This short video highlights the EOA National Best Education Practices Clearinghouse. The Clearinghouse identifies, validates, and disseminates best education practices to improve student outcomes for GEAR UP and TRIO students. These students are often poor, historically-underrepresented, first generation in their families to attend college, and have little to no social capital to help them achieve their dreams. The Clearinghouse provides practices that equity programs can adapt and employ to support student success in their programs. Also, GU and TRIO programs are eligible to submit administrative and educational practices to the Clearinghouse for inclusion.
David Arendale’s History of the Integrated Learning Course: Creation, Conflict, and Survival
This short video tells the story how in 1972 the Integrated Learning (IL) course was developed at the University of Minnesota to meet the academic and cultural transition needs of their TRIO Upward Bound summer bridge program students as they prepared to enter college. The IL course was an early example of a linked course learning community. A historically-challenging college content course such as Introduction to Anatomy and Physiology or Law in Society was linked with an IL course. The IL course is essentially an academic support class customized to use the content of its companion class as a context for mastering learning strategies and orienting students to the rigor of the college learning environment. The history of the IL course provides lessons for creating, sustaining, and surviving daunting campus political and financial challenges that could face any new academic or student affairs program. The TRIO program leveraged its modest budget and personnel for the IL course approach which flourished and withstood changing economic and political forces that could have terminated the innovative approach to academic support. Lessons from this history of creation, conflict, and survival could be applied to other programs in a postsecondary setting.