Portland State Magazine Spring 2016

22 pORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 spring HIGH SCHOOL seniors hear a lot about how the transi- tion to college means dealing with new responsibilities and schedules while also adjusting to life away from home and family. What they don’t hear much about is how the study and research skills they need to apply in university courses will differ from what they needed in high school classes. Portland State is tackling that issue head-on by bringing critical-think- ing courses directly to Portland-area high schools. The Senior Inquiry High School Program pairs a PSU faculty member from University Studies with two teachers at select high schools for a yearlong, dual-credit course. The courses, which have been offered at different Portland schools since 1994, cover a range of general education subjects through the lens of overarching themes such as race and social justice; power and imagination; human nature; and knowledge, art, power. Michael Lupro, senior inquiry coordinator, is the PSU faculty member at Jefferson High School in northeast Portland, where the program was expanded this year to include the entire senior class of about 110 students. The classes themselves, which are split into two large sections at Jefferson, are heavily focused on student-guided inquiry. “We put an idea out there and if they engage in it, we build more curriculum immediately to respond to that,” Lupro says. “Sometimes they don’t bite. Most often it’s things we didn’t see coming, so our planning is very iterative.” Lupro says his students already have a highly developed understanding of the world coming into the course, though they may lack the critical academic vocabulary to communicate it in a college-level course. Through assignments such as reading literature, exploring current events, planning service projects and completing a large research paper, students apply the course theme— race and social justice—to draw connections between what they’re learning and their own experiences. Senior inquiry students also visit the PSU campus a few times throughout the year to learn about conducting academic library research and for the course graduation. Many students in the program will be first-generation college students, so the campus visits combined with faculty interaction and inquiry-based learning are a vital part of preparing for college, says Lupro. “If you’ve never met someone with a Ph.D., you think of them as a specialized, other kind of person that can be intimidating,” he says, “But if you’ve spent a year interacting with someone like that, it demystifies it. It makes you a lot more comfortable dealing with the next professor you meet.” Inquiring Minds PSU program give high schoolers a jumpstart on college-level learning wr i t t e n b y B E S S PAL LAR E S Lorena Gayton, a student in the yearlong PSU senior inquiry class at Reynolds High School, has received an $80,000 scholarship to a private university in Los Angeles.