Bigger Fish in Smaller Ponds: How Clusters Are Reinventing General Education at UCLA

In its recent report, "Students in the Balance," the Penn State Symposium on General Education took stock of efforts by research universities to improve general education offerings in the post-Boyer report era. The Boyer Report, released in 1998, characterized research universities as being out of touch with their undergraduates. The Penn State report includes several recommendations for how research universities need to carefully reflect on institutional mission in regard to general education and commit themselves to “be bold and speak frankly of intellectual life” starting as early as the recruiting and admission stages. The University of California, Los Angeles' (UCLA) Freshman Cluster Program, profiled in the recent report, demonstrates some of the innovations called for both in the Boyer report and the more recent Penn State report.

Background

Since 1998, UCLA has offered a cluster program as an alternative to its traditional general education distribution model. Each first-year cluster focuses on a broad topic, such as the environment, and is grounded in the following set of pedagogical principles: 1) interdisciplinarity 2) best practices (intensive discussion, group work, inquiry-based learning, research, and primary text analysis), 3) intellectual skills (critical thinking, developing reasoned persuasive arguments) and 4) learning communities (a shared intellectual community in and out of the classroom).

Clusters introduce students to the ways different disciplines address common problems. The cluster system was launched in 1998 as a five-year pilot program that fulfills more than a third of UCLA's general education requirements for freshmen, including writing. The yearlong clusters consist of fall/winter quarters devoted to lectures and small discussion/laboratories; a spring quarter of capstone seminars that build on experience in the first two quarters; and finally a substantive project. All clusters include four groups of participants of 120-160 freshmen; 3-4 interdisciplinary faculty; 3-6 graduate student instructors (GSIs); and an instructional support network of librarians, residential life representatives, and writing program consultants. Since the program's inception, 4,234 freshmen have gone through the program and 196 capstone spring seminars—with topics ranging from “The Search for Extraterrestrial Life in the Universe” to “The Color of Violence: The Meanings and Significance of Racial Violence in U.S. History”— have been offered. The program is just on the verge of its five-year goal: to have 40 percent of all UCLA freshman enrolled in cluster courses by academic year 2004-5.

Cluster Development: Courtship and Commitment

The first phase of creating a cluster entails “conceptualization and socialization,” during which an “affinity group” of five or more faculty from different departments and schools who share an interest organize a cluster. Forming the interdisciplinary teaching team is one of the most challenging aspects of the program. The process is characterized as a “courtship”—GSIs and faculty have different motivations for joining, and administrative support of the cluster team members is essential in the beginning to help connect faculty.

In the second phase, development and implementation, a course is developed, such as “Work, Labor, and Social Justice in the United States,” “The Frontiers of Human Aging: Biomedical, Social and Policy Perspectives,” or “Perception and Illusion: Cognitive Psychology, Literature and Art.” Each cluster proposal is reviewed by UCLA's academic senate. Following approval, the teaching team is finalized, syllabus prepared, GSIs hired and trained, and budget finalized. The program started with seven initial clusters and adds an average of two to three new cluster courses per year. Since the process to put a cluster together is a lengthy one, clusters are expected to run for at least two years.

Cluster 101—Teamwork, Tough Questions, and Barbeques

The emphasis on learning as a community or “team” helps students combat the isolation of freshman year. One key to the cluster concept's success is that faculty have sustained contact with students across an entire first year. Faculty also make efforts to engage students outside of the classroom, sometimes inviting students after class to extend the class discussion over lunch in the campus dining hall, or participate in field trips, Web bulletins, film screenings, barbeques, and museum visits.

The participatory learning techniques and spring seminar structure stand in contrast to the large lecture introductory courses for which research universities are sometimes infamous. The spring seminar set-up allows students to make their own conclusions and debate and defend them rather than being “force-fed” conclusions to pre-existing problems. The clusters do not exactly “ease” students into the college experience, however. Most students rated the experience of the cluster courses as a challenging, but rewarding confidence-builder.

A System of Faculty and Graduate Student Instructors

Since sixty-three percent of graduate students pursue an academic career when they graduate, the cluster program has little trouble recruiting UCLA's most experienced doctoral students. In the program, “graduate students receive financial support for an entire year, engage in interdisciplinary teaching and innovative pedagogical practices, make connections with grads and faculty from other disciplines, and get the opportunity to design and teach a seminar that is based on their own scholarly research,” says M. Gregory Kendrick, instructional coordinator of the Freshman Cluster Program. GSIs are able to enroll in workshops on teaching writing, student research resources, Internet use, and seminar syllabus design.

Many faculty members, as well, welcome the chance to engage in subject matter outside of their disciplinary silo. “Faculty become learners as well as teachers,” says Kendrick, and many faculty see it as a fresh challenge to articulate work to younger students with the “generation gap” enriching to the relevance of their own work.

