Welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week:
- Steven describes what Georgetown University is doing to keep its seniors engaged and help them adjust to life after college.
- Dan points you to some recent research on the role of emotion in teaching and learning.
- We share a reader’s reflection about how a trip to the store led to the creation of a new kind of assignment.
Making the Transition
A few years ago, staff members at Georgetown University noticed that their seniors already had one foot out the door. A third of them were attending the university part-time by their final year, and another third had earned enough credits to do the same. How could Georgetown keep seniors engaged and on campus?
Administrators at the university’s Red House, a laboratory that cooks up new courses and curricula to rethink higher education, learned that the part-timers were dropping credits to pursue professional skills. With student feedback, the Red House created Bridge Courses, optional one-credit, pass/fail miniclasses made just for graduating seniors. They seek to tie coursework and extracurricular activities together, and to unify a student’s campus experience.
What began as a pilot with a half-dozen instructors and 72 students has, over three years, more than doubled in size, said Duncan Peacock, a project coordinator at the Red House.
Most Bridge courses meet once a week for seven weeks, and fall under two broad themes: personal and professional development, which help build skills like negotiation, interviewing, and goal-setting; and “enduring questions,” in which students revisit texts and themes from Georgetown’s core curriculum.
A student, for example, who might’ve taken “Theology After Freud,” a full course taught by Terrence Reynolds, an associate professor of theology, could return to the material as a senior in “Freud and the Good Life,” Reynolds’s one-credit Bridge Course. Students have said that revisiting their old coursework encouraged them to read the texts and think more deeply about how they’ll apply them to their lives after college, Peacock said.
The “good life” language may sound familiar. All the Bridge Courses share some element of identity formation, focusing on character and a student’s place in the world, Peacock said — a little like the life-lesson blockbusters at the University of Notre Dame, “God and the Good Life,” and at Yale University, “Psychology and the Good Life,” also known as the “happiness course.” (Some professors, it’s worth noting, have grumbled about “positive psychology” and “self-help” courses since they were revived in the late 1990s, for much the same reasons that they grumbled about the Red House itself.)
In other words, Peacock said, the courses tap into Georgetown’s roots as a liberal-arts institution, helping students understand who they are in the world. In one Bridge Course, for instance, students work with a career adviser to learn the basics of cover letters and mock interviews. And they have “existential” discussions about competition, pressure, and prestige, said Samantha Levine, a project manager at the Red House.
Georgetown is hardly the first to offer senior-targeted minicourses, even ones aimed at well-being. Plenty of colleges, like Carnegie Mellon and Rutgers Universities, offer wellness- and career-oriented courses for seniors. And virtually all four-year colleges have senior capstone programs, according to the University of South Carolina’s National Survey of Senior Capstone Experiences. But many are disciplinary projects based within departments.
Some scholars have argued that narrow focus can be a problem. Many seniors feel a loss of community as they pull away from campus life and occupy themselves with finishing coursework. But only a small portion of senior-year-experience programs emphasize life skills and personal adjustments.
Georgetown says it’s targeting both work and life skills, and says it’s the first to round these courses up in a “suite.” It’s “a whole model for how we can order these in a systematic way,” Peacock said.
Crucial to that model is a sense of community. “Georgetown is very siloed in the way that it offers courses,” Levine said. The Red House has broken some of those walls this year by widening who can teach a Bridge Course. Given some training, career counselors, advising deans, adjuncts, and chaplains can submit a proposal. The courses that result connect members of the campus who may have never met before.
Lots of students, finally meeting peers from outside of their disciplines and free of the university’s “competitive” grade pressures, Levine said, have told them, “This is the first time I’ve ever taken a really small, intimate seminar before. This is the first time I’ve really had a dialogue with a faculty member like this.”
