by Chantelle Warner, German I hope to make it clear to students that it is not enough to dismiss the textbook as biased, but they must realize that authorship is always somehow biased in that it involves making choices...When they are faced with the task of trying to do a better job than the textbook does, students realize firsthand how difficult the task of cultural representation is.
by Tania Martin, Architecture I determined that students unfamiliar with primary source research need models for conducting such research and hands-on practice. This became clear from my students' paper abstracts, preliminary object analysis exercises, and from class discussions. It was not enough to lecture about paintings, photographs, buildings, and forests — the students needed to engage with the materials themselves, and to learn to read various kinds of sources against one another.
by Selby Schwartz, Comparative Literature The students were clearly struggling with the complexity of character motivations, and I could see them teetering on the verge of dismissing the whole play: mocking its archaisms, flattening its protagonists, ironizing its structure, and dispelling its magic for themselves. Their skepticism exhibited a passive kind of resistance.
by Giulietta Spudich, Molecular and Cell Biology I used the students who already had strengths in the theory by interrupting my discussion of the protocol to ask the students why we were doing certain steps. The more theoretically minded students would answer, providing insight to the class. I was attempting to get the students to link the "why" behind the experiment to the practical side of the laboratory.
by Holly Watkins, Music Addressing the question of how music can represent images or ideas poses serious difficulties for music scholars, let alone for undergraduate non-majors...How, then, might a GSI introduce the thorny problem of musical representation in a class...which assumes no familiarity with musical notation or performing ability?
by Jennifer Powell, Molecular and Cell Biology To address my goal of encouraging the students to take the quizzes seriously so they would be useful to everyone as a tool to evaluate their progress in the course, I developed a quiz strategy for my discussion section...Rather than just telling them the [quiz] answers, I asked volunteers to come up to the chalkboard and write their answers for the rest of the class.
by Andrea Zemgulys, English The skill of analytic writing is not only difficult for students to learn, but difficult for the teacher to communicate without suggesting that students douse their work with high-faluting or apparently argumentative words (such as "hence"). My aim is to show students how the thoughtful use of simple language can transform descriptive sentences to analytic ones.