Institutional and Department Cultures, Faculty and Staff Roles and Responsibilities

The Faculty Center for Professional Development

Learning by Doing at Cal Poly Pomona

Internships, Cooperative Education, and Applied Learning

Educational Technologies

Enhancement of Student Learning through University Outreach to Communities, Business, and Schools

Active Learning

The criteria for educational effectiveness advanced by WASC, and the research and principles of learning upon which they are built, present a framework by which to measure, define, and assess ourselves, in the contexts of the challenges and changes facing Cal Poly Pomona and the CSU. The influential principles and practices of the learning paradigm, yielding the questions contained in the note, helped to focus our review of the changing climate and conceptions of learning at Cal Poly Pomona and deepened our understanding of our institution and experience. Addressing these questions, we will not provide a history of teaching and learning at Cal Poly Pomona but a thematic analysis, focused on selected institutional examples and practices, framed by central questions and issues of the self-study. We hope thus to better understand and explain ourselves and to define best practices and strategic plans for our university as a learning community.

Institutional and Department Cultures, Faculty and Staff Roles and Responsibilities

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Concern over educational quality and student performance and skills offers both a challenge and an opportunity to develop new systems of assessment and institutional research linked to student-centered modes of active learning, integrating curriculum and course development and design and comprehensive outcomes assessment measures and methods, supported by use of new pedagogies and instructional technologies.

Transforming the academic and institutional culture of the university entails revision of faculty teaching and professional roles, and coordination of planning, assessment, and resource allocation processes, enabling campuses to make better use of limited funds and more strategic decisions, serving a new public mandate of accountability based on clear standards and demonstrated, reciprocal commitment to quality.

The Faculty Center for Professional Development

A significant indicator of a learning—centered university is its commitment to faculty development to enhance student learning. The Faculty Center for Professional Development grew out of a need expressed by the faculty to be more effective teachers in the classroom. It was established in September 1990 and its mission is to provide programs and services which assist faculty in improving their teaching and achieving their professional goals. Under the leadership of founding director, Dr. Carol Holder, and the guidance of the Faculty Development Advisory Committee (FDAC), the Faculty Center for Professional Development grew to become "the model for an academic support unit" on the Cal Poly Pomona campus, in the view of the Joint Review Committee 1998 report, commending the Center for its programs and services serving all six of the university’s strategic goals.

The Faculty Center continues to provide individual assistance and sponsors campus discussion groups and workshops on exploring alternative teaching strategies, improving classroom instruction, and advancing research and scholarly activities. These workshops, offered throughout the year and conducted by Cal Poly Pomona faculty, enhance collegial relations and promote a multidisciplinary exchange of insights and support for efforts at improvement and innovation. A complete report of the Faculty Center’s strategic goals and activities is included in Annex C1. The hiring of three faculty associates by the Center in 1997-98, each with 8-12 WTUs released time per quarter, enabled the Faculty Center to expand its strategic goals and outreach to faculty through new programs and services. Many of these programs resulted in faculty across disciplines collaborating on teaching strategies.

The success of the Faculty Center’s expanded goals and outreach was further demonstrated by the impact and effectiveness of new programs and services developed by the faculty associates in the areas of technology, diversity, and learning outcomes assessment. Some examples of impact of student learning include the Summer Web Institute and Mentoring Program (SWIM), intensive discipline-based two-week introductory workshops begun in 1997, helping faculty learn how to use World Wide Web-based technologies to enhance learning in their classes. As part of their commitment to the workshop, participants are expected to act as mentors to their colleagues to develop Web-based learning techniques. Workshop participants are expected to show evidence in their pedagogy of techniques learned in the workshop. Several faculty who have attended these workshops continue to act as mentors to their department colleagues.

Another example is the Student Outcomes Assessment Projects (SOAP) (Annex C3), an annual grant award and faculty support program begun in Spring 1997 with funds from the President’s Assessment Initiative, supporting a total of thirteen department-based faculty project teams with over fifty faculty members from five colleges, assessing student learning in the core courses and curricula of academic majors and programs and using the results to improve teaching and learning experiences and outcomes. The impact on classroom assessment of these programs will be discussed in detail in the Assessment section.

