History of Freshman Academy

Learning Communities as a National Movement

The learning communities movement started during the 1920s at the University of Wisconsin, where Alexander Meiklejohn set up an Experimental College. Meiklejohn was concerned that increased academic specialization in the universities would lead to neglect of general education and a lost sense of the social purposes and responsibilities higher education owes to the larger community.

The main purpose of education, as Meiklejohn saw it, was to develop good citizens. With increasing specialization and separation of colleges, general education and education for citizenship would become nobody's business, and no one's concern. In response, the Experimental College formed a structure that would synthesize class issues and promote interdisciplinary learning. This structure included cooperation between professors of various specialties who linked the topics of their classes; cohorts of students who took these classes as a set and focused on integration of the various subjects; and registration based on these sets of classes. These types of class organization later became known as learning communities.

Meiklejohn's Experimental College was short lived, but his goals and ideas about education gradually caught on. Today, between 400 and 500 colleges and universities have implemented some version of learning communities.

Learning Communities and Freshman Academy at BYU

Experiments with learning communities started at BYU in 1993, and by 1997 Freshman Academy had substantially taken its present form. Since the year 2000, Freshman Academy has grown to serve nearly 40% of the incoming student body—between 1800 and 2000 students. FA's collaboration with a growing number of colleges and departments across campus, such as Nursing, Engineering, Theatre/Media Arts, Biology, Chemistry, Honors, and Communications, reflects this huge growth. Another new component of many FA communities is the addition of a student development class for an hour each week, which helps reinforce good learning habits and good citizenship, as well as the interdisciplinary relationships between the linked classes. The use of the internet has assisted dramatically with the complexities of application, registration, and communication.