A. Paired Courses Across Departments
In the beginning of Dr. Grove’s career at Shippensburg University, she participated in the
Clustered Course Component of the University’s Honors Program. Working with faculty
members from Sociology and Speech Communications, they developed a course that integrated
an examination of American government, culture, and social stratification and provided students
with multiple opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge in writing and in persuasive
presentations. The experience provided the opportunity to work with devoted colleagues and
build a learning community for these Honors students.
The Clustered Course concept was expanded beyond the Honors Program and used at our
institution with at-risk students with a great deal of success. A variation of this concept, Paired
Courses, was incorporated as part of our General Education Program and is required of all first-
year students. Faculty members who teach General Education courses volunteer to coordinate
content and assignments; students are then assigned to both courses. Over the semester, they
establish great familiarity with one another and are exposed to an integrated cross-discipline
experience.
The success of the pairings program is wholly dependent on the effort of the faculty members
involved. Some examples of course integration include the pairing of College Writing with
Political Science, resulting in the creation of a 2004 Voters Guide for Students. Pairings between
History and Basic Oral Communication where speeches must be written about topics taken up in
history. Any number of experiments and innovations are tried among faculty and departments.
What is less common, if not unique, is course pairing within a department. The challenge was to
find an appropriate course and approach to integrating the two.
Comparative Politics and Research Methods
In searching for an answer to the Research Methods conundrum, I (Dr. Grove) reflected on my
experience in the Honors Program and the University’s movement to building learning
communities through its use of first-year Paired Courses. In a random conversation with a
colleague in the Psychology Department, he mentioned to me that he was having students
enroll concurrently for two of his courses in order to more effectively teach crisis intervention. I
was intrigued and thought about creating a Paired Course in the Political Science Department.
Given my reduced workload as the Department Chairperson (two versus four courses each
semester), I could not use the model from Psychology. So I asked my colleague, Dr. Cynthia
Botteron, to engage in the experiment with me.
I asked Dr. Botteron for two reasons. First, she has grappled with questions of research design
and measurement and has reached innovative solutions. She is by far and away the most
serious scholar in our Department and I wanted students to leave the course with an
appreciation of what it takes to be a successful researcher. Second, she was teaching
Introduction to Comparative Politics. I had the primary responsibility for teaching this course
before Dr. Botteron was hired in 2002. The literature was familiar to me and I would not
Convention