Additionally, the Summer Teaching and Learning/Assessment Workshops, intensive four-day workshops on course and classroom teaching and learning and department and program learning outcomes assessment, serving 65 faculty participants from 32 departments in the summers of 1998 and 1999, have helped faculty establish clear goals, objectives, and student learning outcomes for courses and programs, linked to new active learning pedagogies, course and program instructional design, and outcomes assessment to monitor and improve student learning.

The Faculty Center has offered other notable programs, expanding its outreach:

• The Mini-Grant Program, begun in 1998 with funding from the Office of the President, has supported faculty teaching effectiveness and other research, professional, and creative activities, awarding over 230 grants in two years to over 200 faculty applicants.
• The Writing across the Disciplines Workshop, an intensive three-day inter-disciplinary workshop held every September by the university since 1982, has enrolled over 500 faculty members from 40 departments and eight university schools and colleges, helping them to integrate writing, reading, and critical thinking in their courses and programs, and to develop effective writing assignments and forms of assessment, and strategies of writing instruction for our diverse student body. The Writing across the Disciplines workshop is one of the most successful programs of the Faculty Center for Professional Development and a model for other workshops and faculty development programs across the CSU.

Participants who have attended these workshops have indicated that they are now able to deal with the challenges of increased enrollment and providing valuable and timely feedback to students on the quality of their writing.

The Center continues to promote faculty collaboration and cross-disciplinary communities through the weekly Brown Bag Lunch Series and University Writing Group and annual events such as the CSU Teacher-Scholar Summer Institute, the CSU Regional Symposium on University Teaching, and the Regional Consortium Colloquium on Teaching and Learning.

The1999-2000 year brought significant changes and transition to the Faculty Center for Professional Development and faculty development at Cal Poly Pomona. Programs and services in instructional technology were separated from the Faculty Center in the Fall1999, and placed in an independent Faculty Computing Support Center. Two new faculty-support units were created by the Division of Academic Affairs — the New Faculty Orientation and the Lecturer Support programs, operating independently and in collaboration with the two centers, each with its own director. The Faculty Center for Professional Development assumed a leading role in defining relations with the new faculty support units, collaborating with New Faculty Orientation, Lecturer Support, and the Faculty Computing Support Center on selected programs and activities and coordinating in planning, scheduling, and budgeting for the 2000-2001 academic year.

The Faculty Center also embarked upon new collaborative programs and activities with university offices, support units, and divisions, offering successful workshops on service learning, academic advising, and seeking funding from foundations and corporations, and a revived International Research Forum. These programs and activities advanced Faculty Center strategic goals of improving teaching and learning, faculty collaboration and professional and creative activity, through new emphases on promoting a culture and scholarship of teaching and learning, supporting faculty growth in the many phases of their careers, and relating faculty development to university initiatives and programs and faculty in their departments and disciplines.

The growing programs and services of the faculty support units must be placed in the context of the transformation of higher education and our student population in the last decade, bringing new challenges, opportunities and pedagogies for the "new American university." The components of the "new pedagogy" are by now familiar: active learning, collaborative and cooperative learning; service and experiential learning, and cooperative education; uses of new technologies and interactive media; emphases on problem-solving and writing across the disciplines, developing learning communities; new approaches to diverse learners and learning, and developmental academic advising; use of learning outcomes assessment to improve academic courses and programs, based on definition of educational goals and learning outcomes.

The faculty support units have a crucial role to play in mediating this controversial "paradigm shift" from a focus on rote knowledge and teacher-centered instruction to the development of student-centered learning communities, from a culture of largely unexamined assumptions and implicit beliefs and preferences to one of inquiry and evidence and "explicit, broadly shared goals, criteria and standards," based on ongoing assessment and self-reflection and research on teaching and learning (Angelo 1997). The vision for faculty development emerging across the university is of a "shared, public process" in which faculty are active participants, drawing from and developing a growing "scholarship of teaching" and inventory of professional roles.

