The Washington Center for Improving Undergraduate Education was founded as a public service center of The Evergreen State College in 1985 with a commitment to supporting historically underrepresented students in higher education. The Washington Center serves as a resource for faculty, staff, and administration at community and technical colleges, colleges, and universities across the United States through its monthly newsletter, virtual workshops, consulting services, and national institutes.
Guiding Purpose
We are for the academic success of all students. Ultimately, the measures of our success are improvements in students’ persistence, achievement, and graduation rates—particularly students who are the first in their families to go to college and those from groups historically under‐served in higher education. As a high impact strategy, learning communities offer a powerful learning environment for students at key points in their educational pathways, and implementing successful learning community programs in an intentional way helps to build institutional capacity for transformation.
History and Legacy
The Washington Center has continually served higher education professionals across the nation since it’s creation as an Evergreen public service center in 1985. The Center was created with support from the Ford Foundation and the Exxon Foundation and in its first years worked in collaboration with colleagues from the state’s higher education community to foster highly effective, low-cost curricular improvements through faculty development, mainly focused on learning communities. As the National Resource Center for Learning Communities, the Washington Center has a distinguished tradition of convening learning community leaders to shape and sustain this high-impact practice.
From 2013 through 2021, the Center published the Learning Communities Research and Practice Journal, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that promoted practices and knowledge to strengthen the learning community field. The Washington Center continues to engage faculty, staff, administrators, and researchers through services and programs including institutes, workshops, consultations, publications, and presentations.