The Learning Communities Project: Join a Circle, Build a Foundation
From family and friends to clubs and activities, we are all members of countless social circles. Now we invite you to join a different kind of circle: an academic learning community dedicated to helping you get the most out of your college experience. You'll build knowledge and skills that will see you through your undergraduate years and beyond. But a community is only as strong as its individual members—we need your active participation in this project. One of the important differences between high school and college is that in college you are more responsible for your own learning.
A learning community can help you to take control of your education, and be more engaged from the start. As is the case throughout AU, you won't be a passive recipient of information dispensed by a distant professor. Instead, you'll be an active participant in a group of people wrestling with complex issues, guided by professors and specially trained upper-level student community associates whose main goal is to facilitate encounters. You'll explore issues through dialogue and debate with other students who share your passion for a particular topic.
But in these learning communities, the classroom is just the beginning of your education. Learning communities are focused on experience and take special advantage of our location in Washington, D.C., to bring the world into the classroom and to take the class out into the world. Your community will go on excursions into the city to enhance your learning in creative and unexpected ways. You'll visit important landmarks and places where world-changing decisions are made and then reflect on those experiences in class. You'll bring together insights gained from different classes and approach issues in diverse ways. Above all, you'll use your classroom as a base from which you start to explore the worlds of ideas, action, and service in active, participatory ways.
Your learning community is also your stable home from which to explore the wider university. You're not isolated from the rest of the campus by participating in a learning community—far from it. You're able to come to college and find an immediate connection with a group of students who share your interests. From there, you can use your learning community to explore the wider university from a supportive group in which you are already a valued member. With a myriad of options in clubs, sports, political activism, internships, service opportunities, and other activities on campus, you will discover many other communities in which to feel at home—many other circles to join.
But all of this works only if you agree to help us and, in turn, help yourself. So come build a learning community at American University, and lay the cornerstone of your college career and your future. Join a circle, build a foundation!
