second year - baylor

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

12

34

THE DOUBLE-HELIX Building the DNA for a Great College Experience

FIRST YEAR

SECOND YEAR

THIRD YEAR

FOURTH YEAR

ENGAGED LEARNING

CURRICULUM/MAJOR

The Double Helix: Building the DNA for a Great College Experience By Elizabeth Vardaman

Every now and again an article on higher education—and the accompanying

images― offer compelling reading and hit a mark that resonates for a long time. One such

piece published in Liberal Education, the journal of the Association of American Colleges

and Universities, has had a three-‐year shelf-‐life for me so far.1 I am hopeful that aspects of

that essay and its double-‐helix image will also be meaningful to you, as a University 1000

leader, and possibly to your University 1000 students as well.

The article and the double-‐helix illustration advocate a total learning experience during a

university education that will intentionally and purposefully weave the formal classroom

experience into life’s larger laboratory. Students, their professors, advisers, student life

leaders, and others may collaborate to design an intertwining of academic courses with a

wide variety of service learning and other activities—just as the image in the article

suggests (see attached essay and graphics). Such collaborations could result in a

progression or interaction that is both thoughtful and exciting. Students invest themselves

in introductory-‐level courses and opportunities in their first term of their first year here,

then commit to increasingly complex and interesting extracurricular activities

incrementally as they move into more advanced intellectual work as sophomores, juniors,

and seniors.

Both strands are very important—the major and the co-‐major. And the double-‐helix

profiles that students create are unique to themselves alone as they weave their classroom

experiences into campus, community, state, federal and international connections in

infinite varieties of ways—all to good effect for them and for society.

For example, one International Studies student built her own double-‐helix, noting that

she became so interested in the International Justice Mission during her freshman year at

1 Jeremy Haefner and Deborah L. Ford, “The Double Helix: A Purposeful Pathway to an Intentional and Transformational Liberal Education,” Liberal Education, Vol 96, No.2, Spring 2010, pp. 50-55.

Baylor that, working with Student Life, she and a small band of friends initiated founding a

university chapter of IJM here. That program provided her exciting opportunities to learn

leadership skills and to enhance her communication skills, as she became president of the

campus IJM chapter and as she volunteered to be a speaker at many IJM’s campus events.

She applied for internships in the State Dept. and also applied for the Truman Scholarship.

Each swirling of her “co-‐major” activities with her academic major deepened her certainty

that International Studies was the right place for her, and the natural trajectory of her

double-‐helix experience made it easy for her to see that one of her next steps would be to

prepare to take the LSAT while also taking advanced courses in her field. She was accepted

to a top law school that has trained her to become a voice at home or abroad for those who

have no one advocating for them.

Another student, majoring in Biology and History, minoring in Chemistry, became

involved with Hospice as a volunteer during her first year here. Throughout her

undergraduate program she sat with patients, made gifts, delivered flowers, baked cookies

or did anything that was needed. She also became a writing tutor on campus, enhancing

her own skills while she helped others. Her study abroad experience in Europe helped her

realize that healthcare in Scandinavia might offer great insights into advances that she

could make someday as a physician serving senior citizens. She was also active in AMSA

(premedical student service organization). When she decided to apply for a Fulbright to

study gerontology in Finland before going to medical school, she had a strong profile that

showed the creative interaction between her coursework and her extracurricular values.

Perhaps a junior or senior you know to be maximizing these principles could come to

your University 1000 class to discuss his or her own “double-‐helix” story. Or the students

could create an imaginary timeline for themselves, brainstorming with one another what

kinds of activities might be ideal complements to their classroom interests. (The Baylor

variation on the double-‐helix is provided for that purpose.)

