to our learning objectives, particularly the notable influence of a learning community on community-engaged learning. More broadly, we reflect on the ways that community learning across disciplines contributes to Booth\u2019s vision of \u201ca re-imagined higher education that is multi-dimensional, outward facing and grounded in the complexity and plurality of meanings that characterize contemporary life\u201d (53).<\/p>\n

\n

W<\/u>orks Cited<\/u><\/p>\n

Booth, Alan. \u201c\u2018Wide-awake Learning\u2019: Integrative Learning and Humanities Education.\u201d Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 10.1 (2011): 47-65. Web.<\/p>\n

Bringle, R., and J. Hatcher. \u201cA Service Learning Curriculum for Faculty.\u201d Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 1(1995): 112-122.<\/p>\n

Evenbeck, Scott E., and Frank E. Ross. \u201cTransforming the First Year Experience through Learning Communities.\u201d Institutional Transformation to Engage a Diverse Student Body. Ed. Liz Thomas and Malcolm Tight. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2011. 213-223.<\/p>\n

Huber, Mary Taylor, Pat Hutchings, and Richard Gale. \u201cIntegrative Learning for Liberal Education.\u201d Peer Review 7.4 (2005): 4-7. Web.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2016 Symposium on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in and across Disciplines, Banff AB (Abstract) From Learning Objectives to Experiences:\u00a0 Community-Engaged Learning Across Disciplines Christine D\u2019Onofrio and Kathryn Grafton What is revealed about student learning when conventional teaching boundaries are expanded from within to across disciplines, from theory to praxis, and from classroom to … Continue reading Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Experiential Learning in First Year Program<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17601,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/donofrio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/donofrio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/donofrio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/donofrio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17601"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/donofrio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/donofrio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":864,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/donofrio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions\/864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/donofrio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/donofrio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/donofrio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}