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Achieving College Excellence (ACE): A New Twist on a Familiar Theme by Linda Manzano-Larsen and Cathy C. Durham |
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Learning communities are not a new concept. Defined literally as communities of learning, they’ve been around since before the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Learning communities aren’t new to GCC either. In the context of today’s colleges and universities, a learning community is defined as co-registration or block scheduling that enables a cohort of students to take a set of courses together. Here at GCC, a variety of approaches have been used to structure students’ time, credit, and educational experiences for the purposes of enhancing learning and building community among students, between students and their teachers, and among faculty members and disciplines: ● For the past twenty-one years, the Scholars’ Program has been serving cohorts of academically gifted students, challenging them intellectually and increasing their chances of successful transfer through priority consideration to affiliated UCs and CSUs. ● Since 1998, PACE has been enabling groups of working adults to achieve their goal of completing their CSU transfer AA/transfer requirements through classes offered one night per week and on Saturdays. ● Several divisions routinely join forces to form small-scale learning communities, pairing classes for the purpose of providing support to students in courses they view as difficult or intimidating (e.g., math with student development) or integrating course content from two disciplines (e.g., English with library). ● Informal learning communities often develop naturally throughout our campus, such as when students preparing for a particular major enroll in a series of classes together and, through hours of shared work, develop social and academic ties among themselves and with their instructors. Thus, the goal of this article is not to announce the advent of learning communities to GCC but rather to describe a new effort, Achieving College Excellence (ACE), which will begin as a pilot program this fall. So, given that GCC already has various forms of learning communities, why develop another? ACE, which is sponsored by a five-year Title V grant, gives GCC the opportunity to offer the academic and social benefits of a learning community to greater numbers of its students. The grant’s long-term goal is to develop several new learning communities on campus, targeting students at various skill levels and with diverse interests. The pilot program is starting small, however, aiming for a beginning cohort of 81 full-time students who will enter GCC not yet prepared for college-level English and math (i.e., students placing into English 120 and Math 145) but who nonetheless seek to transfer to a university within two years. For four semesters (fall and spring of the freshman and sophomore years), the first cohort of ACE students will take blocks of courses together, guided by instructors who collaborate to provide a theme-based, integrated curriculum. (Winter and summer sessions will be left unscheduled, giving students freedom to take electives or courses required for particular majors.) The starting date for the first ACE cohort is the second summer session of 2007. The incoming cohort will participate in a summer bridge program to help the students ready themselves for college by taking a student development course integrated with a special-topics course in math preparation/math anxiety. The summer bridge will also create opportunities for students to develop friendships within the ACE community and become acquainted with their instructors, and it will provide field trips to cultural sites and four-year universities. Then, beginning in the fall, the cohort will take blocks of courses from several disciplines focusing on four themes: “The Power of Knowledge” (fall 2007), “The World” (spring 2008), “Ways of Knowing” (fall 2008), and “Beauty and Expression” (spring 2009). Key to the success of the ACE learning community will be the collaboration of faculty from different disciplines to integrate course content across subjects often viewed as unrelated. The emphasis on curricular coherence around themes aims to give both faculty and students an enriched teaching and learning environment by reinforcing and integrating newly-gained knowledge, by connecting issues that cross subject-matter boundaries, by exploring diverse perspectives, and by encouraging active and collaborative learning. In addition to the summer bridge and a theme-based approach, ACE will offer its students other benefits to help them persist, succeed, and transfer. Such benefits include guaranteed enrollment for all ACE courses, access to a study area and mobile computer lab, a two-year transfer-track curriculum, assistance from an ACE counselor to select a college major, choose electives, and make efficient progress toward transfer, a ready-made support system that includes supplemental instruction, tutoring, and mentoring, and, it is hoped, a sense of belonging within ACE—a community within the larger GCC community. For any new program, recruitment is necessarily a concern. How will ACE get the word out to the community? Led by Mike Dulay and assisted by GCC’s Outreach & Assessment Office, a team of faculty, counselors, and staff is currently engaged in outreach efforts to inform local high school students about ACE. Efforts so far include presentations at shadow days, college fairs, and counselor-to-counselor days, visits to high schools, an attractive and informative ACE website (www.glendale.edu/ace), Gateways interviews, articles in Campus Connections, and YouTube broadcasts. Additionally, the team continues to seek new ways—whether high- or low-tech—of attracting applicants. Some might wonder about ACE’s origins. The project began last fall, when GCC was awarded a new Title V grant. Title V coordinator Cathy Durham requested help from division chairs and academic administrators in assembling a group of individuals from across campus—academic and EOPS counselors, instructors, librarians, supplemental instruction leaders, and outreach and financial aid experts—to develop the new learning community. Subsequently, Cathy asked Linda Manzano-Larsen to lead the development team, which has been hard at work since December. (See the ACE website for a complete listing of team members.) Since then, many others have generously offered their expertise, including staff from Admissions & Records, Outreach & Assessment, Counseling, the Interdisciplinary Studies/Humanities committee, Writing Across the Curriculum, Pathways to Success, and even a graduate intern from USC. As the pilot program gets underway this fall, a new cycle of planning for future learning communities will begin as well, and along with it the need for the involvement of more of our campus community. If you’d like
more information about Achieving College Excellence, or to receive a
one-page summary highlighting the essential features of the four
learning communities currently at GCC (ACE, Scholars, MASTER, and PACE),
visit www.glendale.edu/ace or contact
Cathy Durham, x5397, cdurham@glendale.edu,
or the project’s assistant director, Leticia Estrada, x3001,
lestrada@glendale.edu. Your
questions, comments, suggestions—and student referrals—are most welcome.
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