A number of universities in the United Kingdom (UK) have launched institution-wide initiatives recently to embed inquiry and research more firmly into the student experience. Among these, the Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences (CILASS) led a five-year development program at The University of Sheffield (TUOS) between…

Inquiry-guided learning (IGL) has widespread appeal in higher education as a suite of teaching strategies that promotes learning through students' increasingly independent investigation of questions, problems, and issues using the methods of inquiry of the disciplines. Framed as especially appropriate for research universities, IGL has been…

The University of Gloucestershire, located in the southwest of the United Kingdom, is a small university with approximately 7,500 full-time students and 400 teaching staff. It has three faculties, all with a professional or applied focus: (1) Media, Art, and Technology; (2) Business, Education, and Professional Studies; and (3) Applied Sciences.…

In 2006, Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) launched a major initiative, the Top 25 Project, to embed inquiry-guided learning (IGL) into its largest-enrollment courses across the university. These are generally entry-level classes and thus affect many students: 75 percent of incoming students on its main campus in 2010 were in at least one Top 25…

The term "assessment" sends shivers down academic spines. For faculty, it signals marching orders from external parties who may or may not appreciate the subtle and not always quantifiable value of faculty efforts. For administrators, it means the dual challenge of recalibrating internal measures to meet external mandates but also…

As a pedagogy for citizenship, academic service learning offers students the opportunity to experience and reflect on how citizens organize to bring their communities and their country closer to democracy. The three-course Democracy Project at Swarthmore College (Pennsylvania) illustrates how this approach can be developed within a college…

An introductory statistics course is a common requirement for undergraduate economics, psychology, and sociology majors. An approach to statistics that involves the effort to encourage habits of systematic, critical quantitative thinking through focusing on descriptive statistics is discussed. (MLW)

A course at Hampshire College that examines the character and history of literary natural history and surveys many of its significant American authors and works is described. Issues of the relationship between people and nature are raised and discussed in terms of current environmental debates. (MLW)

A course at Hampshire College that joins the literature and analytical approaches of anthropology with certain texts in English, American, and European literature and modern criticism is described. The problems of the relationship of observer to observed, of author to text, and of audience to text are covered. (MLW)

Librarians must help students establish basic research skills, enabling students to find their way in the pertinent indexes, bibliographies, and electronic databases. A course at Hampshire College in bibliographical instruction is described. (MLW)

A broad liberal arts curriculum coupled with basic and advanced journalism writing, editing, and theory (including law and ethics) courses is the best insurance for excellence in journalism education. A University of Kentucky plan includes establishing an exchange program with other disciplines, and requiring paired, cross-disciplinary courses.…

The integration of learning and knowing is not simply a matter of application but rather an ongoing interactive process in which both knowledge and experience are repeatedly transformed. Two models of the integration of knowledge and experience were used at Alverno College. (MLW)

Inquiry is seen as a tension among three modes of imagination. These modes are labeled creation, self-criticism, and observation. Most people do not want to inquire. They tend to cling to their beliefs about the world. Freud's theories are used in a class designed to dramatize inquiry. (MLW)

A course at Hampshire College is described that was designed to familiarize students with the progression, key junctures, and general drift of forces and events that are the political and economic history of Spanish America. (MLW)

A variety of assessment techniques to measure and document the outcomes of interdisciplinary study at the college level are examined, focusing on the contexts and problems of such assessments. Several programs are profiled, suggestions for assessment design are offered, and an annotated bibliography of information sources is presented. (MSE)