by Jason Ng, Vision Science
I knew that I wanted to strengthen the students’ understanding of the lab material and provide greater clinical relevance…The challenges were to find a way to tie the labs together over the entire semester, and to focus on creating a more direct link between the basic science experiments in the labs and actual clinical patient testing.
by Michael Markham, Music
The difficulty of classical opera for students…lies in a perceived cultural distance between the realistic dramatic forms that today’s students relate to and cartoonish images of huge, blubbering sopranos…The form tends to remain closed to undergraduates; a huge, hulking, messy, “dead” thing with little direct emotional impact resonance for them. In the 2004 Summer session, however, I decided to meet the students halfway.
by Oron Frenkel, Public Health
It was our first discussion section for Drugs and the Brain. We were about to embark on the study of some advanced concepts in neuropharmacology, but before we could get to the “drugs” part, my students needed to understand the “brain.” And they only had one week to do it, which meant I only had one shot at making sure they got it right.
by Richard Keith Slotkin, Plant and Microbial Biology
I set up what I called “cooking show” exercises. For example, when a student finished assembling a reaction, instead of waiting for a week to see the results, I had pre-run reactions ready. This enabled us to bypass time intensive waiting steps and allowed the students to complete long protocols within the three-hour class time.
by Alejandro Reyes Arias, Latin American Studies
I divided the class in small groups, each of which would represent a different historical character…The various characters had been kidnapped from their contexts and transported to Berkeley in 2004 to participate in a Conference on Latin America, to debate the future of the continent and to discuss issues of race, identity, gender, economy, sovereignty, nationhood,[and] culture.
by Catherine Becker, History of Art
I, the eager GSI, launched into an examination of Jomon pots and Yayoi bells; however, so many of the students’ basic questions had no answer that the class became frustrated and uninterested…I wanted to encourage more student participation. How could I engage my students in a productive and thoughtful conversation about objects from the distant past?
by David Radwin, Political Science
Learning by doing has a long history in educational theory, even if it is uncommon in practice…The analysis and rearrangement of facts which is indispensable to the growth of knowledge and power of explanation and right classification cannot be attained purely mentally-just inside the head…The challenge for undergraduate education is how to create activities, within the constraints of the university setting, that challenge students to discover answers on their own.
by Christine Zalecki, Psychology
Discussions with classmates revealed that…we all had felt ill-equipped to handle the task of being a novice therapist…I wondered whether there was a better way to prepare students for their clinical work. During my fourth year, while I was working as a Clinic Assistant, I seized the opportunity to address this apparent need in our program.
by Heidi Saleh, Near Eastern Studies
After a couple of weeks into the class, I found that coming up with fresh ways to discuss and interpret texts that have been studied for hundreds of years such as The Odyssey was becoming a problem. The students were getting tired of straight literary analysis, and quite frankly, so was I.
by Jess Wendover, Architecture
The exercise, while sometimes comically oversimplified, demonstrated the importance of not relying on a single method of gathering data in designing a space. The students really enjoyed the activity; everyone laughed at the conflicting demands for spaces within the theater…[and] they began to see the biases and drawbacks of each of the methods of inquiry.