Students have been doing this sort of creative planning since long before Haefner and

Ford applied Crick and Watson’s DNA image to the college experience. I will never forget—

nor will our community—one of our sophomores who decided he wanted to make a

contribution to the conversation between Waco and Baylor, as he moved forward to fulfill a

Political Science major. In 2002 he and a small band of friends designed and created One

Book, One Waco, a program that has become institutionalized in our community over the

past decade. In the process of doing that, he learned teamwork, leadership, communication

and critical thinking skills—both inside and beyond the classroom. That student learned

how to think outside the box, commit himself to citizenship and service, and turn big

dreams into dynamic realities here. So perhaps we should not be surprised that he then

took a law degree at Harvard and is now an attorney in the US Dept. of Justice.

Many students figure out who they are and answer the question “what is worth

wanting” while they are here. Such accomplishments begin in the first-‐year experiences

that weave the worlds of mind and heart together. Conversations about “double-‐helix”

strategies invite students to take another look at their own calling, their own opportunities

to build an undergraduate DNA that is the foundation of much that they will then become

as they move on into the world of work, graduate programs, service, missions, and

citizenship.

Elizabeth Vardaman is Associate Dean & Special Academic Projects for Arts & Sciences and Associate Director of the Honors Program

50 L I B E R A L ED U C A T I O N SP R I N G 2010

The disciplinary major has long served as thebackbone of higher education. Every studenthas at least one major, and each major pre-scribes a program of study that is supported bya series of courses both within the field andfrom the general education curriculum. Yet re-lying solely on the formal academic curricu-

lum to achieve theoutcomes of a liberal

education shortchanges the total academicexperience available to students. A trulytransformational liberal education considersthe totality of students’ lives as the broadpalette on which the learning experience isfully realized. The academic major plays acentral role, but the learning that takes placeoutside the classroom is, and should be, a crit-ical player in this experience as well. In Learn-ing Reconsidered: A Campus-Wide Focus on theStudent Experience, the landmark joint publi-cation of the National Association of StudentPersonnel Administrators and the AmericanCollege Personnel Association, the authorsnote that “a transformative education repeat-edly exposes students to multiple opportuni-ties for intentional learning through theformal academic curriculum, student life, col-laborative cocurricular programming, commu-nity-based, and global experiences” (Keeling2004, 3). Transformational learning centerson the notion that, with increasing emphasison learner-centric pedagogies, the completelearning environment includes not just the

academic core but all learning experiences,especially those that happen outside the class-room. In essence, the entire campus is a learn-ing environment that should be intentionallytapped for the total learning experience.

A robust partnership between academic af-fairs and student affairs is essential to fosteringtransformational learning. Faculty membersand student affairs personnel should “work to-gether to complete conceptual mapping of thestudent learning, collaboratively identifyingactivities inside and outside the classroomthat focus upon and contribute to specificallydefined learning objectives” (Keeling 2004,24). Our premise in this article is that, in or-der to strengthen this partnership and servestudents in a twenty-first-century environ-ment, the best approach would be to provideeach student with a compass, a map, and aroute through the vast array of available out-of-the-classroom learning experiences. The fi-nal destination would be marked by thestudent’s achievement of the essential learn-ing outcomes of a liberal education.

The co-majorThe compass, map, and route would comprisean individualized student pathway, or “co-ma-jor.” It would be the task of student affairs toprovide a structure by which each student ismentored through the co-major and assessedfor the desired learning outcomes. The total-ity of this effort would essentially be a com-pact between student affairs and each student,formalized as the co-major. While each co-major would be uniquely designed around theindividual student’s learning style and desiredoutcomes, student affairs personnel would

PE

RS

PE

CT

IV

ES

JEREMY HAEFNER is senior vice president for acade-mic affairs and provost at Rochester Institute ofTechnology, and DEBORAH L. FORD is chancellorof the University of Wisconsin–Parkside.

