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.
New Century's 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
Our 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 of our 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.
The Integrative Studies degree requires students to complete a minimum of 24 Learning Community credits. All courses with the NCLC designation fulfill this requirement except:
- NCLC 194, 195, 196, 197, 198
- NCLC 290, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298
- NCLC 390, 394, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399
- NCLC 490, 491, 492, 493, 494, 495, 496, 497, 498.
To learn more, see Courses, Syllabi, and Currently Scheduled Sections.