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When Laurie Hale, assistant professor of education at Indiana University South Bend, learned that 46 percent of all freshmen drop out of school, she wanted to act.
"We were losing about half of our freshmen," Hale said. "I was appalled by the numbers and I wanted to do something about that."
Hale and Ellen Maher, acting dean of education at IUSB, took action and wrote a grant proposal to the IU Strategic Directions Charter (SDC) program that created the Threshold Learning Community (TLC) at IUSB.
"We are going to teach students the craft and culture of higher education," Hale said.
Threshold Learning Community is a three-pronged approach to keeping students in school, Hale said.
First, students must understand learning as a craft on the university level. Enter the Threshold Seminar. Students are instructed by IUSB educators, including physics professor Steve Shore, in courses that teach students the collegiate approach to studying, listening, research and test-taking.
"We want to dispel perceptions that this is grade 13," she said.
TLC offers one- and three-credit hour courses to incoming freshmen to educate them about the university atmosphere. Currently, five sections of the one-credit voluntary threshold seminar are being taught at IUSB and 12 three-credit seminars are offered to freshmen considered to be "at risk" of dropping out.
Mike Mancini, academic adviser at the School of Education, teaches one of the Threshold Seminar sections and first assigned his class to E-mail him with prospective research topics for a course objective. While on the surface this is a fairly simple exercise, the students had to find the computer labs, learn how to log on and access their E-mail accounts. Most important, they had to do it on their own.
"I had a non-traditional student E-mail me who had never touched a computer," Mancini said. "(The assignment) got her to start using a computer."
Second, students are introduced to the social aspects of college life. Freshman Division's Rick Dennie leads the social-education arm of the Learning Communities and encourages students to take part in the full experience of a college life.
"The main purpose is to weave (students) into the social fabric of the campus," Dennie said.
Threshold Seminar students have gotten involved by attending the Student Activity Board-sponsored Fall Kick-Off as well as a campus concert featuring the comedian Gallagher.
Dennie and a group of peer mentors, who are assigned to each Threshold Learning Community, work to bring students back to campus on a social level by attending basketball games, concerts and programs sponsored by campus groups.
The peer mentor concept is the third portion of the program. Peer mentors attend key courses where dropout rates are the highest, and work side-by side with freshmen who need tutoring. The peer mentors have previously taken these courses and act as a guide to those struggling with the classes.
"When they get connected to somebody that's in their shoes, I think that can be more helpful," Mancini said.
How well the program works will be counted by the number of freshmen who return to IUSB in the future. The Threshold Learning Community, in its second year at IUSB, has a goal to increase retention by 10 percent by the end of the third year, when the SDC grant expires.