In this talk, we discuss our interdisciplinary course with the First-Year Interest Group experience (FIGs) at CSU Dominguez Hills. These courses offer students multiple opportunities to engage in community-based projects, connect with peers and faculty along with additional support while acclimating both socially and academically to campus life.
Our FIG pairing focused on community engagement and included a Liberal Studies course titled Child and Adolescent Development: Intersection of Language and Community Development, and a Linguistics course titled Multilingual Los Angeles: Language and Community in the Greater Los Angeles area.
Students learned about various sociological theories to enhance their knowledge about their surrounding communities and gain an understanding of their own upbringing, the formation of their identities, and how societal influences shape our daily lives. Additionally, we critically discussed the linguistic communities in the Greater Los Angeles region and the cultural ideologies that impact both language change and production over time. During this process, we analyzed these shared experiences throughout childhood, adolescence into young adulthood. By making these critical connections between our community and ourselves, we gain the knowledge needed that can be transformed into concrete actions of self-advocacy and community activism.

The adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) by a growing number of states has heralded a seismic shift in how K-12 students will learn science. But the NGSS was designed for, and implemented by, the K-12 system, so why should science faculty care about what is happening at the K-12 level? Simply put, students will be entering the university with a different set of experiences in the sciences, and a vastly different mindset. These transformative changes offer myriad possibilities for changes in how science faculty approach teaching science in our own courses. Not by shifting our teaching to NGSS-aligned practices, but by building on the new strengths that future students will be bringing with them from their K-12 science experiences. Our goal is not to explain what NGSS is all about, but rather to expose you to some of the fundamental changes associated with NGSS which may change the way you approach science in your own classroom, and may even impact your program design and student assessment. As evidence of the changes which are possible, we will briefly share some of the impacts the NGSS has had on our own Department of Biology over the last decade.

Public institutions today are at a crossroads, grappling with dips in enrollment, a devaluing of the collegiate experience and retaining students (first generation, Pell Grant recipients and under-represented minorities) throughout the collegiate career. These complexities drive the investment in student success strategies to hopefully increase a sense of belonging and foster a “give and take” strategy for greater engagement in their academic experience. While student success is first and foremost, what happens in the classroom may be the key to fostering involvement, leading to more active students enrolled in higher education. It is unknown if 1) a student’s sense of belonging, involvement, and/or participation in co-curricular activities are related; 2) if classroom experiences play a significant role in the social connectedness and valued competence of a student; and 3) if those are related to retention and a student’s ability to thrive. It was hypothesized that a significant relationship between students’ sense of belonging, involvement, and engagement in co-curricular activities in the Kinesiology department would exist. In addition, high impact practices and/or safe activities in the classroom in relation to a student’s willingness to “give and take” by getting engaged and becoming more involved in their educational journey.