Learning Communities: Reforming Undergraduate Education

Abstract

Reviewed by: Learning communities: Reforming undergraduate education Nancy S. Shapiro Learning communities: Reforming undergraduate education by B. L. Smith, J. MacGregor, R. S. Matthews, & F. Gabelnick. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 2004. Learning Communities: Reforming Undergraduate Education is the second book by these authors. The first, Learning Communities: Making Connections (Jossey Bass 1990), was published 15 years ago. For those of us who are "believers" in learning communities, this book is definitely worth the wait. Smith, MacGregor, Matthews, and Gabelnick are passionate advocates for an educational reform initiative that has taken root in American higher education over the past 20 years. Their latest book makes it clear that learning communities are ready for prime time. This volume undertakes the important and challenging tasks of providing a definitive history of the movement and simultaneously offering a practical resource for academic administrators. The authors' overwhelming success in meeting the first goal sometimes overshadows their aspirations for their second goal. However, the breadth of the scope, the strength of the documentation, and the analytical insights offered on the state of American higher education reform to date make this book a landmark contribution to the understanding and appreciation of the value of learning communities in American higher education. The book is divided into five parts: Part 1: The contemporary and historical context of learning communities; Part 2: Learning community structures and practices; Part 3: Rich arenas for reform; Part 4: Initiating and strengthening learning communities; and Part 5: Conclusion. Part 1 is divided into two chapters. The first chapter places learning communities in the broader context of contemporary higher education reform. The authors provide a very compelling and lucid analysis of the challenges facing higher education today, and they present their main premise: that learning communities can provide solutions to some of these most pressing problems. The authors begin this chapter by describing the changing demographics of colleges [End Page 550] and universities, which not only reflect a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse population, but also contend with students who follow diverse paths through college: moving back and forth between community colleges and traditional 4-year colleges, working full- or part-time, and taking combinations of courses on-line and in traditional settings. In fact, according to the authors, only 16% of all college students today are "'traditional'—that is ages eighteen to twenty-two, attending college full-time, and living on campus (p. 6)." After setting the stage, the authors offer a comprehensive summary of the recent major reports on undergraduate education reform, with several useful tables that help guide the reader through the explosion of studies and recommendations that characterized the 1990s. Chapter 2 of this book is one of the best-written essays describing the history of the learning communities movement in the literature to date; it is the strongest chapter in the book. The authors not only draw on their personal knowledge of the history of the movement, but they also have included unique stories and anecdotes retrieved from personal communications and primary sources that document the earliest experiences of students and faculty in the first learning communities. It is clear from reading this chapter that the authors loved writing it—it is lovingly written, with sensitivity to the early challenges, the serendipitous events that allowed the movement to leapfrog across the country, and the bittersweet demise of some of the most promising learning community experiments. This chapter is not merely a narrative history of the movement; it also lays the foundation for later discussions of different types of learning communities, so readers can better appreciate nuanced differences as learning communities are adapted to different types of institutions. Part 2 is divided into two chapters. Chapter 3 follows directly from the historical foundation established in chapter 2 and describes different learning community curricular structures. The authors state in their introduction that "each chapter can stand on its own or be linked to other chapters," which explains why some portions of chapter 3 repeat the definition and key features of learning communities that were presented in the first chapter. Chapter 3 reviews the various curricular frameworks of learning communities that were originally presented in the authors' first book. Readers familiar with...