“Developing Curriculum for a Multi-Course Interdepartmental Learning Community to Promote Retention and Learning for Underprepared Engineering Students”
by Rachel A. Milloy, Matthew Moberly, and Rebecca Powell | Xchanges 9.1
The ILC: Interdisciplinary Collaboration
The ILC is designed for Engineering students who either lack high school coursework in advanced mathematics or place below a cutoff score on the math entrance exam. A majority of these students are first-generation college students from socioeconomically challenged backgrounds. Before implementation of the ILC, large numbers of these students were either failing courses or leaving the university altogether after their first year. In response, the ILC formed to provide social and academic support so that these students could begin to situate themselves within the engineering community. Within the program, students are introduced to various concentrations in engineering, college writing, and college success skills, while satisfying remedial math requirements. This is a two-semester course sequence, but for the purposes of this chapter we focus on the first semester sequence, when the writing course we teach occurs.
Our writing course, English 111: Rhetoric and Composition, is required university-wide for all incoming Freshmen. Our challenge, then, was twofold: (1) to figure out how this existing course could inform the learning community; and (2) to build bridges between English 111 and SMET 101, the introductory engineering course. While English 111 focuses on communication, research, and writing, SMET 101 introduces students to campus support resources, provides study skills instruction, and familiarizes students with the various programs/services in the College of Engineering. The other two courses in the ILC (Math and Engineering) enjoy obvious disciplinary connections, yet connecting English and SMET 101 was more challenging.
Commenting on faculty collaborations in learning community design, the widely used online exercise “Designing a Learning Community in an Hour” from the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education suggests that during initial conversations, faculty “leave your syllabus at the door” and instead “engage in intellectual bridge-building with colleagues” based on disciplinary knowledge. Even before discussing complementary assignments, it was important for us — doctoral students in rhetoric and professional communication — to ask ourselves how the learning objectives of English 111 and SMET 101 might complement one another. Both courses are driven by a desire for students to be active learners, to work collaboratively with peers, and to explore and participate in arguments being made in students’ chosen majors. It is from these shared values that we began curriculum development.