This project report presents a multidisciplinary Faculty Learning Community model to foster civic engagement in STEM classes. It focused on first-year Chemistry, Math, and Scientific Inquiry courses and incorporated Academic Service Learning in a project to build solar cell phone chargers for a school in Puerto Rico recovering from the effects of…

Interdisciplinary pedagogy can enhance Introduction to Psychology curricula. We developed an interdisciplinary project to make meaning in a learning community (LC) clustering Introduction to Psychology with Introduction to Criminal Justice. Our purpose is to describe the project as a model and report on students' evaluations of the project and…

Students majoring in non-STEM fields often identify introductory biology courses as irrelevant and overly rigorous. Resistance to enroll in a required general education science course, coupled with negative attitudes toward the subject, can adversely affect the academic performance of students; this can especially be present in students from…

In a case study of a Canadian urban high school, with mainly Aboriginal students that were non-traditional learners, teachers reported that student-centered learning within a culturally-responsive atmosphere contributed to educational success. The school and teachers provided wholistic, experiential, and relational instruction, deeply-steeped in…

Charrettes have a long history of use in medical, architectural, and planning professions. An extensive literature search found little application of the charrette model implemented to advance, support, and identify transdisciplinarity (TD) research, transdisciplinary teaming models (TDM), transdisciplinary learning (TDL) supporting transformative…

Creating meaningful professional development opportunities for general education faculty can be particularly challenging at professionally-focused institutions where teaching liberal arts courses is sometimes viewed merely as a service requirement. Committing to sustained professional development for general education faculty can lead to…

The Transformative Pedagogy Project (TPP) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), is an interdisciplinary and intergenerational learning community seeking to develop ways of knowing and ways of being that do not only augment individual and collective understanding of social structures and social relations, but also transform them…

Among the lessons to take away from COVID-19 in the K-12 sector, one is this: we can never again say that schools haven't changed in a hundred years. After a year in which all schools upended the status quo to support students' learning and wellbeing during a pandemic, the most vocal critics of outdated school systems must acknowledge that even…

This "Practices from the Field" article describes the rationale and operationalization of an interdisciplinary team-taught first-year inquiry seminar and learning community program at a large predominantly White research institution. The authors both serve as faculty members in the College of Education and Human Development and teach in…

This volume offers the first comprehensive guide to how high-impact practices (HIPs) are being implemented in online environments and how they can be adjusted to meet the needs of online learners. This multi-disciplinary approach will assist faculty and administrators to effectively implement HIPs in distance education courses and online programs.…

How do teachers and schools create meaningful learning experiences for students with diverse skills, abilities, and cultures? How can teachers authentically assess the learning of their students and build on their strengths and interests in ways that enrich the larger community? How can schools become places where everyone is learning from each…

Many educators have created successful innovative models but have had difficulty sustaining, re-creating, and scaling these models. Classrooms and schools characterized by student-centered learning practices typically deviate from the norms of transmission teaching and the many structures and procedures that David Tyack and Larry Cuban called the…

One of the mysteries of education reform is how leaders and educators can successfully instantiate, sustain, and spread student-centered pedagogical practices from a few schools to many others. Advocates for "deeper learning" grapple with this mystery as they seek to transform teaching and learning to prepare students to meet the demands…

This case study tracks the application of project-based learning (PBL) during four separate college terms at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon. Each term follows a different learning community of first-term college students enrolled in a program of developmental education (DE), reading, writing, math, and college survival and success…

Each edition of the IDRA Newsletter strives to provide many different perspectives on the issues in education topics discussed and to define its significance in the state and national dialogue. This issue focuses on Student Leadership and Engagement and includes: (1) Project Based Learning for Student Success--Teaching Across Content Areas for…