by Charles Zola, Assistant to the President in Mission Integration, Director of the Catholic and Dominican Institute, and Associate Professor of Philosophy

High Impact Practices (HIPs) and Learning Communities (LCs)

The AAC&U identified Several High-Impact Practices (HIPs) designed to significantly improve student success (Brownell and Swaner xiii). One type of HIP is a living learning community (LLC) where faculty and students engage in a more focused and intentional way than is normally experienced in traditional courses. LLCs can take various forms, and in 2016, the Catholic and Dominican Institute of Mount Saint Mary College launched a LLC inspired by the heritage and mission of the school entitled, The Dominican Scholars of Hope (DSH) Program.

Open to all Mount students regardless of religious affiliation, the program cultivates the Dominican value of contemplation in the lives of students. This post provides an overview of how reflective engagement in the diverse requirements of the program heightens members’ self-awareness and actualizes their capacity for self-improvement and ability to contribute to the community.     

Background: Dominican Contemplation and the Four Dominican Pillars

Study and contemplation engage all of reality in the pursuit of the true and the good for the sake of others. … Dominicans have engaged the reality of the world and sought a deeper truth through assiduous study and contemplation. Dominican pedagogy, then, is a union of study and contemplation in the service of truth, wherever it leads.” (The Dominican Charism in American Higher Education.)

Since its founding in the 13th-century, Saint Dominic de Guzman recognized the essential contribution that formal academic study and contemplation had in fulfilling the objectives of the Order. For nearly eight centuries, these values shaped the intellectual tradition of the Dominicans and the schools that they founded. The Dominican intellectual tradition articulates an intimate connection between the intellectual and practical ends of life mediated through community and service.

Dominican saint and scholar Saint Thomas Aquinas weighed the merits between scholarly activity and service. Reasoning that it is better to illuminate than to shine, Aquinas argued what has been gained in study and contemplation is meant to be shared with others: contemplare et contemplate aliis trader (to contemplate and to share with others what has been contemplated). Consequently, the Dominican ethos is structured around four main values or pillars: spirituality, study, community, and service. 

The Dominican Scholars of Hope and Metacognition

The objectives of the DSH program are similar to those proposed for LCs in the LEAP initiative, but refracted through the prism of Dominican higher education’s emphasis on the four pillars. As such, the program has the following objectives: 1. cultivate students’ academic development through membership in a supportive learning community that is conducive to study and scholarship; 2. foster students’ personal, spiritual, and social development through community-building activities; 3. foster students’ character formation through participation in programs related to community service and social justice.

DSH programming aims to cultivate a contemplative disposition in the students, guiding and encouraging them to develop habits of mind and heart that align with the practices and outcomes of metacognition, cultivating awareness and using that awareness to guide actions.

~Spirituality~

The Dominican tradition understands spirituality as a means to gain deeper awareness of self, the world and God. In turn, self-awareness intimately links to the deeper existential questions of life concerning meaning and purpose.

Weekly meditation and journaling promotes this objective. Weekly meetings begin with time for quiet reflection and communal prayer. Students are provided a brief explanation of a religiously based theme, followed by reflective questions that invite students to consider how the values or lessons illustrated by the theme may relate to their own lives or the larger community.

After a period of quiet reflection and contemplation, students are invited to share their thoughts with the group. Student feedback varies, but often students share personal feelings of stress or anxiety related to school, personal issues, or current events. Other times, students express recognition of their limitations and see, in this kind of prayer or religious meditation, the means by which they find inner strength and resiliency to face whatever might challenge them.

In addition to the public, communal meditation, students are also strongly encouraged to journal. Each year, members receive a bound journal, with the expectation that they will use it to record their personal thoughts throughout the year. This type of reflection may be more compelling to students who are introverted and reluctant to share their thoughts in the weekly meditation period.  

The experiences of communal reflection and journaling provides an opportunity wherein students are able to assess their personal values in light of spirituality. In doing so, they can recalibrate, redirect or recommit to their values.     

~Community and Service~

Free to select the type of service event that best suits their schedules, members of the DSH are required to participate in three community service events per academic year. Afterward, students submit a reflection on their participation. The reflection exercise asks them to consider three main points in order to heighten their awareness of the impact of their service and how that might affect them going forward:

• What circumstances or conditions created the need to offer service to others? 
• What impact do you see your service having in the lives of others?
• In what ways has your service changed any of your attitudes about others, the world, or yourself?

In reading and commenting on the students’ reflections on service, I have been struck by how much the students empathize with the plight of those who are less fortunate than they are. Their reflection helps to engender a greater understanding of and appreciation for their own ability to help others, and, more importantly, a greater sensitivity to the needs of others.

~Study~

The DSH program neither offers nor requires any particular courses. However, the program encourages students to view education in a more holistic way that is not limited to a traditional classroom setting and major requirements. This objective coincides with the Dominican ideal that values contemplation as an “engage[ment] in the reality of the world.”

Free to choose from a broad range of approved events, members are required to write three formal reflection exercises per academic semester that are based upon an academic or co-curricular activity. Among these are communal field trips to educational sites, attending guest lectures, artistic performances, participation in campus workshops, or extra-curricular activities.

The reflection exercise asks students consider several points:

• What did they learn, and did it relate to a subject they are currently studying?
• Did the event make them more interested in learning more about the topic?
• Did their views or perspectives change because of the event?
• Will their future actions change because of what they learned or experienced?

The students’ papers are returned with comments and become part of their individual portfolio. At the end of the academic year, students review their portfolio that also includes their community service reflections. They then engage in a summary and evaluative reflection, considering how they have developed and matured through participation in the program’s requirements.

Conclusion

In my estimation, the end-of-the-year reflective summation best reveals the metacognitive value of the program. Similar to Aristotle’s definition of god as “thought thinking itself,” the students’ annual review challenges them to develop awareness of how their own ideas and values may have been strengthened, developed, or transformed over the course of the year.

Personal change and development rarely occur in one moment or due to one event; it is usually a gradual process. The portfolio review provides students the opportunity to view themselves over a short span of time using their own reflective narrative as the means to gain a better sense of themselves and the unique contribution that they can make to social justice and the common good.

WORKS CITED

Brownell, J.E., and L. E. Swaner. 2010. Five High Impact Practices: Research on Learning Outcomes, Completion, and Quality. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

The Dominican Charism in American Higher Education: A Vision in Service of Truth.  2013.  Dominican Higher Education Colloquium: 11.