The Power of the Model for Engaged Learning: From the Neighborhood Census to the Cosmos

One of the earliest clusters, “Interracial Dynamics“ (IrD) tackled the question of race in America with an instructional team from the School of Law, and the history and English departments, and African- and Asian-American studies. IrD uses a bulletin discussion board moderated by a GSI to help students link what they are learning to what they are experiencing outside the classroom and seeing in media, entertainment, and politics. This cluster also includes a section on media literacy to help students filter the news and think critically and independently about how race issues are covered in the media.

Students in the IrD cluster are also given an assignment over winter break to interview members of their community about their perceptions of the racial composition of the neighborhood. Once back on campus, they compare these perceptions and interviews and profiles with data from the U.S. census on their area. To finish the project, they write a paper analyzing the results and assumptions that emerged about race and class, and how these affect the social dynamics of the neighborhood.

The “Cosmos cluster” focuses on introducing the basic elements of astronomy from the Big Bang to consideration of modern resources. It brings together astronomers, geophysicists, and evolutionary biologists. A case study on the program reports:

a year after completing the course, few students could remember what nucleocosmochronolgy meant. But they did remember and comprehend the basic ideas behind how and why atoms disintegrate, and how their slow decay can be used as cosmic clocks.

Students appreciated the chance to participate in a science course to fulfill a general education requirement that wasn't't too narrow, or “dumbed-down” for nonscience majors; science majors appreciated the broad introduction to a variety of scientific disciplines and faculty members.

Overcoming Institutional Challenges

Originally, the cluster program was designed as a decentralized partnership between the vice provost's office, participating faculty, and a small administrative staff, but this proved insufficient administrative support for the program. According to Kendrick, “it was initially conceived as a decentralized structure with a skeletal staff. It became evident this would not work because faculty needed considerably more institutional support.” Individual departments could not support logistics related to learning community activities outside of classroom, scheduling, and the GSI mentoring support and training. Also, design and administration of a coordinated set of assessment instruments, protocols, and reports took more time than originally expected. An administrative support team was established comprised of two staff members, three instructional coordinators, and an evaluation coordinator to oversee assessment of the clusters.

Cluster courses are not as cost-efficient as regular general education courses. In a study done by UCLA, the cluster team concluded that cluster courses are 20 percent more expensive. “The question of whether or not the clusters are worth the higher cost of teaching them is difficult to answer without comparison data about learning and achievement in different sets of general education or lower division courses,” Kendrick acknowledges, but he points to the tangible benefits reported by students—especially the strengthening of their writing, analytical, and library skills.

More longitudinal and quantitative assessment is needed. Currently, assessment coordinators take a “snapshot” of student views at the end of the cluster using open-ended questions and stock survey questions. They have interviewed more than 2,000 undergraduate students and engaged more than 130 GSIs and faculty in interviews or focus groups. The report studied other things as well, such as attrition rates and frequency and effectiveness of contact with GSIs.

In future assessment efforts, they plan to better document students' growth in writing skills and analytical thinking throughout the cluster year, including compiling portfolios of student writing. Follow-up with former cluster students as they near graduation is also planned to measure the long-term benefits of starting students in clusters.

Expanding the program from serving 30 percent of the UCLA freshman class (about 1,200 students annually) to 40 percent (1,800 students) presents a significant budgetary and human resources problem—compounded by the current California fiscal crisis. They will seek to expand the program through cost-sharing partnerships with departments.

UCLA also continues to face the challenge of proving students with this richer, more complex learning experience while also ensuring that students can develop important core skills. According to the case study in the report on the environmental cluster, the amount of material and the way it is presented is challenging for any student:

Clusters have often been compared to operas in that they present their student audience with an often convoluted plot line that is delivered in a foreign language by a diverse group of actors moving through a dizzying set of scene changes… [T]his operatic analogy is an apt one…Over the course of two quarters, a cast of roughly eight instructional performers present students with the highly complex story of the environment in four distinct “acts,” each boasting its own disciplinary language.

Despite these challenges, however, cluster courses were rated higher by students in comparison to other courses. Well over half the students reported a strengthening of writing skills (61 percent), analytical skills (70 percent), and library skills (67 percent). Students reported a greater connection to one another, and the material, and they felt they got to know their instructors personally.

All of the information for this report is taken from a self-review on the UCLA Freshman Cluster Program. For a copy of the UCLA cluster self-review, visit http://www.college.ucla.edu/ge/clusters/selfreview.pdf. (PDF)

The Penn State Symposium on General Education. (2002). Students in the Balance: General education in the Research University. University Park: Division of Undergraduate Studies, The Pennsylvania State University.

For more information on general education reform efforts going on at all types of institutions, see the latest issue of Peer Review, General Education and the New Academy (Vol. 5:4) www.aacu.org/peerreview/index.cfm. Consider attending the AAC&U spring Network for Academic Renewal Meeting, General Education and Assessment.

Photos courtesy of UCLA Photography.