alverno

ALVERNO COLLEGE
www.alverno.edu

Background
Current Institutional Involvement and Commitment to Civic Learning
Proposed Activities to be Funded as Part of the Cluster
Expected Student Learning and Institutional Outcomes
Leadership Team

Background

Established in 1887 as an independent undergraduate college for women in Milwaukee, Alverno College offers liberal arts and professional programs to its approximately 2,000 students. Civic learning and engagement have been integral dimensions of Alverno's curriculum for more than 25 years, and are systematically infused across both general education and the majors. "Creating a Community" both on-campus and in the city is one of four pillars of the mission statement. This goal is realized through Alverno's ability-based curriculum and assessment process started in 1973. Students are expected to acquire the knowledge traditionally associated with a bachelor's degree, and also master eight critical abilities needed to apply that knowledge throughout their lives. The eight abilities are communication, analysis, problem-solving, valuing in decision-making, social interaction, global perspective taking, effective citizenship, and aesthetic responsiveness.

Current Institutional Involvement in and Commitment to Civic Learning

Alverno College indicates that four of the critical abilities which form the foundation of its baccalaureate education very directly strengthen civic learning and engagement. These are effective citizenship, valuing in decision-making, global perspective taking, and social interaction. Students demonstrate these abilities through a wide variety of in-course experiences, campus-wide simulations, off-campus internships, and self-assessments.

In addition to their appointments in traditional disciplines, faculty and academic staff serve in standing, interdisciplinary departments related to each ability. These departments study the latest methods for teaching and learning in that domain, offer pedagogical workshops, help create special student learning opportunities, network in the community, and monitor the curriculum for effectiveness.

In sum the abilities related to civic learning and engagement organize the learning of the students and the daily work of faculty and staff in profound ways throughout the College.

Recently, revisions in the ability statements used to design learning and assess student growth are prompting faculty to develop new curricular elements and improve existing ones. Further, as the primarily commuter student body continues to be challenged to find time and pathways for deeper civic learning and engagement, the College needs to better assist them to reflect on their goals as learners and commitments as citizens, to show them new ways to become active in meaningful ways and reflect on their role as future leaders. These situations shape the College's approach to participation in the Civic Learning Cluster.
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Proposed Activities to be Funded as Part of the Cluster

Alverno College is focusing its proposed project on: Involving Women in Civic Life in New Ways. The College has two main goals for this project.

The first to continue the curricular evolution in the area of educating women for civic life. This involves implementing a number of diverse program initiatives that require additional resources for their fruition and that, taken together, represent a qualitative improvement in the College's educational practice.

Second, the College will place emphasis on better preparing for effective leadership in future additional civic learning clusters. This involves deriving lessons from on-going experience with transforming its campus and collaborating to foster civic education, sharing these experiences with current cluster colleagues, learning from those colleagues' experiences, and helping develop processes to foster genuine collaborative learning among future cluster members.

Specifically the College proposed the following activities related to each goal.

Curriculum development. Faculty and staff are continually evaluating the effectiveness of teaching and assessment strategies for the key abilities related to civic involvement and participation. Recently the statements of some of these abilities have been revised, and tentative plans for implementing changes across the curriculum around these new statements have been proposed. The proposed Civic Learning Cluster project will review and reshape several specific learning experiences, assessments and program features central to qualitatively improving civic learning across the curriculum. The tasks include:

Reviewing the current internship seminar, taken by most students in the Weekday program, and the range of currently available internship sites, in order to improve the civic dimension of the seminar content and increase the number of site opportunities in the political or public affairs realm.
Working with teachers of new students to better integrate the teaching and assessment of new definitions of the effective citizenship and global perspectives abilities into required beginning level courses in both the Weekday and Weekend programs.
Completing the development of a new required course for all juniors in the Weekday program, entitled "Global Effective Citizenship," including an external assessment component, and teaching it for the first time.
Working with teachers of intermediate and advanced students to strengthen the civic dimension of various majors, through a greater use of recent materials from the Valuing Department on decision-making in community affairs, and from the Social Interaction Department on cultural diversity and cultural competence.
Exploring how to more effectively coordinate community-based research projects frequently conducted by advanced-level students and faculty; this includes studying the feasibility of a Center for Community Development.

Leadership for Additional Civic Learning Clusters. Alverno College proposes to bring its experience transforming its campus through creating coherent, integrated curricula to the Cluster Project members. Further, the College hopes to explore the role of documentable collaborative learning in institutional transformation. To pursue thisparticular goal, the College proposes:

1. Drawing on the findings presented in its forthcoming book, Learning That Lasts, the Collegewill study the nature of collaborative learning in greater depth. This will include a review of relevant literature and a reflective analysis of their extensive experience working with other colleges and universities in a large number of prior teams, consortia, and networks.

2. The College will share the results of this inquiry with Cluster Project team members during Cluster Project gatherings; develop workshop structures to encourage the probing of these ideas on all future cluster campuses; and elucidate some Collaborative Learning Action Principles.

These interconnected projects are all beyond the initial stage of development. They all involve systematic, campus-wide discussion about how best to organize institutional resources in support of improving students' abilities to contribute to civic life. The College's ongoing assessment processes for both individual student learning and program evaluation will be directed at analyzing the effectiveness of their work. Participation in the Cluster will assist the College to advance projects even further, evaluate them more thoroughly, and thus better consolidate its overall process of institutional renewal.
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Expected Student Learning and Institutional Outcomes

The College anticipates that the proposed curricular changes should significantly improve student learning and performance in regard to its expectations of Valuing, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, and Global Perspectives abilities as already defined in the ability-based curriculum.

Alverno expects to learn more about institutional transformation through collaboration with colleagues on campus and within the cluster, and to systematically track the learning which occurs. Concretely, this means the College expects to be better able to identify the learning associated with collaboration per se, and identify organizational patterns and practices that foster it. These findings could then be widely shared and applied in the design of activities with new cluster members could participate in to deepen transformational learning on their campuses.

Leadership Team

Project Director: Stephen Sharkey, Department of Social Science; Chair of the Behavioral Sciences Division
Russell Brooker, Department of Business and Management; Coordinator, Effective Citizenship Department
Annette Garcia, Department of Nursing; Member of the Effective Citizenship Department
Kathleen O'Brien, Vice-President for Academic Affairs
John Savagian, Department of History; Coordinator, Global Perspectives Department
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