For These Duke Students, Durham Is Their Classroom

Locals may notice first-year Duke students taking notes and asking questions in City Hall, the Hayti Heritage Center, local churches and other places downtown this month.

The students are preparing for a class that will get them engaged in Durham's past and present, exploring issues that range across ethics, race, human rights and class.

The students in history professor Susan Thorne's seminar on the history of Duke and Durham will work in groups in the community to collect statistics about topics such as economic development and the demography of the prison population. They'll also visit local sites.

In designing the course with associate professor of African and African American Studies and history Thavolia Glymph, Thorne says one of their goals was to get [the students] off campus with research projects. "We're historians so we also want to help them locate themselves in Durham, in a larger, historical continuum. It helps them integrate their learning because they come back and talk about people's reaction to them being Duke students."

Courses such as Thorne's that incorporate real-world learning experiences into formal classes are becoming increasingly common at Duke and other universities. A recent survey of members of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) found that more than two-thirds of institutions now combine courses with integrative or engaged learning practices. Duke is among those at the forefront of this trend, according to Debra Humphreys, vice president for communications and public affairs at AACU.

"Engaged learning practices -- everything from study abroad to undergraduate research -- make a difference for students in terms of higher retention rates, higher GPAs and higher satisfaction rates," says Humphreys. "These practices educationally are the right thing to do, and it turns out that employers agree."

Duke has been pursuing these and a growing number of other "engaged" practices since revising undergraduate education through its "Curriculum 2000" initiative.

"In a nutshell, Duke's curriculum is designed to create a general education framework through traditional means of exposing students to different areas of knowledge, but also to ways of knowing things -- through skills-based research, learning how to write, learning a foreign language and developing perspectives on ethics, science and technology," says Steve Nowicki, dean and vice provost for undergraduate education and a biology professor at Duke.

Nowicki says President Richard Brodhead, Provost Peter Lange and other senior administrators remind students frequently to take advantage of learning opportunities beyond the campus and to put their "knowledge in service to society."

Duke Chapel Dean Sam Wells helps his students do just that. He weaves students' experiences outside the classroom together with readings and writing assignments in his course "Ethics in an Unjust World."

"You learn by reflecting on what you've done," Wells says of his approach. "This form of learning gives students opportunities to see people rather than issues."

Rising Duke senior Emily Nuckolls, a student in Wells' class last semester, says she benefitted from combining her classwork with interactions with members of the Durham community.

"It was good for the whole class because we could talk about the [models of social engagement] all day long, but it didn't become real until we went to the vigils and to urban ministries," she says.

Duke's move toward engaging with the local community for a more holistic learning experience emerges from the same wellspring that drives Duke students to "paint their faces blue and jump up and down in Cameron [Indoor Stadium] for three hours," according to Nowicki.

"Duke is a fairly entrepreneurial place. People are open to new ideas -- they let ideas flourish," he says, pointing to student-initiated examples such as Duke's energy-efficient Smart Home and the Ubuntu civic-engagement living community, which is opening this fall.

Rising sophomore Vinayak Nikam says Duke's growing emphasis on engaged learning experiences is one of the things that attracted him to the university.

"I knew if I pushed hard enough, I could create an opportunity for myself," says Nikam, who is spending the summer at Duke getting hands-on lab experience as a Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Fellow.

"I enjoy learning what's going on in the lab," he says. "This program is a great opportunity for me to see that there is so much more to science. It has broadened my horizons a lot."

Like Nikam, other Duke students are increasingly seeing college as extending beyond formal semesters and the four corners of campus, says Nowicki.

"They see it as an integrated package that can help them connect their experience in the classroom to the real world and back again," he says.