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Vol. 16
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No. 1
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December 2018
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The Catalyst Semester: High-Impact Educational Practices in the City
Richard Kohng
North Park University is a Christian institution in Chicago that embraces interculturalism and civic engagement as its institutional values, which have been key to the university’s history. More than 40 years ago, university leaders exemplified these values by choosing to remain in the city when a suburban property became available. At that point, the institution began to embrace the city’s residents as potential students and committed to educating an urban population. This emphasis on civic engagement, along with the cultural diversity of the surrounding neighborhoods, led to a significant rise in the number of students of color enrolled at North Park. For example, more than half of the first-year class in 2017-2018 identified as students of color.
Vice President of Enrollment Management and Student Affairs
Director of Civic Engagement
North Park University
Jodi Koslow Martin Triton College
In Fall 2015, university administrators supported piloting a cohort-based, experiential learning program called the Catalyst Semester. One of the program’s core objectives was to deepen students’ understanding of civic engagement with high-impact educational practices (HIPs) that leveraged the city of Chicago. North Park students indicate the city’s location as a primary factor in their college selection process; to administrators, embracing Chicago would meet the expectations of students while also embracing innovation. Within this article, we offer an example of a creative approach to crafting an educational environment aligned with North Park’s urban identity.
Overlapping HIPs for Impact Kuh’s (2008) research on HIPs served as the methodological backbone for program development. Knowing these practices had the potential to deepen students’ experience in significant ways, program administrators saw value in overlapping them for further effect. According to Kuh (2008), HIPs consist of “first-year seminars and experiences, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity/ global learning, service-learning and community-based learning, internships, and capstone courses and projects” (pp. 9-11). Aiming for a large impact and having already embraced many of these HIPs, faculty and administrators integrated these teaching techniques into an experiential learning opportunity: the Catalyst Semester.
Students in the Catalyst Semester, a cohort-based, experiential learning program at North Park University, meet with a community leader in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood as part of the program. Photo courtesy of North Park University.
Ambitiously launched in Spring 2016, the Catalyst Semester comprised a learning community of first-year commuter and residential students taking two or more Chicago-focused
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