 "Photo: photo courtesy of Chris Ripley")
 "Photo: photo courtesy of Chris Ripley")
As of Wednesday, February 17, the face of Medaille College’s undergraduate program at the Buffalo campus will never be the same.
On this day it was announced that the John R. Oishei Foundation will provide the school with a $400,000 grant over three years to support project EQUIP, an integrated four-year learning sequence that focuses on community-based, experiential learning.
The money the college will receive is meant to help expand the program beyond the Community 101 projects that current freshmen are involved with.
“What we hope to do is continue to make those projects more challenging, give students more opportunities to get out into the community and be involved, and really provide the faculty and staff at the college with the kind of professional development that will help them to integrate this community-based learning into their courses,” said Dr. Brad Hollingshead, associate dean for foundational learning and assessment.
According to Dr. Hollingshead, EQUIP (Explore, Question, Understand, Involve, Produce), was developed from lessons learned through Medaille’s learning community initiatives. This four-year learning sequence, with the funding from the Oishei grant, will ultimately become the new learning structure for incoming students moving forward.
“Some of the money is going to continue to enhance the first year experience, but the bulk of that money is going to build out the sequence in the sophomore, junior and senior years,” he said. “This is really an effort to take the next logical step in improving the undergraduate experience.”
Medaille sent a proposal to the Oishei foundation on November 19, 2009, which was approved on February 2, 2010. In the letter accepting Medaille’s proposal, the directors of the foundation noted that they were “impressed with the commitment that Medaille College is making not only to its students but to the wider community though this deeply engaging and collaborative model.”
President of Medaille College, Dr. Richard Jurasek, said that the shift to this style of instruction has very noticeable benefits.
“There is a law that operates in all human learning and teaching that says: the more integrated and more coherent the delivery of new content and new perspective is, the deeper, more long-lasting, and more useful the learning is,” he said. “We’re going to have more horizontal integration – the courses inside the freshmen learning community all hook up… and more vertical integration – what is learned in the freshman year is going to be multiplied in the sophomore year and junior year and so forth.”
“All of this integrated teaching will produce deeper learning,” he said.
According to Dr. Hollingshead, assessments of the existing learning communities at Medaille found that students involved demonstrated improvements in terms of persistence and success.
“The students who participated in learning communities earned about a half a grade higher in terms of overall GPA compared to when they were not participating,” he said.
“I think one of the things we’ve seen already through the learning communities is that we’re engaging students in better ways,” said Hollingshead. “From that perspective, we’re going to help students better build the skills, the knowledge, and the attitudes they will need in order to be successful when they graduate.”
Dr. Hollingshead’s insights are backed up by freshmen that participated in Community 101 last semester.
“I think community service is one of the best ways to learn about the community and the people who live here,” said Nikki Meehan, freshman liberal studies major. “I feel like I have already learned so much about the people here in just one semester.”
Erika Hamann, a humanities professor, finds that learning communities prepare students for the rigors of college learning.
“I notice that students attain a certain maturity and self-confidence at the end of their first learning community semester,” she said.
For Dr. Hollingshead, the most exciting part about all of this is that this new learning style will provide students with a larger purpose to what they are doing in the classroom.
“(Students) can see how what they’re learning applies to problem solving in a real world context,” he said. “I think with the implementation of (Project EQUIP) we’re going to see more students succeeding and we’re really going to see a significant bump up in the quality of work that students do.”
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