Abstract This project will create a framework for designing better general education experiences through social pedagogies, a set of teaching and learning practices that share certain goals and signature design elements, and which can be applied and adapted in diverse fields and curricular levels. The project will explore the idea that social pedagogies can be particularly effective at developing in students certain qualities of "adaptive expertise" such as the ability to use knowledge fluently and flexibly, to manage and proceed confidently from uncertainty, and to have self-awareness of one's knowledge. Our purpose is to capture the essential assignment structures of social pedagogies, and to create a clear, commonsense schema that demonstrates parallels between pedagogical practices and assessment issues. A collaborative core working group will document successful examples of social pedagogies with close attention to the evidence of student learning and development of usable rubrics for evaluating the criteria of successful student work. These core faculty, along with additional colleagues from participating institutions, will test the framework in the classroom with new implementations. Findings, cases, and a robust archive of student work will be documented through a guide that will be both print and digital.

Introduction Transforming general education courses In higher education we generally believe that our students' inexperience with a discipline precludes their substantive engagement with it. Consequently we design introductory and general education courses as broad surveys of a subject and as forums for faculty to impart a foundation of facts, concepts, and schema. We expect students to do little with the material beyond acquisition for future use. Yet cognitive and educational research clearly tells us that active and engaged learning experiences deepen student understanding; we also know that awareness of intellectual contexts and processes allows students to apply knowledge more readily to novel problems. The following questions then should guide the transformation of general education courses as a critical focus of educational reform efforts in colleges and universities: Can we embrace our students' inexperience with academic disciplines and provide context and structure to their search for knowledge by implementing pedagogies that develop the habits of expertise in our students? If so, then what qualities should be embodied by new pedagogies to foster the development of attitudes and approaches of expert learners among even our most novice learners? Can this engagement foster an understanding not only of the knowledge of disciplines but also of the ways of knowing that are the intellectual foundations of the disciplines? Adaptive expertise as a learning goal We want first to clarify what we mean by "expertise" as a learning goal and suggest that the phrase "adaptive expertise" better captures our meaning. "Adaptive expertise" is defined by cognitive research as the ability to use knowledge fluently and flexibly, to manage and proceed confidently from uncertainty, and to have self-awareness of one's knowledge. If in higher education we are indeed preparing students to meet the real-world intellectual challenges they will face following graduation (to be "lifelong learners" in the language popular today), then the qualities of adaptive expertise must be integral to our educational mission. Social pedagogies as a promising venue for active and engaged learning What do we already know about pedagogies that successfully stimulate the development of adaptive expertise in students? It is clear that active and engaged learning opportunities have demonstrated success for student learning, yet these terms are sufficiently broad to merit a closer look at what categories of pedagogies they might encompass. There is further compelling evidence that learning is strongly affected by the social setting in which it takes place. In particular, educational research has shown that when individuals act within social situations as shapers and communicators of knowledge, they gain adaptive expertise around this knowledge. This is the basis of the emergence of what are termed "social pedagogies" - a term traditionally defined as a set of strategies for creating educational environments in which learning occurs in the context of a community, to which we are adding an emphasis on activities that ask learners to represent knowledge for others. What do social pedagogies look like in practice? Our provisional framework emerges from a set of innovative core case studies focused on social pedagogies developed by the participating faculty. These innovative assignments in a variety of disciplines have all been developed and revised over a period of years. In these cases, faculty around the country have found that successful social pedagogies share certain broad goals and elements of design. All of the social pedagogies included in this project share two overarching goals: They strive to give students a strong sense of purpose that motivates their learning and they help students develop their own voice as part of a rich intellectual conversation. These are of course very abstract goals that might belong to any number of active and engaged learning approaches. These two core goals of purpose and voice are further defined through at least three common signature elements of design that characterize social pedagogies and their course contexts: A concrete product or authentic task, the creation of a sense of community or audience, and a process that gives students critical feedback from sources other than faculty. These three signature design elements can take a wide range of flexible forms, adapted to various disciplinary contexts. Among the approaches represented in the project: First-year students in a literature and writing course create multimedia annotations of historical and contemporary novels, using text, images, and audio, as a way of communicating close critical readings of difficult texts to others. Students in an introductory-level undergraduate history course create short documentary digital stories for public audiences to enhance their interpretive and analytical abilities and build meaningful connections between their own life experiences and larger social and cultural contexts. Students in a literature seminar use guided writing in online discussion spaces to develop their "interpretive authority" in their first exposure to Shakespeare's plays. Students in a non-majors science course gain an introduction to the discipline and deepen their learning by creating lessons on biology curriculum and teaching them to students in an urban elementary school. Qualities of Adaptive Expertise Promoted through Social Pedagogies We believe that these signature elements, when successfully incorporated into a course, can foster social learning contexts that immerse students in the culture, language, and practice of diverse academic disciplines. And in doing so, social pedagogies engage students in certain ways of thinking that emphasize many of the characteristics of adaptive expertise: the flexible application of knowledge to different situations, including the distillation and structuring of knowledge for others, the integration of knowledge across seemingly disparate areas, and the growing awareness of the extent and limitations of one's knowledge. Although these kinds of thinking processes and habits of mind are typically valued by faculty in general education courses, they are rarely the focus of course design, resulting in a misalignment among goals, activities, and outcomes.

