When Teachers Foster Student Involvement Grad 963 Final Project

We all know that teachers teach and good learning relies signiicantly on good teaching. We also know that the major ingredients of good teaching are academic competency, pertinent course objectives, coherent syllabus, and integrated, objective-related assessment of student learning. More recently, the emphasis on active learning has revealed that actively engaging students in the process of learning as opposed to just transmitting the subject matter knowledge is the key factor to successful student academic achievement. There is a rich literature that discusses exhaustively all the facets of active learning and methods to make it happen. The issue we are interested in here is about extending the in-class student engagement to the larger, within-institution student involvement and its active role in deening the institutional ethos. More speciically, we address the problem of how teachers encourage and promote student involvement, and which aspects of teacher-student relationships contribute to stimulating student involvement. As a direct result of examining the assigned readings of the GRAD 963 course, College Students and the Undergraduate Culture, this paper focuses on selections that present and debate on student involvement as is fostered by teachers. The selections cover the four sections in which the reading material was structured: the context, the culture, the characteristics, and the synthesis. My goal in investigating this issue is to understand better how teachers participate in creating a learning community starting with \the smallest academic subunit with which students and faculty nd identiication" Davis and Murrell, 1993b ]. It may be the classroom, the discipline, or even the department. At each step of encompassing such subunits in larger ones we develop the indispensable sense of integration of the learning community. My motivation for nding answers to the question of how teachers foster student involvement is connected to my constant endeavor of deciphering and, if possible, demystifying the magic of good teaching, when teachers \make their love of learning ... contagious", and can \create a sense of wonder and excitement in students" Kuh et al., 1991 ] .