How Curricular Infusion Can Work in Your Discipline Courses

Read here to learn more about how to leverage the key cognitive structures and content of your own discipline to develop students’ skills with developing personal responsibility and interdependence.

Qualities of Effective Student Success Infusions

Infusion is as much about pedagogy as it is about content.
It’s not enough to tell students to buy a calendar or to remind students of deadlines (although those are important).  Curricular infusions embed support for student development in the fabric of the course.

The most effective infusions will address specific challenges students in your discipline face as they work through your course material. 
For example, if math anxiety leads many of your students to procrastinate, develop an infusion that addresses both time management and avoiding procrastination while also including some math anxiety strategies or course design features.

The best infusions will allow for time in class for students to work with and talk about the strategy or tool or activity.  
If you create homework assignment sequences, be sure to note how you will reinforce home learning and development during class time.

The best infusions build in reinforcement and recursivity throughout the term. 
Whenever possible, plan at least for an early-term, mid-term and late-term engagement with the activity. 

The best infusions build assessment into the design of the infusion. Be sure to use Classroom Assessment Techniques to measure the effectiveness of your assignments.

Leverage the Key Concepts of Your Discipline

The best infusions use the language and cognitive constructs of your discipline to reinforce critical thinking skills as they develop and reinforce time management and self-management. 

For many Lane students, personal responsibility and interdependence can be fraught.  It takes critical thinking, reflection and decision making to develop these skills--and these are skills that are being taught in your classes in different contexts. The best infusions leverage this thinking to change students’ behavior for their own benefit.

Ideas to explore for Discipline-based Infusion of Personal Responsibility and Interdependence:

• SCIENCE Using the Scientific Method—hypothesizing, fact-finding, evaluation of evidence—to develop skills in and deepen understanding of personal responsibility and interdependence.
  
  
• MATH Using graphing skills to create relationships between personal responsibility and success and or personal responsibility and interdependence.
  
  
• MATH STATISTICS SOCIOLOGY Using principles of prediction and proportions to develop personal responsibility and interdependence.
  
  
• DIVERSITY/MULTICULTURAL UNDERSTANDING Across disciplines, developing assignments that look at cross-cultural understandings of the interplay between personal/individual responsibility and interdependence.
  
  
• CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY Use an investigation of the cultural and historical roots of modern concepts of individual effort, personal responsibility and interdependence. Becoming familiar with other cultures’ notions of time management and self-management/priorities and then embedding a Lane context into time management.
  
  
• HUMANITIES Help students see the constructs of personal responsibility and interdependence in their historical, cultural, artistic and aesthetic contexts. How can situating students present actions within this context improve their own success?
  
  
• CRITICAL THINKING Developing problem-solving skills of working with competing demands, in competitive environments—when personal responsibility and interdependence might operate dynamically.
  
  
• WRITING Work on activities and assignments that could improve the interplay between individual writing and collaborative projects. Embed development of more effective group work into your curriculum.
  
  
• BUSINESS/MANAGEMENT Using discussions of procedures and processes to reinforce students’ thinking about personal responsibility and interdependence.
  
  
• ECONOMICS BUSINESS Discussions of human resources and how understanding the interplay between personal responsibility and interdependence can inform resource allocation decisions.
  
  
• EDUCATION Using a case-study approach to foster student engagement with assessing their own sense of personal responsibility and their own use of interdependence.
  
  
• GRAPHIC DESIGN/MEDIA ARTS/DATA ANALYSIS Investigating and representing personal responsibility and interdependence in an interplay with another variable.
  
  
• ART/APPLIED DESIGN Independent creative projects, posters, artworks that involve individual and collective contributions/collaborations.
  
  
• ALL FIELDS Active and collaborative projects that highlight and promote understandings of effective group dynamics and the interplay between personal responsibility and collectivity/interdependence.
  

IV. Adapting College Success Curriculum

Lane’s College Success course utilizes Skip Downing’s On Course curriculum, which is a great place to start for teachers wishing to improve students’ academic behaviors and “college knowledge.”  The course textbook, On Course Strategies for Creating Success in College and In Life is available to faculty; contact Lida Herburgerfor a copy.  There is also a useful website with faculty infusions from colleges across the country: http://bit.ly/qlRk7F

The On Course curriculum is just one resource for developing curricular infusions for your classes. Many pedagogical resources may be available through the discipline contact program in your department.