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Contextualized Adult Learning Communities (CALC) model
Contextualized adult learning communities are year-long (fall, spring, and summer semester), thematically- and culturally-centered “villages” of internal and external constituents committed to wholistic student success. Each annual cohort will engage students from the basic developmental tier (English or math) through the next two tiers (semesters) of the discipline in a sequential fashion, with the same instructor(s). Research suggests “this approach may …increase in efficacy when institutions ensure that students enroll in corresponding college-level courses as soon as they finish their developmental counterparts. This sequencing of courses will help limit course avoidance and other barriers to college completion.”
Contextualized instruction for these particular learning communities is not intended to infer alignment of content with the student’s major, but alignment of content with the student’s life and adult responsibilities.
The signature tenet of each CALC will be the fluidity or adaptability of curriculum delivery and methods based on students’ needs AND strengths. We are cognizant of the dynamic and evolving nature of communities, and the role of the affective in methodology; as such, CALC’s instructional methods will never be linear or identical from one cohort to the next.