FREE - Truckee Meadows Community College

Faculty for Radical Empowerment and Enlightenment (FREE) is TMCC’s longest-running interdisciplinary theme-based learning community, operating continuously since its founding in 2003.

Learning communities—theme collaborations among cohorts of educators and students—are forums for shared social-emotional learning to deepen academic engagement. F.R.E.E. is an example of a "laboratory" learning community, focusing on imaginative evolving student-centered themes to engage previously scheduled courses into big picture academics through a year-long series of events. Involving approximately 200 students and 10 active cross-disciplinary faculty each year, F.R.E.E. centers on holism. FREE is successful because we use existing institutional bureaucracy—class schedule and catalog curricula—to gather a ready-made critical mass of interdisciplinary students, professors, and community members into active, universally-relevant, interdisciplinary themes.

2019 Topic: Food

The topic for the 2019 F.R.E.E. event was Food. Nearly 20 different departments at the college participated bringing very unique ways of looking at relationships with food.

History

FREE began in 2003 at TMCC in Reno, Nevada after education professor Micaela Rubalcava read Henry Giroux’s Public Spaces, Private Lives (2001), which argues for hope and action in democratic participation through public education.

Drawing on the flash mob model, Rubalcava realized that the existing class schedule is an efficient structure to elicit capacity attendance and student participation in “big ideas” and interdisciplinary learning. She had observed that many well-meaning panels on campus were unpredictably and poorly attended. The FREE model that Rubalcava organized built-in a critical mass of student attendance because participating professors bring their own students to the culminating event during scheduled class time.

Organic and Evolving

FREE started with a few professors who taught at the same time in 2003, gathering all their students into the second floor of the library for a panel of professor lectures.

Then FREE changed to become student-centered, after an anthropology and art instructor brainstormed that students themselves should present their findings and interact before the culminating event. FREE, then, is always on the path of continual improvement.

Most recently, FREE participants have been playing with "flipping" FREE, through student-driven questions and content; for example, the 2017-2018 FREE theme of "(Hum)Animals" was generated by a student survey for topics.

Big Idea Themes

FREE has explored many big idea themes, including:

vision
censorship
freedom of expression
colorblindness
fear
evolution vs. creation
creativity
paradigm shifts
mythology

organic
binary opposition
diversity
nature vs. nurture
critical thinking
water
(hum)animals
food

2017 Topic: Water

Here are the highlights from the 2017 F.R.E.E. presentation on the topic of Water. Student research and art projects combined to form the backbone of the information presented.

Three Core Principles of FREE

1. Revolution from Within: Interdisciplinary “Big Idea” Theme Within the Existing Class Schedule

FREE events occur within the existing class schedule, gathering together interdisciplinary “cells” of three or more classes. If more than one cell of three or more classes exist in any given semester, then all cells coordinate their culminating student events in the same week to cohere around a single “big idea” theme.

Each FREE event, which occurs once in the semester, gathers together between 75–200 students who have automatic "buy in" because FREE-affiliated professors bring their own students to the big event. The professors have previously introduced the agreed upon theme to their students before the culminating event. Theme introduction might be intense with several readings, cross-class collaborations, and activities, or it might be introductory. But some preparation and concept integration occurs for students before the big event.

Meanwhile, FREE teachers share readings, insights, curricula, assessment ideas, and interdisciplinary analysis throughout the year to establish a learning community of teachers as intellectuals. FREE teachers meet together about three times each semester to plan and share. FREE teachers are “cultural creators,” supporting one another in Victor Turner’s concept of “communitas” that generate “social dramas” and ritual metaphors, such that faculty and students learn how to take educational risks together in order to empower thinking and transform understanding.

2. Diverse Student Participation: Active Student Learning Community and Presentations

Students engage interdisciplinary learning during pre-culminating-event interactions and during the large culminating event. Teams of students present their own findings visually, linguistically, mathematically, statistically, with performance, media, or in any number of active learning methodologies. Some boundaries on student presentations exist: 5-7 minutes and 5-7 slides. After students present, then faculty facilitate holistic assessment to integrate all participating students in interdisciplinary evaluation and imagination.

3. Interdisciplinary Assessment Display

FREE culminates in a big idea theme across disciplines with results in a holistic assessment outcome, such as a mural, display, or performance. The idea of a FREE assessment is discovery, collaboration, and imagination. The intent is to push for a crucial thinking breakthroughs during the assessment activity, which usually involves physical movement, collaborative artwork, analysis of written notes, and data collection. This assessment display often uses the Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) interdisciplinary approach. This assessment display also includes globalization and multicultural curriculum.

Colour Blinders

This condensed version of the full Colour Blinders event is just a taste of the experiences of TMCC students and other contributors on the issue of race.

How to Participate in FREE

Students, professors, and community members may participate in FREE in two primary ways. The simplest is to test out FREE by jumping in on the FREE events days to participate in the interdisciplinary theme-based learning activities that might include performance art, lectures, student-team presentations of slides and videos, and then participate in the active demonstrative assessment.

The second way involves commitment to the year-long learning community process, which consists of approximately 5 meetings: 3 planning, 1 or more event, and 1 debrief, pre-event student integration and communication through email to share resources and ideas.

To be part of the full FREE learning community experience, faculty look at their existing class schedules and form interdisciplinary cells, according to class meeting times. For example, five professors—say from biology, computer science, engineering, math, and visual arts—who each are scheduled to teach on Tuesdays from 8–9:15 a.m. meet before the semester starts to select a big idea theme.

Next these five professors select a single date within the semester when all their students will meet. Meanwhile, the professors weave in a few readings, projects, or problems related to the theme into course syllabi and some professors may swap learning activities and findings with one another.

Then on the designated culminating FREE event, students present the theme information to each other. The five professors facilitate the student presentations and active assessment that results in an integrated outcome display.

For more information, please contact us.

F.R.E.E. Learning Community