The College of HEHD Living and Learning Community

In association with the Clemson University Division of Student Affairs

Are you on Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site? Why?

There are certainly numerous reasons.  The most common fall inline with the ideas of: connecting with others; meeting people and forming relationships; sharing information; and learning about one another to form common bonds.  This is the concept behind Living Learning Communities with the added benefit of helping one another learn, grow, and become a professional.   

Becoming Meaningful to You
Living Learning Communities (LLC) are designed to create the intimate climate of a small college within large universities.  While other academic learning communities such as cohorts in large course or team-taught courses place a greater emphasis on curriculum, LLCs emphasize personal development through engagement in a broader community (Shapiro and Levine, 1999).

For anyone choosing to earn a degree in Education, Nursing, Public Health Science, or Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management, The College of HEHD Living Learning Community is designed to give every student a learning experience that is both social and unique to your experience at Clemson University.  

The HEHD Living Learning Community provides you and your classmates with an extraordinary experience in a living environments that focus on learning in and outside of the classroom. These communities are ideal contexts for reaching deeper levels of learning by allowing you to become entrenched in the processes of critical thinking, understanding contexts, engaging with other learners, and reflecting and acting.

All Living Learning Communities have common hallmarks. Each community encapsulates a program that has clear academic objectives and mission. All students live together in a discrete residence hall. And each community has dedicated staff, curricular and co-curricular programming and resources specifically for the particular program of choice.

According to The National Study of Living-Learing Programs website, research data from a 2004 study illustrates the advantages that Living Learning Community participants enjoy over their non-community counterparts, including:

• Dialogue with peers about academic and social issues
• Have a mentoring relationship with a faculty member
• Find their residence hall climates to be academically and socially supportive
• Experience a smooth transition to college
• Utilize critical thinking skills
• Be more committed to issues related to civic engagement
• Drink less and have fewer negative consequences of drinking

Subsequent studies in  2007 and 2008 have yielded additional data from almost 120,000 students at more than 50 colleges and universities.  Many of the schools surveyed in these most recent studies also participated in the 2004 study, providing valuable longitudinal data to assess student outcomes over time. These studies indicate that students are more likely than their peers to:

• Experience a smooth transition into their new environment
• Build, maintain, and utilize healthy social networks
• Nurture relationships with faculty mentors
• Perceive their residence hall to be academically and socially supportive