AAC&U News | January/February 2003

Mercer University Sees Civic Engagement as Its Signature

Mercer University, located in Macon, Georgia, prides itself on being connected with its community. Its Center for Community Development coordinates service-learning opportunities for students in Macon by working with neighborhood organizations and community agencies to revitalize inner-city neighborhoods. In addition, each school within the university has a strong community service component; the school of medicine, for example, is charged to train physicians to serve in local areas that do not have adequate medical care, and the college of education has built-in extension programs to serve working adults in Georgia.

In the past two decades, Mercer University completed two major reforms to embed learning-centered innovations in the curriculum and maintain the disciplinary and departmental focus for its faculty. This year, the university is seeking to make sure every program that has been developed is anchored in a commitment to community.

A Third Curricular Revision

Last summer, as the university rolled on with facility improvements such as new gymnasium facilities and a music building, a team from Mercer flew to Leesburg, Virginia to attend AAC&U's Greater Expectation Institute to work on some less visible, but equally important concerns—developing and coordinating its growing patchwork of new educational programs and making sure each included a focus on community service.

Mercer came to the Institute with the same challenges many leading and innovative campuses face. Mercer wanted to build on its culture of innovation, but also to develop strong assessment mechanisms to "institutionalize" innovations and to ensure that these new programs would benefit more students. Many of their most innovative programs were spread among the university's nine schools and were housed at many levels. Some of the programs depended on a single faculty member, and they lacked a promising mechanism to link their various efforts.

Developing a Coordinated Plan

Mercer used the institute to chart their learning centered innovations and assess such issues as structure, responsibility, history, rationale, and assessment for each program. Some of the programs (First-Year Seminars, Scientific Inquiry, and Senior Capstone) formed the interdisciplinary backbone of the curriculum, while some were alternatives (such as the Great Books program and the honors program), and some were confined to a specific discipline.

According to Team Leader Richard Fallis, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and professor of English, the best thing about the Institute was having five to six days to get people together from parts of campus that normally don't have the opportunity to work together. "We figured out how to set up lines of communication between groups that didn't have daily interaction," said Fallis.

Away from campus time constraints and multi-tasking, the institute gave the members the license to "think big." With the preparation and the diverse views brought to the Institute, team members were able to tackle a specific task and apply it to an ambitious scope. In addition, Fallis said, they used the plenaries and workshops to jolt them out of more parochial thinking.

"Launching the Conversation" Back Home

When the team returned to campus with a rough timeline, they embarked on a three-step implementation process. They knew they had to intensify a campus-wide discussion about the programs and goals defined by the team. For campus leaders and opinion makers, they needed to identify concerns and communicate that this ambitious project also had very practical returns for the university:increased recruitment and retention. This process of "launching the conversation" has taken most of the fall 2002 semester.

The next step is to deepen and expand the conversation across the university, bring in more participants, design curricular specifics, consider their implications, and imagine exactly how service-learning components will be developed as a unifying thread for their various innovations.

They hope soon to have acheived general agreement about closer relations among innovative efforts. The conversations at the Institute also helped lead to a closer look at the liberal arts curriculum as whole with proposed chnages in course hours and graduation requirements. They will work with the provost's office and Center for Teaching and Learning to develop assessment tools. They anticipate a full set of revised courses will be offered in 2004-5.

When asked about what advice he would give other institutions tackling similar structural improvements, Fallis had two pieces of advice: pick a large enough project and be flexible with a timeline at first. When the team embarked on a revision of the First-Year Seminar, they knew they had a chance to do something that would change the course of every student's learning at Mercer. They also came up with a plan flexible enough to be adapted to unexpected challenges and to create a timeline that was general enough to adapt to new problems. One challenge the team faced this year was integrating service learning while also teaching students to become better writers. At first the integration was not easy, but the pairing of the two learning goals was well worth the effort. "We tried to sketch a strategy, not just tactics," said Fallis, "and we knew we had to take this opportunity to not confine ourselves to small, administrative fixes."

For more information on Mercer's evolving curriculum, visit www.mercer.edu.

For information on applying to the 2003 Greater Expectations Institute on
Campus Leadership for Student Engagement, Inclusion, and Achievement in Denver, Colorado, visit www.aacu.org/meetings/gxinstitute2003.cfm. Application deadline is March 7.