At Southwestern College there is now an opportunity for students to get connected and get involved in its learning community hubs, and now has a physical space that provides an extra layer of support and resources.
There are four Learning Community Hubs available at Southwestern, each tied to different student populations.
The Bayan learning community is for students who want to learn about the Filipino American community in higher education. Chel learning community focuses on LGBTQIA life experiences and topics that relate to higher education for people in the LGBTQIA community. Chel is an Aztec Nahuatl word that means rainbow. SWC’s first learning community established is the Puente Project, with the mission to increase the number of Mexican Americans and Latinx students transitioning to four-year colleges and universities.
The Umoja community, which means unity, serves and promotes student success for all students, but through the lens of the African and African American perspective. There is the Athletic Learning community that focuses on student transfer and the student-athletic experience, and the First Year Experience community for new students with no prior college experience or a recent high school graduate.
“It is definitely a great resource that we now have on campus that has been institutionalized, and if students are interested, they should definitely take advantage of this,” said Learning Communities Hub Coordinator Brenna Leon.
Leon said a learning community is linked classes taught by faculty, while embedding the students’ cultural components into the learning.
“It is a cohort style of learning, so if students are interested in picking classes with students of similar backgrounds and interests, they can enroll in the learning communities and take classes at SWC within a learning community,” she said.
“My role, with the Learning Community Hub, is we now have a physical location on campus for our learning communities. That was established in Fall 2021, and we officially opened in Spring 2022, so we just completed our first semester as a physical space on campus for our learning community students to have a place on campus where they actually had a community, took their classes together on campus, so it is a brand new space that opened last semester.”
Leon said now, the linked courses taught are Personal Development and English that are transferable for students. It is up to the discretion of the program to add other courses.
“The largest benefit is that you can take linked class models with peers, so you are with the same group,” she said. “It is a one-year commitment. When you enroll in the learning community, you are in it for the entire academic school year. You are with the same group of students. You get assigned a counselor who really supports you throughout the entire year, so you have that direct one-on-one counselor support to go through that can provide you with support and resources. And they teach as well. Another benefit is it is heavily focused on transfer success. The goal for all our students is to be able to transfer to four-year universities or each their personal educational goals. We do many college visits to four-year universities to get the students exposed to their options after leaving Southwestern.”
Leon said the college is still recovering from COVID, but the numbers of students participating is growing, and the college is actively recruiting students for the program for the fall semester.
“The students have been very responsive to having the physical hub that they can come to when they are on campus. It makes it feel like they have more of a home on campus. They can stay and hang out in their learning communities. They have space, they can study, we have computers, and printing services for them,” she said.
Leon said students should enroll during registration.
“We are currently taking fall registration until the semester begins. Students can visit the counseling center if interested in the learning communities and the counseling center will direct them to the right counselor coordinator assigned to the learning community and they will walk them through and get them enrolled in the program,” she said.
