Interdisciplinary Teaching through Learning Communities: A Perspective from a Part-Time Faculty Member

For adjunct professors like me, it is all too easy to experience institutions of higher learning from the outside looking in. The ability to develop deep collegial relationships and establish a presence on any campus is limited. In my experience, students respond to professors who are steeped in the culture of their institutions, knowledgeable about its history, and connected enough to embody its culture. George Kuh suggests that fostering a close relationship with faculty "committed to seeing that students succeed" enhances students' first-year college experience (Kuh 15). Adjuncts who don't have these deep institutional connections have to find other ways of demonstrating this commitment to our students' success. That is why, when the opportunity came my way to teach with one of the highimpact practices (HIPs) at Queensborough Community College, Queens, New York, I accepted it without hesitation.Queens, one of the five New York City boroughs, is the most diverse county in the US, with the highest number of foreign born residents. With both of the city's airports (Kennedy and LaGuardia) located in the borough, Queens is truly a gateway to America. Queensborough Community College is a two-year college of the City University of New York (CUNY), serving a diverse student population of nearly 15,000. Our student population is roughly a third black, another third Hispanic, and nearly 40 percent of students come from homes where English is not the first language. At Queensborough, a veteran of the Afghan War may find him- or herself sitting next to an Afghan refuge, and a North Korean and South Korean may study in the same workgroup. Traditional classes may not always provide the support and opportunity for engagement that these students need. Traditional pedagogy may also not take full advantage of the rich experience these students bring to our academic community.With a track record of innovative pedagogy, Queensborough is committed to the implementation of HIPs considered to increase student engagement and active learning, and appeal to and meet the needs of its diverse and often underserved population (Kuh, 13-17). Current HIPs at Queensborough include learning communities, writing-intensive courses, undergraduate research, diversity/global learning, service learning/community-based learning, and capstone courses and projects. We also consider our Students Wiki Interdisciplinary Group (SWIG), which partners English and basic educational skills courses with an additional content course (currently in the following disciplines: education, nursing, social sciences, and speech/theatre), to be a high- impact student learning experience. Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), another focused practice, is a CUNY-wide program funded by the mayor's office and dedicated to increasing graduation rates for nonremedial students. At Queensborough, we routinely seek ways to integrate and retain our students. In this article, I will reflect on my experience teaching in two of Queensborough's learning communities.In Five High-Impact Practices, Brownell and Swaner state that, "In their simplest form, learning communities are a collection of courses that a small group of students complete together" (2009). While the Queensborough learning communities meet this definition, the following learning community description by Scrivener et al. (2008) better captures the spirit of our aspirations for these programs: 'Any one of a variety of curricular structures that link together several existing courses - or actually restructure the material entirely - so that students have opportunities for deeper understanding and integration of the material they are learning, and more interaction with one another and their teachers as fellow participants in the learning enterprise. "SWIG LEARNING COMMUNITIESMy first experienee of an interdisciplinary learning community came in spring 2011, when I took on a longtime substitution assignment for a full time colleague, Joan Dupre, who was hurt in an accident. …