Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana
In the following, we will describe a provisional framework for our discussion on the relationship between residentiality and off-campus study. We will also include a list of questions that we'd like you to consider in your pre conference response.
One of our struggles in approaching this topic has been how to conceive of the term "residentiality." We believe that much of what is special about residential liberal arts colleges springs from embedding a challenging formal curriculum within an intellectually vibrant residential community. While most faculty, staff, and students at liberal arts colleges would probably agree with this statement, our understanding of how our residential cultures connect with our formal curricula is often superficial. Our goal is to learn more about the way that good liberal arts colleges build and take advantage of their residential cultures to foster student learning and development.
As we suggested in our invitation letter we've used the term "residentiality" as a placeholder of sorts for the kinds of learning that takes place outside the classroom (even though it is often connected to class work)-a complex mix of the social interactions within a college community, extra- and co-curricular activities, institutional ethos, residential environments, etc. We'd like to suggest that many of our colleges act, either intentionally or unintentionally, to structure their residential communities, and that the combined impact of these actions is sufficiently powerful that we should think of the "residential curriculum," as a partner with the formal curriculum.
There is a substantial amount of evidence that our students' out of classroom experiences play a critical role in what students learn in college. In a recently published review, Terenzini, Pascarella, and Blimling (1) concluded:
…students' out of class experiences appear to be far more influential in students' academic and intellectual development than many faculty members and academic and student affairs administrators think. Even when students' precollege academic learning and cognitive ability levels and other relevant characteristics are taken into account, academic and cognitive learning are positively shaped by a wide variety of out of class experiences. (p. 618)
They add that this is not simply a general positive effect that results merely from living in a residential environment, but is tied to specific activities, especially those that require active student involvement. For example, students who work full time, spend more time socializing with friends, and have fewer academically or intellectually oriented out of classroom interactions with faculty and students typically show less intellectual growth.
George Kuh (2) refers to out of classroom experiences as "the other curriculum." He argues that while the formal academic curriculum is the "organizing framework" for most colleges, "…students benefit in many ways from out of class experiences, ranging from gains in critical thinking to relational and organizational skills, attributes that are highly correlated with satisfaction and success after college" (pp. 149-50). Kuh also argues that while students often have the opportunity to develop and test such skills in the classroom, many out of class experiences demand that students develop these skills.
Although evidence in support of the importance of out of classroom experiences has been accumulating for decades, these experiences became more prominent with the publication of Alexander Astin's (3) massive study of undergraduate education in 1993. This study was based on a longitudinal sample of over 24,000 students from 217 institutions. Astin found that the strongest predictors of student satisfaction and affective and cognitive development included students' peer interactions and their degree of "involvement":
Perhaps the most compelling generalization from the myriad findings summarized in this chapter is the pervasive effect of the peer group on the individual student's development. Every aspect of the student's development-cognitive and affective, psychological and behavioral-is affected in some way by peer group characteristics…. (p. 363)
This review once again underscores the tremendous potential that student involvement has for enhancing most aspects of the undergraduate student's cognitive and affective development. Learning, academic performance, and retention are positively associated with academic involvement, involvement with faculty, and involvement with student peer groups. (p. 394)
At the same time Astin found almost no impact of the curriculum on involvement. According to Astin, the reason for this surprising finding is that most colleges and universities use a more or less similar distribution based curriculum. In essence, the formal curriculum in higher education does not vary as much as we tend to think it does. This, however, did not lead Astin to dismiss the importance of curriculum. Instead, he pointed to the importance of the residential context in which the curriculum is embedded:
…it appears that how the students approach general education (and how faculty deliver the curriculum) is far more important than the formal curricular content and structure. More specifically, the findings strongly support a growing body of research suggesting that one of the crucial factors in the educational development of the undergraduate is the degree to which the student is actively engaged or involved in the undergraduate experience. As noted above, two critical factors are (1) the extent to which the student interacts with student peers, and (2) the extent to which students interact with faculty. General education outcomes are thus enhanced when students devote a lot of time to study, when they socialize with diverse student peers, when they serve as tutors for each other, and when they engage each other in discussions of contemporary issues. (pp. 425-6, original emphases)
Astin thought that smaller, residential liberal arts colleges were the institutions that integrated a sound curriculum with a small, connected residential environment to create a powerful undergraduate education:
…a primary commitment to educating the undergraduate, a residential setting that not only removes the student from the home but that also permits and encourages close student student and student-faculty contact, smallness, and a sense of history and tradition that generates a strong sense of community. This sense of community is manifested in many ways, including alumni loyalty, the strong student interest and involvement in team sports, and the friendly rivalries that evolve between neighboring colleges…[and] leads to favorable educational results across a broad spectrum of cognitive and affective outcomes and in most areas of student satisfaction. (p. 413)
While most of us would embrace Astin's conclusions, they do raise interesting questions for off campus programs that enhance our student's education by removing them from their rich, residential community.
