What Learning Communities Offer You

A learning community is a course that links classes together across disciplines such as history, sciences, communications, and art. In a learning community, you take classes together with the same group of students, and your group meets regularly, focusing on specific themes across classes.  

In a learning community, you’ll learn to:

• Synthesize knowledge and ideas across different disciplines
• Understand patterns
• Make connections among different schools of knowledge
• Integrate your studies with personal experience

Learning communities also build community among students, between students and their teachers, and among faculty.

How a Learning Community Course Works

At Cascadia, a learning community might meet 2 days a week for 4 hours per day during a quarter. The program may include workshops, lectures, field trips, and especially seminars, writing assignments, and group projects.
 

In seminars, you learn to analyze and critique arguments, cooperate in group discussion, read critically, and debate logically. In writing assignments and group projects, you clarify and express your ideas and make connections among many subjects.
 

Learning communities are part of Cascadia’s integrated educational approach, which provides coordinated program curricula so that you can start small and continue toward more advanced skills and/or education if and when you choose. You can apply credit from learning community courses toward an academic degree or professional technical degree and usually when you transfer to a 4-year college or university.

Learning Community Courses

For current learning community courses, see the Class Schedules/Catalog.

Some past learning community courses have included:

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• “Seeing” Research Become Action: Talking Stories with Our Communities. Courses: Art Appreciation and Composition II. Combine research with creating visual and written documentation of the people in our neighborhoods, and take our growing understanding of what is happening to actively engage in ways that respect and honor them.
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• Swimming Upstream? The Environment, Power, and Democracy in the United States. Courses: Themes and Methods in Environmental Science and American Government. Focus on how U.S. political, economic, social, and cultural developments have altered the natural world in which we live.
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  Being Human: Reading and Writing in Cultural Anthropology. Courses: Cultural Anthropology and College Reading and Writing. Through an examination of social institutions such as kinship, belief systems, marriage and subsistence, as well as cultural taboos and the effects of development on indigenous peoples, students will find their distinct writing voice by exploring the human experience.