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Most universities respond to public demands for accountability in the form of increased attention to rates of performance, retention, and graduation. In our experience, these metrics are often administrators' or departments' main concerns when conducting self-studies for program review. However, there are other important measures of student success prior to these outcomes that are often overlooked or dismissed as classroom issues. When considered within an institutional framework of faculty development, we feel that providing faculty with opportunities to codevelop course content and approaches to teaching and learning can also contribute greatly to student engagement and success.
Toward that end, a team of California State University-Los Angeles (CSU-LA) faculty from our biology, Chicana/o studies, child development and family studies, English, and liberal studies departments recently participated in the AAC&U Transparency and Problem-Centered Learning project. In order to contribute to the implementation of a civic-learning requirement in CSU-LA's new general education (GE) curriculum, our team chose to pilot GE courses that focused on civic- or service-learning projects in local communities. The team's goal was to implement the new GE civic-learning requirement in a way that meaningfully engaged the predominantly Latino, first-generation college students who attend CSU-LA. We focused on issues and needs in local communities addressed through a service-learning project or "real-world" issues considered in a civic-learning course-where students did not spend time working in a community setting. Thus, we defined our approach as "problem-centered" and we developed assignments that allowed students to research solutions to problems in relation to the cultural wealth of community residents and the process of problem solving outlined in the Problem Solving VALUE Rubric.
Our team project used transparency within a student-centered, community cultural wealth (Yosso 2005) framework that highlighted students' life experiences and acknowledged the cultural competencies they brought with them to their identities as college students. This community cultural wealth approach had several advantages: it provided a common platform for problem-centered learning across a variety of disciplines, and students' knowledge and ways of knowing not only informed but also shaped their instructors' teaching and learning.
A STUDENT-CENTERED APPROACH TO PROBLEMBASED LEARNING
The community cultural wealth (Yosso 2005) approach views students' cultural knowledge and life experience as academic assets. As a theory of education, it can be applied in pedagogical practice...