TheDoubleHelixA Purposeful Pathway to an Intentional and Transformational Liberal Education

J E R E M Y H A E F N E R A N D D E B O R A H L . F O R D

A robust partnershipbetween academicaffairs and studentaffairs is essentialto fostering transformationallearning

Copyright 2010 by the Association of American Colleges and Universities

University of Wisconsin–Parkside


PE

RS

PE

CT

IV

ES identify certain themes—or regions within

the student learning map—to aggregate theco-majors. For example, student affairs mightidentify the themes of leadership, civic andsocial responsibility, global awareness, ethics, andsustainability as co-majors. Each student wouldthen pick at least one theme and devise a co-major to achieve the desired learning outcomesthrough programs offered by student affairs.

Imagine, for example, that a student choosesthe theme of leadership for his or her co-major.Working with this student, student affairs per-sonnel would devise a plan (the route) thatwould guide him or her through specific stu-dent affairs programs to achieve the desiredoutcomes within the specific context of leader-ship. The student might start by getting in-volved in residence halls and student clubsduring the freshman year. These experienceswould expose him or her to the preliminaryaspects of leadership. In the sophomore year,the student might add an intramural sport tothe learning experience and be guided by thecoach and the team in exploring the impor-tant role leadership plays in sports. The stu-dent might, in the junior year, become astudent government representative and cometo realize the nuances of leadership withinthis program. Finally, he or she might run forstudent body president, a consummate leader-ship experience. Throughout this co-major,student affairs personnel would interact,coach, mentor, and assess the student’s progress.

The double helixThe metaphor of the double helix enables us tovisualize the proposed relationship between themajor and the co-major; on one side of the he-lix is the traditional academic major, while theother strand represents the co-major (see fig.1). Each student’s helix would be unique to hisor her own transformational learning experi-ence. In a sense, one can think of the doublehelix as a ladder that the student ascends whileprogressing toward the desired learning out-comes. The “rungs” of the double helix ladderrepresent the programs shared by both the ma-jor and the co-major, and each rung is con-nected to the major and the co-major strands.An ascending spiral, the double helix also rep-resents the expansion of experiences and an in-creasing level of cognitive complexity. At eachturn of the spiral, students engage subjects inmultiple ways (Leskes and Miller 2006).

While the spiraling strands representing theacademic major and the student co-majorform the backbone to the transformationalstudent learning totality, the rungs of the doublehelix critically represent the collaborativepartnerships between academic affairs andstudent affairs. In essence, the rungs representprograms that both divisions support and uti-lize. Moreover, the rungs represent activitiesin which one division might take the lead inorder to distribute the workload more effi-ciently. For example, one rung might repre-sent internships as a learning opportunity forthe student; academic affairs might be the locusof the internship program, with student affairsplaying a supporting role. Other examples ofthese shared programs include freshman ori-entation, career placement, mentoring and


“Major”Discipline-based

“Co-major”Theme-based

Figure 1. The double helix

To Ins

titu

tion

al L

earn

ing

Out

com

es


advising, student clubs, under-graduate research, and servicelearning.

To further demonstrate thepotential for collaboration,we’ll use the example of servicelearning. This program mayserve as a key component ofthe academic major in, say, po-litical science, and it may also be a key com-ponent in a co-major thematically focused oncivic responsibility. Both academic affairs andstudent affairs would support this program ofservice learning. The political science depart-ment would identify the academic learningoutcomes associated with the service-learningproject and deploy appropriate assessmentmethods. Likewise, student affairs personnelwould identify outcomes relevant to the co-major and conduct appropriate assessment ac-tivities. Academic affairs might provide afaculty mentor, while the student affairs per-sonnel might work with the student to iden-tify an appropriate service opportunity. Boththe faculty mentor and student affairs person-nel would work with the sponsor to provide arich learning experience for the student.

By increasing cooperation between studentaffairs and academic affairs, the identificationof such programmatic “rungs” could also leadto increased efficiency. The assessment of aprogram for which the use of student portfo-lios is appropriate, for example, could more ef-ficiently be implemented by either academicaffairs or student affairs, rather than by bothdivisions separately.

