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The faculty's collaborative inquiry into learning outcomes within and
across the disciplines was a key step in initially developing the
ability-based curriculum and has remained vital to improving and
updating it. This kind of inquiry itself has a strong experiential
and deliberative base, carried out in different groupings within
the institutional community. Sharing what they are learning about
learning as they constantly modify their practice in the context
of a common program is one way that educators increase their knowledge
about how and what learning endures. Effective collaboration across
the curriculum requires faculty discourse that includes close analysis
of practice, conscious reflections on the frameworks of practice
and their critique in relation to student learning outcomes.
Formal research with its emphasis on well-defined literatures, samples,
designs, analyses, and reporting is another way of knowing about
the student as a learner and developing person and also the graduate
as performer and contributor to society. In particular, longitudinal
analysis of change in relation to curricular experiences has been
one key method for studying the learner's developing perspectives,
performance, and holistic growth. The Alverno Longitudinal Study
has been extensively supported by the
Educational Research and Evaluation office
in a way that has made it integral
to the ongoing inquiry of the College. For example, faculty interpretation
of research findings has been folded into structured interactive
processes that connect to how faculty are already raising questions
about practice and how they are developing expertise as educators.
Our experience has been that questions about curriculum become intertwined
with theories of learning and practice when pursued in the spirit
of a community of inquiry that focuses on
Learning That Lasts.
Collaborative inquiry entails interactive, participative,
and critical processes
that lead to mutual exploration of ideas and evidence. Significantly,
it has meant redefining faculty work as including multi-disciplinary
scholarship where faculty formulation of educational theory and
research leads to new insights into and out of practice. This collaborative
redefinition of faculty work requires that faculty already have
or acquire collaborative skills and habits that enable them collectively
move forward in the context of diverse voices, sources of ideas,
and evidence. For any faculty developing these skills and habits
is a lived process rather than a defined moment. Thus, the collaborative
means of carrying out scholarship into teaching, learning, and assessment
become itself an end in the making. The capacity for modes of inquiry
to foster collaborative processes becomes no less important than
what is the focus of inquiry. And since such collaboration is not
a given, the role of harmonizing diverse perspectives becomes a
key institutional role and task for unlocking collective potential.
Such leadership happens at all levels. Effective collaborative inquiry
in smaller projects or units often ground larger collective achievements.
The focus on student learning is critical. For example,
Institutional and Program Assessment
that is centered on the study of student
learning outcomes more effectively supports collaborative inquiry.
Indeed, the phenomena of faculty resistance often bemoaned in the
institutional assessment literature can be usefully reframed as
inquiry into educational assumptions and perspectives. Legitimating
diverse voices in the spirit of pursuing common educational aims
effectively leverages broader collaboration.
Although collaborative inquiry for us has been
grounded in our own educational
setting and practice, its vibrancy depends of connecting to the
wider literature and educational practice. Reviewing the range of
best and emerging practices includes, but also goes beyond, the
formal literatures on theory, research, and practice. For example,
an institutional consortium can operate as an expanded community
of inquiry for just such purposes; our participation in consortia
have provided for a deeper engagement of a range of practices and
has supported critical comparisons and insights. Consortia centered
on student learning have become another way of sustaining our inquiring
so that it has a cumulative effect.
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