Project A key premise of this project is that communication-intensive practices can be highly effective in cultivating these qualities. Our purpose is to capture the essential assignment structures, and to create a clear, commonsense schema that demonstrates parallels between pedagogical practices and assessment issues. The working group that we will gather will add to our knowledge base about social pedagogies and their applications to liberal education along two lines of research: 1) Design of Effective Social Pedagogies: Not all social pedagogies are equally effective at stimulating student engagement and learning. We need to understand what are the common principles of effective social pedagogies and how faculty can work from these common principles to design new curricula. More specifically we seek to understand what constellation or combination of elements is important to make these learning activities work. We will construct these principles such that they can be widely incorporated across the curriculum and adapted to accommodate different student populations, class contexts, and disciplines. 2) Evaluation and Assessment of Student Work: Social pedagogies produce complex student work products that are often unfamiliar in both their format and their learning objectives to faculty. The inherent challenges of evaluating such work can often discourage faculty from embracing social pedagogies in their own classrooms. Faculty in the project will look at the ways that social pedagogies challenge us to broaden how we assess student learning, especially novices engaged in this kind of learning. We will aggregate faculty insights on developmental stages: What defines novice, intermediate, and advanced work in each of these areas? What are new forms of evidence, especially non-traditional evidence? How might we learn to read this kind of evidence? What are some model assessment rubrics that would help faculty adopt these strategies? Our collaborative working group of faculty represents diverse disciplines (literature and writing, cultural studies, history, sociology, psychology, biology, mathematics, early childhood education, and chemistry) and institutions (liberal arts college, community college, public comprehensive, and research university). These faculty will investigate and document teaching strategies and learning outcomes from a range of successful and proven practices that can be classified as social pedagogies. This project draws on the methods of the scholarship of teaching and learning, an approach to reflective inquiry where faculty look closely at student work in their own classes for the purpose of pedagogical improvement. All of the faculty in this project have experience studying their own teaching - and students' learning - in this way. A key strength of the project is bringing the insights of these faculty, and their explorations of particular pedagogies in their contexts, to bear on a more generalized framework in order to illuminate the common features and strengths of this type of teaching and learning activity. These core cases are "successful and proven" in the sense that they all have shown evidence of student engagement and learning gains. They represent teaching approaches that have already undergone considerable reflection, revision, refinement, and some form of peer review through conference presentations and written publications. The core case studies will document examples of social pedagogies in three categories, those that place students in roles as: Discussants (in both oral and written conversations, especially online writing environments), Creators (of digital multimedia materials), and Teachers (in the development, delivery and analysis of curriculum) This initial documentation will allow us to define common elements that are instrumental in achieving student learning gains and, in doing so, refine our social pedagogy framework so that it might be implemented effectively by others. After identifying these common elements, we will test their applicability by applying them to new contexts by reworking or reframing course components, in line with the design elements of social pedagogies. This testing phase will be undertaken both by the core case study faculty as well as additional colleagues (at least two) from each of their campuses who will redesign an element of their courses along the lines of the framework.

Criteria for Success The primary measures of success for the project will be the capacity of the framework and case study materials to be useful to faculty as guides for designing their own classroom practices and assessments. The clarity, flexibility, and applicability of the framework will become evident through the testing phase, as well as through additional outreach activities. We have already submitted a working session proposal for the July 2007 meeting of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning that would subject the framework and examples of learning evidence to critique and discussion with an international audience of faculty and developers. Additionally, each participating faculty investigator will hold at least one similar workshop on her or his campus for the same purpose. Finally, the project participants - and select colleagues at their institutions - will serve as important peer reviewers for each other of materials that will end up in the guide. We will establish a mechanism whereby faculty in the project give critical cross-project feedback as a way of reviewing and strengthening the materials in the guide. In addition to the specific focus on social pedagogies, we hope that the project will also be a model for giving close attention to new ways to measure and capture meaningful dimensions of student learning and demonstrate how such measures can be an integral part of intentional and accountable curriculum redesign.