Assessment and student learning outcomesThe entire double helix and co-major structureshould be designed around assessment andstudent learning outcomes. The desired out-comes should determine the plan for the co-major, which, in turn, should determine theassessment methods used. Moreover, the stu-dent and his or her mentor should, together,develop and use a rubric to ensure intention-ality in learning as well as to assess progress inachieving the desired learning outcomes.

Effective assessment tools for the co-majorinclude student portfolios, capstone projects,project reviews conducted by other students,case-study exercises, and national tests. Port-folios can provide longitudinal evidence of

student learning and develop-ment, for example, and cap-stone projects can be effectivein assessing how well a studentintegrates learning, concepts,and skills into a project. Facultyand student affairs mentorscould play a central role in as-sessment by observing student

behavior in various settings throughout themajor and co-major. Students themselves couldbe engaged in assessment by reviewing and cri-tiquing peer projects and providing feedback.

Many student learning outcome modelscould be used to support the development ofco-majors. In Learning Reconsidered, for example,the primary student learning outcomes iden -tified are cognitive complexity; knowledgeacquisition, integration, and application; humanitarianism; civic engagement; interper-sonal and intrapersonal competence; practicalcompetence; and persistence and academicachievement (Keeling 2004). College Learningfor the New Global Century identified five essen-tial learning outcomes: knowledge of humancultures and the physical and natural worldthrough study in the sciences and mathematics,social sciences, humanities, histories, languages,and the arts; intellectual and practical skills,including inquiry and analysis, critical andcreative thinking, written and oral communi-cation, quantitative literacy, information liter-acy, teamwork, and problem solving; personaland social responsibility; and integrativelearning (AAC&U 2007). A model devel-oped as part of the Wabash National Study ofLiberal Arts Education identifies seven studentlearning outcomes: integration of learning,

SP R I N G 2010 L I B E R A L ED U C A T I O N 53

PE

RS

PE

CT

IV

ES

The metaphor of the double helix

enables us to visualizethe proposed

relationship between the major and the co-major

Rochester Instituteof Technology


PE

RS

PE

CT

IV

ES


Activities and experiences: Student Learning Outcomes:

Knowledge/ContentIntellectual andPractical Skills Integrative Learning

InterculturalEffectiveness

First Year

Participate in a youth group

Assessment: Journal

Focus: How is civicresponsibility interwovenwith the youth group?

Focus: Reflect on how thisactivity can serve toimprove communicationskills.

Attend campus lectures about a nonprofit group

Assessment: Journal

Focus: What connectionsdid you observe betweenthese lectures, civicresponsibility, and culturesother than your own?

Sophomore

Service learning project;

Assessment: Supervisor observations; journal

Focus: How is your service learning projectconnected to civic responsibility and to your academic major?

Focus: How did the student use his or her com-munication skills in this project? Were they intentional learners about these communica-tion skills?

Focus: What were the key project managementstrengths and weaknessesof the student in this pro-ject? Are any of theseunique to service learningor to civic responsibility?

Focus: Did this projectcross various cultures? If so, were there thingsyou’ve learned at the uni-versity that could beapplied in this setting? If not, why not?

Attend lectures with civic theme

Assessment: Journal

Focus: What connectionsdid you observe betweenthese lectures, civicresponsibility, and culturesother than your own?

Junior

Connect academic major to civic responsibility through project with faculty member

Assessment: Paper graded by faculty member

Focus: Identify the con-nections between the content of the major and this project. How did you apply what youlearned as content to this real-life setting?

Focus: The writing of the paper is directly associated with the communication outcome.

Focus: Describe how project management skills are used in paper writing.

Internship with civic theme

Assessment: Supervisor observations

Focus: Connect the con-tent of your major withthis internship and civicresponsibility.

Focus: Did communicationskills play a key role in thisinternship?

Focus: Were there multi-cultural aspects of thisinternship? If so, whatwere the key things youlearned about working in this environment?

Senior

Enroll in leadership course

Assessment: Course grade

Focus: Where did coursecontent connect to theclass project?

Focus: Explain how com-munication was a centraltheme of the course and theproject you worked on.