The Faculty Center for Professional Development and other faculty support units at Cal Poly Pomona continue to pursue the vision of faculty development established by Dr. Carol Holder and the Faculty Development Advisory Committee, a vision whose integrity and commitment have earned a position of unique affection, respect, and trust on our campus, and whose programs and services have earned a place of preeminence in the CSU. The Faculty Center and related support units are widely regarded as places for faculty to learn and grow, to risk and find support, to build fellowship and advance scholarship, and affirm a community of learners and learning. This vision is embodied in the strategic priorities of the faculty support units for 2000-2001, reaffirming their mission and strategic goals.

The mission of Cal Poly Pomona is "to advance learning and knowledge by linking theory and practice in all disciplines, and to prepare students for lifelong learning, leadership and careers in a changing multicultural world" (Strategic Planning Guidelines: 4). The university’s "highest priority is to ensure the intellectual and social development of its students," maintaining a "campus environment supportive of learning" (p. 5).

In its Strategic Planning Guidelines of 1997 Cal Poly Pomona envisions becoming "a national model of a polytechnic university" that offers "an extraordinary education by blending theory with practice, maximizing the contact and accessibility of faculty to students, and providing a strong foundation in general education" (p. 5). The university’s "strengths" derive from the congruence of its historical commitments and practices with learning-centered vision and values:

• Its emphasis on "learning by doing" as a polytechnic approach to education, "encouraging and assessing modes of teaching, learning, and advising that promote significant student involvement in the learning process" (p. 5).
• Its opportunities for applied, experiential, and field-based learning experiences such as internships, work-study, and cooperative education projects, bridging the worlds of the classroom and community or work.
• Its strategy as a polytechnic university of using instructional technology to enhance the teaching and learning process and improve preparation of students.
• Its commitment as a public university to outreach to local communities, businesses, and schools, with the "capabilities, technical expertise, and intellectual resources" to address pressing societal issues, problems, and needs and to provide educational, research, and community service learning activities which enrich the education of students.
• Its commitment, as an institution that "mirrors and benefits from the diversity of Southern California," to "provide access" to a wide variety of students, foster "cross-cultural communication and understanding," and integrate multicultural perspectives into the curriculum" (p. 6).
• Its corollary commitment as an "institution that embraces a global perspective" to outreach to local and world communities, inclusion of international subjects and themes in courses and curricula, addressing global issues through the university’s international activities and programs.
• Its emphasis, as an institution committed to excellence in undergraduate education, on the use of innovative teaching methods and active learning approaches such as collaborative and cooperative learning, problem-based learning, and case teaching, and its corollary emphases on faculty research on the teaching and learning process and on interdisciplinary collaboration among departments, programs, and colleges, offering the opportunity to develop "a national reputation as an institution in the forefront of improving and reforming undergraduate education" (Strategic Planning Guidelines: 7).

How well does Cal Poly Pomona fulfill these stated goals and its mission as a polytechnic university? In what ways is it organized to promote the learning and development of students, and to assess their performance and its own educational effectiveness, in order to improve academic courses and programs? This section offers a survey of learning-centered practices and programs at Cal Poly Pomona. We will then examine the ways in which the university has "organized for learning" in response to the problems facing higher education and challenges facing Cal Poly Pomona and the CSU.

Cal Poly Pomona is renowned for its "learning by doing" philosophy and for the quality of its professional and technical colleges and schools. We will now highlight the manner in which this philosophy is applied. Some examples include the College of Engineering which is the largest in southern California, and ranks 13th nationally among undergraduate engineering programs out of over 500 regional universities. The College is the principal producer of minority engineers and engineers in nine disciplines in the state of California. The Collins School of Hospitality Management, the oldest and largest four-year hospitality management program in California, is consistently ranked among the top ten of over 200 hospitality programs in the United States and Canada. Students in this program operate a superb restaurant, which also serves as a living laboratory and learning environment. The School has also revised its curriculum based on input from its industry advisory board and has moved to an integrated skill-based curriculum.

