Rote teaching and learning have their place, but not in a music course and an art and design course in which two dozen students at Queensborough Community College (QCC) enrolled together. In addition to a shift toward increasing cultural relevance in their courses, QCC began to explore a learner-centered pedagogy that would better respond to the…

In this article, the author, director of Watauga College and residential learning communities at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, shares her experience dealing with first year college students who are taking medication to manage depression, anxiety, or attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders. She stresses that this is a…

A multiyear effort to understand and improve the practice of learning communities across North America has revealed encouraging trends and areas in which work should continue. The authors asked fifty-six educators involved in the work to write and talk about the state of learning communities. The authors wanted to learn how learning community…

U.S. Supreme Court opinions have left some doors open for institutions to build the kinds of diverse student populations that are known to enrich the learning of all students. But simply inviting diverse students through those doors is not doing nearly enough. In this article, the authors detail the problem of educational diversity and explore why…

As the 21st century turns five and a half and looks forward to summer vacation, the higher education community seems poised to undertake an endeavor of epic proportions: the remodeling of the American approach to college student learning. To begin building structures and designing strategies for 21st century education, the "Greater…

Old Dominion University's distance learning program, called TELETECHNET, brings the main-campus college experience to geographically distant learners at sites across Virginia and as far away as the state of Washington, as well as to military personnel on Navy bases, carriers, and submarines. In an interesting turnabout, the Summer Institute for…

America's current generation of adolescents promises to be not only one of the country's most complex but also one of the country's largest, rivaling the baby boomer generation in size and consumer power. Understanding the challenges and positive experiences that these students bring with them to college campuses is important for educators as they…

In this article, the authors present two stories that depict the best and worst of times experienced by today's community college students. Within these narratives are both vestiges of the past--pieces that some colleges have yet to fully discard--and exemplars of a potentially brighter, more engaging future. While they are fictitious, these…

When George Mason University's Johnson Center opened a decade ago, it was on the leading edge of architectural design and innovative thinking about spaces for learning. Over time, the building has retained many of its revolutionary aspects even as it has accepted encroachments of conventionality. With its four floors and central atrium, twenty-two…

Institutions across the U.S. have designed and implemented first-year experience programs that have gone a long way toward affecting student success. Retention rates have increased at some institutions as a result of these interventions, and first-year students often get the support they need to negotiate the transition into college. Now many…

In this article, the author recounts his experience teaching MU-241, Music Harmony and Counterpoint, which is a capstone course for the music electronics program--a two-year associate of arts and sciences degree--at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York. The class, a difficult one, combines harmony, counterpoint, and piano,…

College support staff members often have an important, if sometimes unrecognized, impact on students' lives. Regardless of their job responsibilities, these individuals generally care deeply about the academic environment and the institution in general. When these individuals demonstrate to others how much they care, they are helping to build a…

Imagine the opportunity to design a college from scratch. Structures for collaborative learning and student engagement could take any form. The vision could embody the community's expectations, and the classrooms could contain flexible furniture, multimedia stations, and floor-to-ceiling white boards. The library could also accommodate learning…

In some organizations, coming to a consensus about what members' work is collectively about might be fairly straightforward. At a comprehensive public university serving more than thirty thousand students, reaching such a consensus is, more often than not, a real challenge. A tradition of faculty and staff autonomy, full schedules, competition for…

Promoting student learning can be difficult, even at a liberal arts and sciences college where faculty members are passionate about it. The authors have experienced these challenges at the College of Mount St. Joseph in the last five years as they have moved collegewide efforts more intentionally toward facilitation of learning. The College of…