Focus: What skills did you learn from the class project that pertain tocivic responsibility?

Focus: Were there multicultural aspects of this project?

Figure 2. Sample civic responsibility program plan


inclination to inquire and lifelong learning,effective reasoning and problem solving,moral character, intercultural effectiveness,leadership, and well-being (King et al. 2007).

A co-major designed around the theme ofcivic responsibility, for example, would allowa student to achieve the campus and studentaffairs learning outcomes through a programplan focused on civic responsibility. Severalacademic majors are particularly compatiblewith this co-major, including criminal justice,political science, religious studies, and visualand performing arts—to name but a few. Thestudent’s mentor might be a student affairs staffmember, a faculty member, or a communitymember (e.g., from a nonprofit organizationsuch as Habitat for Humanity). The mentorand the student would work together to devisea civic responsibility program plan, whichwould consist of out-of-the-classroom experi-ences, as well as an alignment matrix. The ex-periences could draw from a variety of programsand sources on and off campus. For example,the student may already be involved with anonprofit organization, and his or her experi-ence could count toward the achievement ofthe learning outcomes. The alignment matrixwould explicitly connect the experience withthe student learning outcomes in order to en-able the student to be more intentional abouthis or her learning through the co-major. Thematrix would also identify specific assessmentmethods, and the overall plan would includerubrics for measuring performance. Figure 2shows a sample plan.

Logistics If every student is to have both an academicmajor and a student affairs co-major, the logis-tics for determining programs and pathways,assessing the achievement of learning out-comes, and providing a continuous improve-ment process are critical. Student affairs,working with appropriate student governancegroups, should identify a small number ofbroad themes for the co-major that reflect theunique nature of the college or university.

The foundation of the co-major itself is anindividualized plan or pathway developedjointly by the student and a specifically trainedmentor—a student affairs staff member, a fac-ulty member, an advanced undergraduate orgraduate student, an alumnus, or a communitymember. Ideally, this mentoring relationship

would continue throughout the student’s under -graduate experience. The plan itself shouldinclude a variety of learning experiences, andone of the designated student affairs themesshould run through the co-major plan and thevarious experiences. These experiences needto be tied to the learning outcomes and assessedwith regard to what the student has actuallylearned. An electronic portfolio should housethe plan, the student-assessed work, and thedocumented interactions between the studentand his or her mentor. The portfolio couldalso serve as a cocurricular “transcript,” pro-viding strong evidence to potential employersthat the student has accomplished intentionallearning far beyond the traditional major.

Conclusion Retention issues, a focus on learning out-comes, accountability, and other factors havecreated an acute need for new models for estab-lishing closer partnerships between academicaffairs and student affairs. Institutions thatstrive to build such partnerships will be wellpositioned to provide a twenty-first-centuryliberal education. We believe that the co-majorproposed here—when connected intention-ally to the traditional academic major—pro-vides the second strand of a double helix thatrepresents a purposeful pathway for achievingthe essential learning outcomes of a liberaleducation. ■■

To respond to this article,e-mail [email protected],with the authors’ names on the subject line.

REFERENCESAssociation of American Colleges and Universities.

2007. College learning for the new global century: A report from the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise. Washing-ton, DC: Association of American Colleges andUniversities.

Keeling, R., ed. 2004. Learning reconsidered: A campus-wide focus on the student experience. Washington,DC: National Association of Student PersonnelAdministrators and the American College PersonnelAssociation.

King, P. M., M. K. Brown, N. K. Lindsay, and J. R.Vanhecke. 2007. Liberal arts student learning out-comes: An integrated approach. About Campus 12(4): 2–9.

Leskes, A., and R. Miller. 2006. Purposeful pathways:Helping students achieve key learning outcomes.Washington, DC: Association of American Collegesand Universities.

SP R I N G 2010 L I B E R A L ED U C A T I O N 55

PE

RS

PE

CT

IV

ES


second year - baylor

Documents