The Colleges of Agriculture and Environmental Design represent the university’s commitment to the physical environment and its innovative use as a teaching resource, preserving the pastoral traditions while enhancing the natural beauty of the campus. Agriculture students grow the produce and plants sold at Cal Poly Pomona’s Farm Fresh Store and Nursery, engaging in rich applied learning experiences and helping to generate support for educational programs for the college. The College of Environmental Design has graduated five thousand alumni in programs in art, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban and regional planning, exerting major influence on the forces shaping architecture, planning and design, and sustainable resource practices in the southern California area. Both Colleges have contributed substantially to the multi-disciplinary Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies founded on the Cal Poly Pomona campus in this decade, offering a minor in regenerative studies and prospective certificate and graduate courses.

The College of Business Administration offers courses that involve the participation of area family businesses where students team up with these businesses to develop business plans. Several departments in the College have strong internship programs where students earn academic credit for supervised internships where they have the opportunity to link their classroom experiences to the world of work. Academic courses and programs across the campus feature the same learning by doing philosophy, marked by student performances in departments such as Music and Theater and the institute for New Dance and Cultures of the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences, by field experiences in the liberal studies and teacher preparation programs of the College of Education and Integrative Studies, and by internships and cooperative education projects in the Colleges of Business Administration and Science. The inter-disciplinary, applied programs in Geographic Information Systems (Geography), Cultural Resource Management (Anthropology), Master’s in Public Administration (Political Science), and others demonstrate that learn-by-doing is not confined to the technical fields.

Internships, Cooperative Education, and Applied Learning

Many departments and colleges at Cal Poly Pomona offer or require internships, cooperative education projects, or other applied learning activities for students in their programs and majors (many of which are discussed in greater detail in Theme Four, Chapter VIII). The Cal Poly Pomona Cooperative Education Program connects prospective student interns with a network of more than 125 participating companies, providing hands-on experience for students in the Colleges of Science and Engineering and other majors. The program was rated the most outstanding in the CSU and community college systems in 1996.

The Engineering Interdisciplinary Clinic in the College of Engineering provides cost-effective solutions to business/industry problems and invaluable experience on real world research problems by forming partnerships between industrial sponsors and multidisciplinary teams of high-performing students from engineering and other majors and faculty advisors. Since its founding in 1990 the Clinic has completed over 40 projects, each averaging 1,500 hours of student effort and 100 hours of faculty time, with a high 80 to 90% success ratio.

Cal Poly Pomona was one of only three universities chosen to participate in a unique scholarship/internship program with Lilly Industries, which offers qualified chemistry students a scholarship to help fund their education and hands-on experience as summer interns at Lilly’s Montebello plant, with the possibility of employment at an international level.

The College of Education and Integrative Studies (CEIS) has enhanced university relations with K-12 schools and expanded the number and range of teaching internships and field experiences, offered alternative paths to earning a teaching credential, and participated with Cal State Long Beach in a regional center of the Cal-State-Teach Program. The Service Learning Internship Program (SLIP) of CEIS combines community service with academic learning.

The range of capstone experiences, such as senior projects, capstone courses, team projects, engineering clinic, design studios, cooperative education programs, internships, service learning, and other forms of industry, professional and community support programs can be seen from Table A-4 in the 2000 Campus Accountability Report (available in print in the Team Room and on-line at http://www.csupomona.edu/~academic/programs/). Capstone experiences provide important evidence of the quality of undergraduate education at Cal Poly Pomona.

Numerous Colleges and departments at Cal Poly Pomona are intensively involved in the study and use of technologies appropriate to a polytechnic university. The College of Science was selected in 1991 to offer the only Bachelor of Science degree programs in Biotechnology in the CSU, which will be housed in the new College of Science Biotechnology Building scheduled to open in the Summer 2000. The spacious classrooms and well-equipped labs of the new building will enable the college to enhance the innovative hands-on learning experiences of students and to provide industry-focused short and long-term training programs.

