THE CATALYST SEMESTER: HIGHIMPACT EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES IN THE CITY Richard Kohng, Director of Civic Engagement, North Park University Jodi Koslow Martin, Vice President of Enrollment Management and Student Affairs, Triton College
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. In Fall 2015, university administrators supported piloting a cohortbased, 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. 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 classes together that meet general education requirements. Each student in the cohort interned at a city-based community organization and attended weekly curated experiences. The program was small at its inception (12 students), with each student explaining their interest in this new way of learning in their application. The most innovative part of the program design centered on meaningful integration of the city through general education courses. After significant research on how best to design the experience, faculty teaching in the Catalyst Semester were asked to shape their learning outcomes using the Civic Knowledge and Civic Values rubrics commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education (Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, 2015, 2016). These rubrics helped faculty develop learning outcomes that prioritized civic knowledge and civic values (e.g., open-mindedness, civic negotiation, empathy, social justice; Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, 2016). In one instance, a mathematics faculty member tailored an introductory course called Just Stats to introduce statistical analysis through examining issues related to social justice, such as the intersection of racial demographics and housing segregation. Homework sets used real-world scenarios that drew upon current issues in Chicago. All students in the program also took a writing-intensive firstyear seminar required of all students. Taught by a program administrator, the course served as a platform to develop firstyear students’ writing skills while showcasing the university’s citycentered focus through course content that drew from current issues such as activism and protests relating to racial divides. In addition to the general education courses offered to students in the program, each cohort was placed in a major-specific course
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