To develop these questions further, here's a slightly more formalized description of our sense of the connection between the residential environment, or "residential curriculum," and the formal curriculum. We offer it as something to bounce ideas off of and invite you to revise it or propose alternatives as you see fit. What the model helps us to do is to begin thinking about a student's whole experience at college, both inside and outside the classroom.
Essentially, we believe that student learning is proportional to how much a college's formal curriculum connects with students' experiences outside the classroom. And so we propose the following:
[Student Learning] = [Formal Curriculum] @ [Residential Curriculum]
Formal curriculum: The explicit structure of our college's curriculum as it is outlined in the course catalog and the content we cover in our classes. It includes things like major and minor fields of study, graduation requirements, and general education / distribution requirements, etc.
Residential curriculum: The underlying structure of our students' out-of-class experiences. This structure may well be implicit and unconsciously developed, and includes things like extra- and co-curricular activities, institutional ethos, residential environments, "cultural" practices, etc.
@: The "a" within the circle is our way of indicating that our formal curriculum is embedded within the residential curriculum. We believe that the stronger the connection or "embeddedness" of the formal curriculum within the residential curriculum, the more opportunities there are for the intellectual work that occurs in class to find purchase and relevance in the student's life. (Our use of the "@" symbol was inspired by the symbolic notation chemists use to describe a metal atom inside of a "bucky ball" [e.g.,(K@C60.(4)]
The model is offered as a heuristic device and we do not mean to suggest a natural, necessary, or easy division between the two curricula. Instead, we wish to play up their connectedness. Our goal is to unravel the connection between the formal curriculum and the residential curriculum, in other words, to develop an understanding about "@". Part of our hunch is that the residential curriculum has a certain amount of integrity unto itself and that there is also an amount of integrity connecting the residential and the formal curricula. Following this, how can we ensure that we are able to maintain a student's integration with both the formal and residential parts of the equation? Study abroad programs have already directed our attention to integrating their brand of off-campus study with the formal curriculum. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that we need to be mindful not only of how we integrate student learning off campus with academics, but also with the college community.
In addition to drawing on your expertise with off-campus study and how it best fits into student learning, we also want to tap into your particular perspective on the residential context of a liberal arts education. By bringing you all together, we hope to begin a conversation about different ways to approach and conceive of the relationship between the formal and the residential curricula.
In your paper, we ask that you 1) provide a brief overview of your program, 2) consider how it relates to student learning in terms of the formal and the residential curricula (or however you choose to model learning), and 3) present examples of or ideas for "best practices." A length of eight to ten pages would be ideal, but please try to stay under fifteen. We also ask that you respond to the following questions in your paper:
o What happens, both to students and campus residential environments, when we remove a substantial portion of our students for an extended period of time? Does the home campus experience a drain on student involvement? Are there ways to protect both student and community while fulfilling the promise of off-campus study?
o How do we enable students to become part of new communities as they go off-campus, and how do we reintegrate them back into our own communities when they return?
o What are some ways to maintain a connection between the home community and students while they are off campus? If you have developed strategies to maintain this connection, do you have ways of assessing them?
o How can we help students use their off-campus experiences to enrich the residential community of the other students who did not participate in those experiences?
References:
1. Terenzini, P. T., E. T. Pascarella, and G. S. Blimling. (1999). Students' out-of-class experiences and their influence on learning and cognitive development: A literature review. Journal of College Student Development, 40, 610-623.
2. Kuh, G. D. (1995). The other curriculum: Out-of-class experiences associated with student learning and personal development. Journal of Higher Education, 66: 123-155.
3. Astin, A. W. (1993). What matters in college? Four Critical Years Revisted. San Francisc Jossey-Bass.
4. See Chai, Y., T. Guo, et al. (1991). Fullerenes with metals inside. Journal of Physical Chemistry, 95, 7564-8.