by Emily Frey, Music
The lowly sounding course title is thus deceptive; teaching Basic Musicianship II is a baptism by fire. Desperate times, I thought when I received the assignment, called for experimental measures. With its mélange of skills, requirements, and student backgrounds, 20B is chaotic by nature, and it seemed unproductive to try to work against that.
by Anastasia Kayiatos, Slavic
As the students of the introductory course (many of them first-years) sift through these dense texts (for many, their first brushes with theory), it is easy for them to feel alienated by the language….My job is to make sure they know that feminist theory’s difficult lexicon is not an exercise in esotericism designed to disempower them. On the contrary, I strive to demonstrate throughout the semester, feminist scholars invent new vocabulary with a deliberate political aim of empowerment.
by Gina Zupsich, French
For my students, gender was, and had always been, a personal choice. The queer literature we were studying was fantasy indeed to students in a post-feminist world on an LGTBQ-friendly campus….If we were to understand the radical messages of our texts, I realized that I would have to put these theories into historical perspective and in living color.
by Emily Hamilton, History
I was not altogether prepared, though, for the general attitude of the students as we began to approach the midterm exam. Suddenly, the same students who displayed sophisticated analysis in section expressed intimidation by the sheer quantity of information they were responsible for. The discrete chunks of material that posed no problem to the students were overwhelming in aggregate…The students began feeling powerless in their own comprehension.
by Danielle Champney, Education, SESAME
I view Calculus II as more than just a solution-finding mission or strategy game. Students will learn little or resort to untested pattern-matching if I simply tell them what method to use each time they encounter a new problem! Learning how concepts in class are reflected in procedures used to solve problems is, to me, a core principle of the course.
by Natalia Cecire, English
The project was designed to produce a scholarly community that would provide an intellectual context for research findings. Yet because the community was composed of students, all with similar experiences with nineteenth-century literature, the debates occurred in terms that were meaningful to the students at their particular stage of exposure to literary criticism, rather than in the remoter terms of my discipline.
by Kathryn Jasper, History
I wanted the students to realize that historical interpretation, what appears on the pages of their textbook, was written by a human being who is not omniscient. The author’s conclusions are based on primary sources and informed analysis. In addition, that author is subject to his or her own biases. Moreover, the sources themselves are biased, which the students understood when they had to formulate arguments based on…[the] text.
by Paul Bruno, Physics
If I could help them recognize what they had learned, and to see how that acquired knowledge empowered them to understand even more course material, I could develop both their understanding of physics and their positive self-efficacy as science learners.
by Christopher Clark, Integrative Biology
We had the students perform a double-blind peer review of each others’ papers during the final lab session. This is similar to the way scientific papers submitted to a journal are reviewed by peer scientists… By seeing (or overhearing) mistakes their peers were making, students became aware of ways they could improve their own papers. They also received nearly instantaneous, in-depth constructive criticism of their reports.
by Seemay Chou, Molecular and Cell Biology
I found that the problem was not rooted in lack of comprehension but an imprecision in their scientific language, owing to their lack of experience in the field. They felt that they knew the answers but could not express what they were trying to say…They needed to think and speak in the same language as scientists.