Cal Poly Pomona is the only campus in the CSU to offer a geography major with an option in the new inter-disciplinary field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS, a spatial technology software linking locational and tabular data, is being used to construct a spatial data library on our campus, bringing standardization and accessibility to vast amounts of information scattered around the university. The Center for GIS research was located in a new lab in the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences in the Fall 1999,equipped with 24 NT workstations in a smart classroom environment that includes a research lab, a product design room, and office space. Faculty from the Department of Geography and Anthropology and the Colleges of Environmental Design, Science, Engineering, Business, and Agriculture are actively involved in curriculum development and the development of hardware and software resources for GIS.

Faculty and staff across the university share a commitment to excellence in instruction through the adaptation and use of technology to support active learning. Many faculty, departments, and programs are using instructional technologies to enhance teaching and improve student learning in their courses and programs. The Digital Summer School presents experimental, academically rigorous courses, mediated through computer networks, video, electronic mail, and electronic archives of materials. The campus expanded in three years from zero to 44 Smart Classrooms, offering students and instructors electronic access to Internet resources, instructional training materials, databases, on-line course work, and satellite down-link facilities. WebCT, an integrated web management system, made available many more tools to enhance on-line teaching and learning in one easy program, with a browser interface for the course-building environment. Over 150 courses from every college and school at Cal Poly Pomona use WebCT for interactive on-line education to enhance and expand active learning and assessment. The Faculty Computing Support Center offers training in Web CT, while ITAC’s Media Vision offers instructional design and production support.

Nineteen innovative faculty are portrayed in "In Celebration of Learning: Teaching and Technology at Cal Poly Pomona" (Appendix C5). Many faculty and teams have received grants or won awards for innovative uses of technology to improve courses and programs. Two prominent examples are Dr. Len Troncale of Biological Sciences, whose Integrated Science General Education program has won NSF grants and SOAP grants, and Dr. Sonia Blackman, whose innovation of the introductory level course PSY 201 proposal obtained PEW funding along with a SOAP grant.

The Faculty Center for Professional Development and the Faculty Computing Support Center have offered faculty development programs and services in instructional technologies to over 400 faculty and staff members of Cal Poly Pomona in the last four years, ranging from individual tutorials in faculty computing support labs to the in-office assistance offered to faculty in their offices by student technological assistants in the popular and successful It Fits program. Annual intensive summer (SWIM) workshops feature development by faculty participants of significant instructional technologies and Web Pages for academic courses and programs. The Faculty Center for Professional Development and Faculty Computing Support Center have collaborated with ITAC and the University Library on the University Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable and an annual TILT Conference on the Cal Poly Pomona campus, featuring workshops and demonstrations on best practices in the educational use of technologies and demonstrations of best practices and the latest instructional technologies.

An information competence project was funded by the CSU assessing the entry-level information competence of students, promoting university information competency policy and plans. Further, the university made an important effort to explore the educational uses of technology and to develop an institutional consensus and integrated strategy for teaching and learning, through participation in the ACE Project.

Enhancement of Student Learning through University Outreach to Communities, Business, and Schools

We recognize that learn-by-doing is not a solitary endeavor. It involves connections with external partners as well as with other units on campus. Some forms of outreach and collaboration are less directly related to teaching and learning in our courses and programs, but improve the contexts and climate for teaching and learning, establish or consolidate relations, clarify our goals and expectations and showcase our skills as college. It is important for students to have visible evidence that knowledge and the processes of research and application are embedded in society. Such projects as Agriscapes (described in Theme Four, Chapter VIII) are emblematic of this notion.

