Name: Amy Eshleman
Position: Assistant Professor, Psychology
Notable Achievement: My scholarly work
has been published in esteemed journals
in my field, including Psychological Bulletin
and Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology. In 2004, I was granted the
Maureen Robinson Fellowship, an award
provided by Maureen Robinson, a member
of the Wagner College Board of Trustees,
to a faculty member in the Humanities or
Social Sciences.
About Wagner: I enjoy the opportunities
that Wagner College affords to work closely
with students through small class sizes,
by organizing academic advising in the first
year within the Learning Communities so
that my advisees are individuals I know well,
and through a commitment to involving
undergraduate students in research.
Our First Year Program (FYP) is designed to help students meet a number of goals. By integrating our courses, we want students to discover the connections between many different subjects. By linking courses to genuine fieldwork in communities and organizations, we believe students will discover the connections (and sometimes the disconnections) between ideas and real-world problems. The FYP Learning Communities create conversations between subjects so that what students learn in one course relates directly to the other. Beginning with the very first semester at Wagner, first-year students are involved in real-world problems and field work directly linked to their coursework.
Have you ever been lucky enough to take two courses that seem somehow to be in conversation with one another so that what you are learning in one directly relates to the other? We intentionally design learning in this way by creating Learning Communities (LC's). Simply stated, LC's are clusters of courses that are linked together by a single theme and that share a common set of students. The faculty plan their LC courses with overlapping assignments, common readings and joint problems so that courses share some common ground.
Wagner College gives its students the unique opportunity of linking Learning Communities to experiential learning. By virtue of our location in New York City, Wagner College is able to involve all students in the social, scientific and professional domains of the premier city of the nation.
The Wagner Plan links the LC's directly to field experience based on the theme of the Learning Community. In the first year LC, students are placed in carefully selected field sites in small groups made up of students from the LC. Students typically spend three hours per week at the designated site observing the organization, its practices and its dynamics. We link the field placements carefully to one of the three courses in the first year LC called a Reflective Tutorial (RFT). Faculty in each LC divide the students into smaller groups for the RFT with each faculty member serving as the professor for one of the RFT groups. The faculty member who teaches the RFT will also be the first year faculty advisor to all students in the RFT. The Reflective Tutorial emphasizes writing skills and discussion, where students link their field experiences directly to the course readings in all three LC courses. Because the field experiences are directly linked to academic course work, students learn how to scrutinize ideas in the light of real world experiences.