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  • High-Impact Practices and the Pandemic Normal:A Timeline
  • Marlowe Daly-Galeano (bio)

summer, 2018: in medias res

My colleagues and I have come back from a week-long summer institute, eager to transform our four-year college into a mecca of what the Association of American Colleges and Universities defines "high-impact practices" (or HIPs). AAC&U's comprehensive list of such practices includes first-year experiences, collaborative projects, undergraduate research, diversity/global learning, service learning, community-based learning, internships, and capstones among other educational practices designed to generate deep learning.1 We recognize much from the AAC&U list that is already in place at our institution, ranging from undergraduate research opportunities to service-and community-based learning. We simply haven't been referring to these components as "high-impact practices."

2018 to march, 2020: the pre-pandemic normal

Back on campus, we present workshops at our Center for Teaching and Learning and develop an initiative to support faculty as they work toward fostering student belonging by implementing HIPs in their general education [End Page 189] courses. Faculty create and share a number of high-impact projects. Our students engage in assignments that involve interviewing elders, creating photojournalism projects, measuring air pollutants, and developing Wikipedia sites about regional politics. While national studies have shown mixed results regarding the relationship between HIPs and student success,2 my colleagues and I know (from assessment of our pilot and anecdotal evidence), that HIPs are working well on our campus. Through collaboration, service, research, and experiential learning opportunities, students are actively engaging in campus and community life. Because we have so many first-generation, lower income, and commuter students, we know that extending opportunities for HIPs in both general education courses and courses within the majors can potentially improve students' connection to campus and college life, which might even increase our college's retention and graduation rates.

As an instructor of US and North American literature, I find that the HIPs framework helps me better articulate and emphasize the connections between my students' individual reading experiences and community building. I start designing service learning and community engagement assignments for all of my literature classes. This work allows us to show our broader community a tenet we hold dear: literature matters. In the context of these assignments, my students bring the director of a documentary about Henry David Thoreau to campus, hosting a community screening and dialogue. For the 150th anniversary of Little Women, we produce a "Reader's Guide" to the novel that we disseminate to local libraries. Additionally, my students host Moby-Dick reading marathons that draw people from campus and the broader community to a live, literature-focused event. It is exhilarating to see students from across the college (not just English majors!) camped out, sometimes for hours, munching on free snacks and hoping to win the door prizes, [End Page 190] while listening to their peers, professors, and community members reading from Moby-Dick.

I also begin developing performance-based projects, in which students turn their reading experiences into spontaneous live performances. For example, in an American literature survey course, students dress up as elements, texts, characters, or authors of Realism for our "American Realism Tea Party." They interact with classmates, sipping tea and staying in character, embodying various roles that include Huck Finn, Jack London, Money, and Nature. The students introduce themselves by explaining how they see themselves in relation to Realism, before entering into more spontaneous conversations. Nature and Money disagree about who exerts the stronger force over individuals, and the student who plays Huck Finn incessantly adjusts his corn-cob pipe.

Through planning, participating in, and reflecting on these community-based and performative projects, the students develop a special relationship to the American literature they study: it becomes timely, local, and relevant. They are also engaged in promoting the humanities and the study of literature, and by doing so, they practice explaining the value of our work to those unfamiliar with the field. These projects help students professionalize, and the assignments allow them to engage with literature actively and memorably. In short, HIPs help students gain more from the classroom experience.

As Peter Brown, Henry...

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