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Senior inquiry: a university/high school collaboration.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Portland State University has been collaborating with four area high schools to deliver a high school course based on the university's Freshman Inquiry model. Senior Inquiry is taught by a team of high school and university faculty partnered with peer mentors from the university. It is designed to provide college experience and credit for any senior in good academic standing who wants to gain the skills needed to succeed in college.

Project Description

The University Studies program at Portland State University (PSU) is engaged in a collaborative project with four metropolitan high schools to provide yearlong inquiry courses for high school seniors as an extension of the Freshman Inquiry general education program at PSU (White, 1994). The project began in 1995 at Westview High School in suburban Beaverton, and has since added Grant, Vocational Village, and Jefferson High Schools in urban Portland. Westview teaches "Embracing Einstein's Universe: Language, Culture and Relativity," an interdisciplinary curriculum based on University Studies' goals: communication, critical thinking, diversity of human experience, and social responsibility (Rennie-Hill & Toth, 1999). The teaching team consists of one PSU faculty member, three high school faculty, and two PSU juniors or seniors who act as peer mentors.

The course meets for 85 minutes, 5 days a week. Any motivated student who wishes to work at college level may take the course, which offers support to achieve college level standards and 15 college credits. It is designed to be a bridge between high school and college, a truly academically collegiate experience within the high school.

Senior Inquiry at Westview High School

Senior Inquiry is distinctive because it is a learning community that is a powerful new tool for secondary education. The learning community created in Senior Inquiry at Westview High School is unique in our teaching experience. Powerful intellectual and personal bonds are forged. Students are more engaged in learning and more concerned with one another than in any other class. We have asked ourselves why Senior Inquiry, alone in the high school, becomes a community. In our experience, as in the literature (Shapiro & Levine, 1999), this arises from the combination of: team-teaching, an interdisciplinary theme, an emphasis on active learning, a value is placed on emotional as well as intellectual responses, and peer mentorship.

The team is at the very heart of Senior Inquiry. We decided early on that we did not want the class to be merely a series of "experts," each teaching about his/her own field. We pledged to both plan and teach together and to teach everything. The result has been a class where the teachers set a tone of camaraderie and friendship. We also constantly model the excitement of learning since each of us...

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