Enhance Research Productivity Research Articles

A Counterforce Within The System

Young University is just about all a modern institution should be. It is the largest private university in the country, enrolling 25,000 students from 50 states and 69 countries. With students almost all of one faith (the Latter Day Saints), it draws on a cohesive set of values. Its basketball arena can seat almost the entire student body; its library has just been expanded to six floors and houses more than a million volumes; its faculty has been upgraded to enhance research productivity ; it has recently built a law school. Nevertheless, despite its strikingly beautiful setting, its fine facilities, and its unusually homogeneous faculty and student body, BYU still is troubled by the power of the huge, multipurpose university to depersonalize learning. The CLASP program at BYUCreative Learning Through the Application of Sociological Principlesgrew out of a sense of anomie and alienation. John F. Seggar, associate professor of sociology and a founder of CLASP, recalls, just began to distrust that students were learning anything, that I was doing anything important in going through the paces of the 50-minute class. Seggar voiced his frustrations to another professor, Wesley Craig. What could be expected of separation of bits of knowledge into scattered classes with faculty similarly compartmentalized within their colleges and specialized disciplines? Where could there be cooperation, reinforcement from peers, beneficent socialization amid the testing, grading, and certifying that characterized the college process? Where was integration of personal goals, work competence, physical and spiritual well being, development of community? By the fall of 1972, five sociology professors-out of a department of 24had sufficient interest in breaking out of the established pattern to form a working team. They sought a holistic and humanistic approach that might bring together the students' fragmentary learning and develop not merely a mastery of content but individual competence in learning. The basic shift was to move responsibility from teacher to student, to move away from individual classes and required assignments and into a semester-long learning experience that would take up all the student's program. As CLASP has developed, it is a way for a student to gain a full semester's credit for working in various social science areasjuvenile delinquency, medical sociology, community development, for exampleand developing personal and interpersonal competence. Each of the learning communities through the five years of CLASP's existence has included freshmen to seniors from many majors, most of them outside sociology. Students learn about the program primarily from their peers or from announcements circulated across the campus. Former CLASP students make excellent recruiters. Most students