College Project Finale

When I last left off with this project, the team of college instructors had designed four assignments that would facilitate the students answering the driving question, how are we alike, how are we different and how have we worked with those differences to become an actual community?


Four weeks have passed since this last posting and in that time there has been additional refinement of the driving question as the students' interest drove the direction of their inquiry. The developmental education students sharpened the question further, shaping it to better reflect what it meant for them to try school again, this time at the college level, when they hadn't had a lot of positive experiences with school in the past. Their further refinement resulted in the final question, how did we feel when we started, how do we feel now, and why have we stayed? This change of emphasis was partially in response to the unsettling experience of losing five of their peers to attrition.

The assignments shifted along with the question and due to the short time frame they thought it better to divide the assignments by task. The group, led by their reading and writing instructor, crafted a Group Resume to identify their strengths, talents, and backgrounds (college success/reading and writing). They also translated some of their findings into graphs (math). Then they designed a set of interview questions (reading and writing). Then two students conducted all the interviews (college success-communication).

Two other students videotaped and then edited the film so that each student's response was viewed in succession after each question was asked. The results of the interviews led the students to wonder about those who had dropped out so they decided they wanted to call them and interview them over the phone using the same set of questions (college success-communication).

The two students who videotaped then worked under the tutelage of the campus AV/multi-media expert (accessing campus and community resources) to edit and combine all the pieces. The written pieces were inserted into Powerpoint and all the slides, music, videotaped interviews and photos were blended into one "movie."

A finding of the interviews was that those who had remained in the learning community felt the support of their peers in a way that allowed them to persevere when the going became stressful or overwhelming. They mentioned that when they started school, they never expected to engage with their peers as the project/learning community model required them to do. They talked about how they'd felt on orientation day when I led them in a team building session, noting one activity in particular about the behavior of geese. They learned not only about the benefits of flying in formation, and rotating the lead, but also how other geese will drop out of formation with an injured bird until it recovers, or send decoys out ahead of the flock to divert the attention of hunters so that the rest of the geese can safely take off. This resonated in such a powerful way with these students, many of whom were underprepared for college because of challenging life circumstances, that reflecting back, they realized that those who stayed had reached out to others and had accepted the help of their peers when it was extended. This lead to the final product of their integrated project, suggested by one of the students when she realized the power of her peers in her ability to stay with the program. She brought in a book of qualities, personificaitons. After sharing it with her peers, each student paired up with another and wrote a personification of a personal quality that their partner possessed. They closed their presentation reading these personifications about each other out loud to the invited audience. They were powerful and beautiful and resulted in no small amount of eye dabbing and nose blowing from the invited guests and faculty.

The instructional team debriefed today and while we came up with lots of ideas for how to improve our process next time, all in all, it was a first effort the entire team was enormously proud of.