AAC&U News | October 2005

At College of San Mateo, Learning Community Gives Students “Tools for Thought”

The College of San Mateo (CSM), a two-year, open-access institution located in the San Francisco Bay Area, has been using learning communities for several years to help students integrate their learning. Like similar programs elsewhere, CSM's learning communities seek to connect disciplines and provide new contexts for student learning.

The learning communities program has evolved since 2003, when the College of San Mateo was selected for Integrative Learning: Opportunities to Connect, a joint project of AAC&U and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Today, the program enrolls more than one hundred students in five different learning communities each semester. As faculty at CSM are discovering, these learning communities offer an effective way of engaging community college students, who often struggle to balance academic commitments with competing demands from family and work.

One learning community that exemplifies CSM's approach to integrative learning is "Tools for Thought." Designed and led by mathematics professor Michael Burke and English professor Jean Mach, two leaders of the college's learning communities program, "Tools for Thought" pairs a reading and composition course with an intermediate algebra course. Students in "Tools for Thought" thus learn to combine the analytical skills of two very different disciplines--and, in the process, to apply those skills to real-world problems.

Tools for Thought

Even before CSM's learning communities program was launched, Michael Burke and Jean Mach were intrigued by the possibility of pairing English and mathematics courses. Burke had previously experimented with incorporating real-world data and writing assignments into his math classes. Mach, for her part, thought that integrating mathematics into writing assignments in her English classes "might help some students who struggle with abstract thinking."

In 2003, the two began teaching "Tools for Thought," which joins together Math 120, English 100, and required workshops in math and English. As in other learning communities at the College of San Mateo, the courses are taught back-to-back in the same classroom. The math and English courses intersect most directly through a series of writing assignments.

In planning "Tools for Thought," Burke and Mach had to establish how these assignments could simultaneously serve the purposes of the two courses, both of which are commonly taught and have clearly defined requirements. In intermediate algebra, students must learn to work with linear models, quadratic models, linear systems of two equations, and exponential models. Students in composition courses, meanwhile, are expected to write essays that analyze causes, definition essays, comparison/contrast essays, and persuasive essays.

The assignments for "Tools for Thought" merge these two sets of expectations. In the first paper, for instance, students both analyze the causes of declining California Chinook salmon populations and graph a linear model to predict when the species will become extinct if current trends hold. Other papers similarly require students to apply mathematical models to contemporary issues: students graph a linear system of two equations to evaluate winning times in Olympic sprints for men and women in a paper about the nature of sexual equality; they assess data about the AIDS epidemic in a paper that compares opposing viewpoints; they consider the exponential growth of wolf populations in a persuasive essay about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone; and they respond to a classic mathematical argument in a philosophical paper.

Students use spreadsheets to represent data in the papers. In addition to being easy to incorporate into papers, Burke says, spreadsheets help students understand "the mathematical ideas associated with a function." Because they require formulas, take the form of a table, and can be converted quickly into graphs, spreadsheets are especially powerful tools for teaching different ways of representing functions.

Although students may find the paper assignments daunting at first, Burke and Mach both say that the work of their learning community students is typically more sophisticated than that of students who take the same courses outside of the learning community. "The papers from those classes lack the authority and intellectual rigor that I see in the learning community papers in which students must, in some way, confront real data," says Mach. Rather than "relying exclusively on someone else's interpretation of the data," learning community students are able to interpret data themselves and apply their knowledge of mathematics to real-world problems.

Obstacles and Opportunities

Despite the success of "Tools for Thought," the College of San Mateo's learning communities program faces a number of challenges. CSM's articulation agreements, like those at other community colleges, are designed to ease student transfer to four-year institutions but can also restrict pedagogical innovation by too rigidly prescribing syllabi and assignments. And community college students themselves often don't "arrive with the same level of commitment" as students at four-year colleges, according to Burke. Although learning communities have been "able to generate that level of commitment," Burke and other program leaders have been frustrated by the fact that the program so far has only reached a small portion of the student body.

Unexpected "institutional constraints" can also limit a program's reach, Burke says. At CSM, for example, a technical glitch in the design of the online schedule has prevented students from accessing information about linked classes. Despite administrative support for the learning communities, this seemingly small problem continues to impede the program's growth.

Partly in response to such problems, Burke and other faculty are beginning to experiment with new approaches to integrative learning. In the spring, a group of seven stand-alone courses in English, mathematics, philosophy, and sociology--all scheduled for the same time slot--will examine the ideas put forth in Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons." This essay, which itself incorporates a range of disciplinary perspectives, will then be used "to show how these different fields can contribute to looking at a single idea," Burke says. Although the seven classes reading the essay will all be taught separately, they will convene as a group several times during the semester for lectures and discussions. The classes thus will model integrative learning, while also providing faculty with an opportunity to promote the learning communities program.

In the meantime, the College of San Mateo has begun to collect data about student success in the learning communities. The college recently assigned an institutional researcher to comparatively track student progression through learning community and non-learning community courses. Although too limited in scope to be broadly generalized, early data suggest that learning community students are more likely to progress successfully through the curriculum than other students. Finally, as Mach and Burke point out, self-assessments from "Tools for Thought" have already indicated that their students are developing crucial quantitative literacy and critical thinking skills--skills that will help them make connections not just between disciplines, but also between college learning and real-world problems.

More information about the College of San Mateo's learning communities program is available online.

The College of San Mateo is a participant in Integrative Learning: Opportunities to Connect, an initiative jointly sponsored by AAC&U and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The current issue of Peer Review, also dedicated to integrative learning, profiles programs at a number of other campuses participating in the integrative learning project. An AAC&U Network for Academic Renewal conference scheduled for later this month, "Integrative Learning: Creating Opportunities to Connect," will explore a variety of approaches to integrative learning.