Presentation:

Professor Castillo initiated this session on increasing undergraduate engagement and retention through research and other creative efforts with a presentation on a research-oriented first-year core course implemented at Oakes College, one of ten residential colleges at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC). He began by providing a context for this effort.

Oakes College has 1,200 undergraduate, of whom approximately 300 are in their first year. The College is one of the most ethnically diverse of UCSC’s ten colleges, with a population that is 30% Euro-American and includes the largest number of African American among all colleges, a sizable number of Latino students and large numbers of Asian and Native American students. About half, or 600, of the students live in the residential buildings at Oakes. The USCS colleges are also home to academic departments. The academic departments housed at Oakes College include American Studies, American Literature and World Literature. The graduate program in the History of Consciousness also resides there.

When Professor Castillo became Provost of Oakes College three years ago, he had among his goals to enhance students’ multicultural understanding and foster cross-culture perspectives, and to increase undergraduate engagement and retention. He was able to bring these goals together by taking advantage of the UCSC requirement that all first year students take a core course and a writing intensive seminar in their first quarter.

At Oakes College, the writing-intensive core course offered during the Fall Quarter and the research seminar during the Spring Quarter are connected and designed to reflect the multi-ethnic backgrounds of the students and faculty and the College’s emphasis on cross-cultural understanding. The theme of the core course is “Values and Change in a Diverse Society.” Through readings of fictional and non-fictional works that speak to changes taking place in American society, students examine historical and contemporary aspects of multiculturalism in the United States, including issues of inequality in the areas of race, class, and gender. The knowledge gained through the reading and writing of the core course are reinforced during the Spring Quarter’s research seminar entitled “Race Relations in Modern America – Humanities and Social Sciences,” in which they write papers that require research and reflection on subjects discussed in the core course.

While all 300 first-year students at Oakes take the core course and writing seminar, Oakes also developed complementary seminars designed to involve smaller groups of first-years students in core-related research and creative activity in different venues. During the second quarter, students may choose to take a seminar centered on service learning; in the third quarter, they can take a discovery- oriented research seminar based on the core course theme, with an emphasis on race relations in modern America.

Students must apply to participate in the service learning seminar, which can accommodate fifty students (two sections of twenty-five students each). The service learning seminar has two components. First, the students are all placed at a government office or non-profit organization in the community where they carry out a research project. Projects thus far have involved politics, education, poverty, housing, social services and government work. In addition, as part of the experience, they are supervised by faculty sponsors who work with them on developing skills in critical thinking, field methodology and the practical application of theory. In determining the students’ sponsors, the College attempts to identify faculty whose work relates to the individual student’s placement or who have research interests or disciplinary knowledge that match the student’s intended focus. A student working in a museum, for example, might work with a history professor; a sociology student placed with the local chapter of the NAACP might work with a professor whose teaching and research interests are in social inequality; a psychology student assigned to a soup kitchen or women’s shelter might work with faculty interested in gender, psychology and poverty. Obtaining a good match is important because the students are not placed in the community to do clerical work; they are there to conduct research supervised by the faculty.

The second component is the seminar itself, taught in a classroom setting, usually by a faculty member in sociology or psychology. The combined approach of seminar plus placement works well because the placement not only validates the students’ classroom experiences, but it also allows the students to understand and make connections between social, political and economic issues learned through course work and local community life—in other words, to bridge the gap among academic studies, research and service work.

The third quarter research seminar associated with the “Values and Changes in a Diverse Society” course is derived from the core course theme focusing on race relations in modern America and is entitled “Race Relations in Modern America – Humanities and Social Sciences.” Like the service-learning component, it too accommodates fifty students, who are divided into two sections, each with twenty-five students. Enrollment is limited to undergraduates who are members of Oakes College. Faculty affiliated with departments housed at Oakes, as well as faculty from other colleges and departments, teach the seminar. After an initial exploratory period, students choose a research topic they would like to pursue. It typically is in an area of history, sociology or literature. A critical aspect of the research seminar is Oakes’ College collaboration with the interdisciplinary History of Consciousness graduate program. Using funds made available by the University, Oakes College and the Graduate division, Oakes College has established the Oakes/History of Consciousness Teaching Fellowship, awarded annually to a doctoral student in the History of Consciousness program to be in residence at Oakes for two academic quarters. The Fellowship is designed so that the graduate student has considerable time during the first quarter to devote to writing the dissertation; the sole other responsibility during this period is to prepare a course of general interest, which she or he teaches the following quarter. Graduate students find the fellowship valuable because it affords them time for writing and at the same times gives them experience designing and teaching an undergraduate course that has research at its foundation.

The departments that are housed at Oakes are involved in the “Values and Change in a Diverse Society” course. Affiliated faculty also sponsor students during the service learning quarter and teach the research seminars, while graduate students teach as lecturers for the core course.

