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Teaching Introductory American Politics as Part of a Learning Community

D the fall of 1998, I took part in an experimental learning community involving my introduction to American politics class, "The American Political System" (POLS001). Robert Hariman, professor of rhetoric and mass communication, and Ronald Troyer, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also participated. We judged it to be a success and we repeated it in the fall of 1999. In this article I report on that experiment, detailing what went well with it and what did not, and also make some observations about how what I learned while participating in this experiment might help me better design and conduct more "typical" introductory American politics classes. Calls for improving undergraduate education by creating "learning communities" have been common since the early 1990s.' This phrase seems to mean something different to everyone who discusses it, but the common goal of learning community organizers is to bring students together in ways that will broaden their educational experience and make their classes more than a series of requirements they meet on their way to a degree. The literature on learning communities is growing rapidly, as are attempts to create them. Researchers with experience in learning communities have argued that such programs can help with retention, meet general education objectives, foster student success, and bring coherence to student class schedules (Matthews