ABSTRACT
Given the everyday realities of the accountability movement, thisLearning College may seem like a fantasy, but Learning College is a description of a real institution, namely Alverno College, that dared to be fearless when it came to ensuring that students developed the competencies they needed to have a bright future. While they have achieved this
centrality of the learning mission today, it was a hard fought battle, and we will describe fully the process of how they came to embody a culture of learning and assessment later in the chapter. In this chapter, we first consider what it means to be a “learning college”—an institution that focuses on the learning of its students and knows how the institution contributes to that learning. Second, we contextualize the understanding of the “learning college” in the accountability movement and the historical landscape of higher education assessment and accountability. Finally, we focus in deeply on one particular learning college, Alverno College, from the perspective of a leader who served to instill the values of learning and assessment as a way to transform the college.
