I currently serve as a mentor for the BioHouse Learning Community at UW Madison. Freshman live in a biology-themed dorm and take a seminar in which they are exposed to research across campus. My role is to support a subset of these students as they begin to get involved in biology-related campus activities such as lab and field research. This includes talking with students about the diversity of careers in the biological sciences and the various opportunities and resources they have access to at UW Madison.
Learn more about BioHouse here.
As a Learning Community, BioHouse integrates the perspectives of a diversity of freshmen interested in a variety of biological fields, from agriculture and astronomy, to ecology and neuroscience, as well as graduate student mentors from a similar range of biological fields. Each week a different faculty member from the UW Madison campus presents on their research, which the students have read about. We discuss the reading in small groups for the first few minutes before the presentation. Often during the discussion, we talked about the bigger picture of the speaker's research. Sometimes it would be obvious that some of the students hadn't considered the bigger picture, but if even one student had a particular connection to the speaker's research, that students comments could set a whole discussion in motion. The diversity of our group's interests and backgrounds was sufficient to kickstart meaningful discussion across a broad range of topics. This experience has made me consider how the effectiveness of a Learning Community relates to the diversity of its members.
This seminar also had me consider what I value in a Learning Community. Specifically, I value ample opportunities for members of the community to interact, including through group discussions and problem-solving. Researchers invited to present their research to the BioHouse community often fell back on Powerpoint and lecture-style speaking as the method to communicate and engage their audience. This is the typical format for a seminar but left little time for our group to interact. To leverage the Learning Community BioHouse put together, speakers might present for half the time and use the second half of the time to facilitate group discussions concerning open questions in their field. In reflecting on my experience, I have come to believe that the most effective Learning Communities facilitate active participation of all community members.