Learning Communities/Courses
In New Century College's Integrative
Studies program, students and faculty collaborate as learners and teachers
in specially designed courses called learning communities. The
teacher Peter Senge defined a learning community as:
A diverse group of people working
together to nurture and sustain a knowledge-creating system...The
members of a learning community are thus stewards of a knowledge-creating
process, helping one another enhance their capacity for effective
action and reflecting on and conceptualizing their evolving understanding.
In NCC, learning communities are:
- interdisciplinary - they combine subjects generally taught as
individual courses into one integrated course
- team-taught - they integrate two or more faculty and their disciplinary
perspectives
- theme-based - they tackle a complex contemporary intellectual inquiry
from several different perspectives
- collaborative - they offer both faculty and students the chance
to learn from, and teach, each other
NCC learning communities structure
the fragmented learning many students acquire while working their way
through a series of unconnected courses. They
promote the active participation of students in their own learning.
And they foster intellectual and practical interaction between students,
faculty and the wider local community.
Finally, many NCC Integrative Studies students build on learning community
collaborations to work individually with faculty and community mentors,
to rewrite their definitions of education through internships and other
experiential learning and to explore potential post-graduation careers.
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