Results have shown that the seminar approach used in conjunction with the “The Value and Change in a Diverse Society” course increases the engagement of first-year students. Other seminars taught by faculty in the departments housed at Oakes and offered during the sophomore, junior and senior years give students the opportunity to continue to be engaged in the educational and research processes and develop enhanced skills. Among students in the junior year who took the “Value of Diversity” sequence three years ago, 49 of the initial 50 students are still enrolled in their sophomore or junior year, when they declare their majors, and they are continuing to work with a faculty member. We have also found that when faculty members are able to secure external funding to conduct research, they tend to seek out a student with whom they worked through the Oakes program to be their research assistant.

The financial cost of the Oakes effort is minimal, though it does require quite a bit of coordination among the provost, department chairs and faculty members. Nonetheless the undergraduate students have a very rich first-year experience. The commitment to the Oakes students continues once they declare a major, regardless of the discipline they choose.

The Oakes College emphasis is on students in History, Art and the Social Sciences. Science is not emphasized because underrepresented students in the sciences have access to support via a number of programs aimed at increasing underrepresented students in the sciences.

Discussion:

Much of the discussion focused on the Oakes College program. The topics that were raised include: the costs of running such a program, recruiting faculty to serve as sponsors issues of course releases, strategies for reaching a diverse group of students, how to engage the less assertive students who might benefit more from faculty/student mentoring programs and research programs, the different level of responsibility between teaching and working with undergraduate and graduate students; decreased state funding of universities; the increased emphasis on faculty members raising money through grants; and the tenure promotion system and mechanisms of reward. In deliberating these issues, the group considered approaches used at other institutions and in similar programs such as the First-Year Discovery Program at Kentucky and the Field Work Program at the University of Connecticut.

Recommendations:

• The most “crucial” recommendation is for campuses to reevaluate the tenure promotion system. Though teaching, service work and publishing are all part of tenure evaluation the unspoken emphasis at virtually all universities is on research and publishing. With the emphasis on publishing and the rising teaching load across the country, it is harder to persuade faculty members to participate in programs that focus on increasing the engagement of undergraduates and integrating research into undergraduate education.
• Universities need to develop mechanisms to recognize and reward the kind of faculty participation that the Oakes program and other initiatives directed at undergraduates entails. Such mechanisms would go a long way toward alleviating faculty discontent and attracting more faculty. Suggested strategies include: increasing possibilities for teaching more narrowly focused courses; buying of release time; and acknowledgement and recognition of the “real” workload of faculty members (weekend and summer work outside of the classroom).
• University leaders should undertake a major evaluation of teaching loads, with special attention on inequities that may exist.

The Reinvention Center could play a lead in fostering discussion of these issues and working with member institutions to establish common standards.

Resources/References:

Websites

1. Esprit de Corps: College Nine’s Service-Learning Course. Students earn credit in exchange for a volunteer commitment and attend a weekly seminar. http://collegenine.ucsc.edu/praxis.shtml
2. Praxis: College Ten’s Service Learning Course. http://collegeten.ucsc.edu/praxis.shtml
3. Alternate Spring Break is an opportunity for students to engage in community service and experiential learning during Spring or Summer breaks. http://www2.ucsc.edu/institute/community/alt_break.shtml
4. Student Volunteer Connection is a student-run organization designed to bridge student involvement in the Santa Cruz community through meaningful volunteer opportunities. http://www2.ucsc.edu/institute/community/svc.shtml
5. The UCSC Center for Teaching Excellence supports UCSC faculty and graduate students in their commitment to excellence in teaching and learning. http://ic.ucsc.edu/CTE/index.html
6. The History of Consciousness Program is an interdisciplinary graduate program centered in the humanities with links to the social sciences, natural sciences and the arts. For more than thirty years, this curriculum has concentrated on methodological and theoretical issues and is concerned with the integration of disciplines. http://humwww.ucsc.edu/histcon/HisCon.html
7. “Values and Change in a Diverse Society” is Oakes College’s core course for first year students. For more information visit: http://oakes.ucsc.edu/
8. The University of Kentucky’s Discovery Seminar Program offers first year students small classes with outstanding professors who engage the students in challenging discussions. http://www.uky.edu/AS/Discovery/index.htm
9. The Freshman Discovery Seminar Program at the University of California, Riverside engages freshman in a highly interactive classroom experience, exposes them to new and unfamiliar fields of study, and creates close contact with professors and future mentors. http://discoveryseminars.ucr.edu/index.php
10. The UCSC Freshman Discovery Seminars engage first year students in challenging discussions that will foster critical thinking about topics in which the faculty are renowned as research scholars. http://planning.ucsc.edu/vpdue/froshseminars/
11. The UCSC Community Studies Department offers an interdisciplinary undergraduate (and graduate) program that focuses on the study of social change in the context of the community. http://communitystudies.ucsc.edu/