By Madeleine Levac, Philosophy Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 introduced new challenges for educators, several of which were front of mind as I prepared to GSI a philosophy course last fall. There was the obvious issue of academic dishonesty. We lack a surefire…
By Thomas Lee, Political Science Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 Many students in my political theory courses every semester would come to my office hours distressed about how they should go about writing their political theory papers. While the wide-ranging possibilities of political theorizing reflected in the paper questions were…
By Britt Leake, Political Science Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 Teaching Middle Eastern politics to students is difficult in the best of times. Teaching a class entitled War in the Middle East recently at UC Berkeley is perhaps uniquely challenging. Our students have to learn about a dizzying array of…
By Andrea Lara-Garcia, Geography Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 Last semester, I had the privilege of teaching two discussion sections of GS10AC, or Introduction to Global Studies. Our first writing assignment was an analysis of the documentary film Writing with Fire. Set in Uttar Pradesh, India, the film follows a…
By Emily Kang, History of Art Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 In Fall 2023, I was a first-time GSI for History of Art 101: Theories and Methods for a Global Art History. The challenge (and joy) of this course was that the “content” of the lectures ranged from Italian Renaissance…
By Sukriyo Chokraborty, Chemistry Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 “Ethanol possesses polar atoms; hence, it fully dissolves in water.” Or, “toluene has induced dipole-induced dipole bonds”. Or, “ethyl acetate is non-polar while water is polar”. These were some of the answers that surfaced while grading data analysis worksheets in Chem…
By Vivek Bharadwaj, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 The demand for computer science classes has ballooned across the nation, and UC Berkeley is no exception. Given massive class sizes of hundreds of students, the workload for teaching assistants (TAs) is so immense that department union…
By Gregory Arena, Integrative Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 Amidst a gauntlet of Berkeley bureaucracy and impersonal undergraduate prerequisite courses, students often tell me they feel that they must fend for themselves. This was my experience as an undergrad at Berkeley. In my first two years, I never once…
By Jes Heppler, Philosophy Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2023 The problem of getting students to feel comfortable enough to speak about high-stakes topics is not new. Nevertheless, in an era where social media can build or destroy a reputation, many students who are just beginning their adult lives are keenly…
By Joshua Freed, Political Science Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2023 Two terms ago, I reflected on the structure of my communication with students. I realized that my students fell into three categories. First, there were the actively engaged students who felt comfortable coming to office hours or exchanging emails regardless…