Another new community education attraction is the Rain Bird Rainforest Learning Center, a 2,923 square foot free-standing greenhouse structure in the new Biotechnology Building, will offer education courses and hands-on experience in rainforest architecture, plant adaptations, plant-animal interactions, animals of the rainforest, and human impact and interaction. Presentations and curriculum outlines are designed to attract college students in the biological sciences, K-12 students, and community members. A few others that could be cited include the new Cal Poly Education and Art Center which opened in February 2000, a 14,000 square foot extension campus that will provide Cal Poly Pomona students with hands-on experience in the community and help to revitalize downtown Pomona. Cal Poly Pomona students have also been involved in the Pre-collegiate Academic Program (PAD) and the America Reads Program, which provide tutorial support to elementary, middle and high school students in English and Math.

Globalism and internationalization are, of course, significant elements of outreach. With regard to the internationalization of the curriculum, Cal Poly Pomona has consciously sought to re-design particular courses and majors so as to address this need. General education (and especially the new model in the process of adoption) specifically calls for attention to international issues. The College of Business Administration offers a concentration in International Business and currently has approximately 550 students enrolled in the program. In addition, several departments in the college offer courses with an international emphasis. In CLASS, many departments offer courses based in international knowledge and the global context (English and Foreign Languages, Geography and Anthropology and Political Science). Ethnic and Women’s Studies, Interdisciplinary General Education, Regenerative Studies, and several programs in ENV and Agriculture are highly international in focus and content.

Among Special Programs of study, apart from the basic menu of study abroad experiences, students can enroll in courses that take them to Cuba, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Greece, Rome, London, Japan and China. In many cases, faculty members accompany the study-abroad students. These faculty members upon their return have been in a position to bring these experiences overseas to the classroom and thus enrich the students’ learning.

Active Learning

The Faculty Center for Professional Development, Faculty Computing Support Center, Instructional Technology and Academic Computing, and other units are all interested in providing expertise and support to the active learning emphasis of the campus, whether it is expressed in upgrading of faculty skills or directly translated into course and curriculum refreshment. The Wang Family Excellence Awards (Appendix C6), the SOAP Awards, the publication of "In Celebration of Learning", all underscore the value accorded these activities. The faculty have signaled their approval of the use of variety and activity in all kinds of programs, even if their adoption of the full range is uneven across the community. We do not yet know if students make course selections on the basis of the known pedagogy of the instructor (beyond his or her "easiness"), but it is tempting to imagine that this day will come. A recent volume of the Cal Poly Pomona journal "Interdisciplinary Studies" focused on learning styles (Annex C2). Faculty contributed pieces bringing educational theory to bear on particular case studies in their fields and programs.

The Interdisciplinary General Education Program (IGE), begun in 1983 as an innovative learning community of faculty and students, has received national recognition and won numerous awards. IGE’s sequence of eight courses enables students to interact for nearly three years, building friendships and forming bonds. The theme of the first course, IGE 120, Consciousness and Community, invites exploration of the learning community of the university as well as other kinds of human communities from prehistoric to contemporary. The cultural program, or arts events, in IGE build community that extends beyond the classroom. Students and faculty travel together to concerts, museums, and galleries, and attend plays presented by the Cal Poly Pomona Theatre Department. The classroom experience in IGE engages students in collaborative learning featuring large and small group discussion of themes and questions, so that students gain a place in the community by articulating their ideas, challenging each other, and building collaborative classroom discourse. Students conduct research and make presentations of group projects in ways that build community and reduce competition. Over the eight quarters of IGE their projects will take them out into the communities in which they live and the environment of the Cal Poly Pomona campus.

The Integrated Science General Education Program (ISGE) is an ambitious interdisciplinary alternative to science general education that combines four revolutions in a rich hybrid science curriculum that may be taken by non-science majors for up to 16 hours of course credit.

Several faculty have received recognition through the RTP process for their use of active learning techniques in the classroom. In addition, Wang Award winners Vernon Stauble (International Business and Marketing) in 1999 and Steve Wickler (Animal Sciences) in 2000 were lauded for their creative, action-oriented teaching.