by Alexandra Minnis and Jennifer Bensadoun, Epidemiology With large sections and students who represent backgrounds as distinct as laboratory-based infectious disease, public policy, and social and behavioral health, engaging students in exploring the epidemiological methods and in stimulating discussions of course material proved to be a challenge.
by William Hayes, Sociology While sociology of culture courses regularly assign selections from his text, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, US students usually encounter these readings without the necessary theoretical knowledge (symbolic capital) or cultural knowledge (cultural capital) for understanding the main arguments or referents in his survey analysis of 1960s Paris. Hence, the teaching problem emerges of how to "materialize" these Parisian abstractions within our Berkeley students.
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 Deanna Kiser, Near Eastern Studies The daily activities and concerns of the earlier society's participants are lost on modern people, who view the entire culture as dead. This affects new students to the field in particular... I have found that helping Egyptology students to identify with the ancient Egyptians generates more enthusiasm for the subject matter and makes it meaningful to them.
by Mathew Gelbart, Music I feel strongly that a course of this nature should not give musically experienced students an unfair advantage, especially since it is nominally geared toward those with little to no musical background. I want the less experienced students to come away not with an inferiority complex, but rather, with a new interest in some exciting music.
by Paul Dosh, Political Science Encouraging diverse forms of participation began on the first day of class with the tone that I set and the grading system I presented...[and] required persistent and explicit efforts throughout the semester.
by Brian Current, Music We recreated the ambient sounds I recorded by "performing" the piece as a class. Dividing the parts up as one would for a choir, we assigned some students as the "chair-squeakers", some as the "sighers", some as the "inhalers", and one...as the "pencil-clicker". With myself as conductor, we proceeded to perform our twenty seconds of music, producing a sound world not unlike that which I had heard the week before...I asked them: "Is this music?"
by Steve Dawson, Astronomy Any physical problem, as well as all of the associated formalism, can be rendered not only intelligible but even pleasurable if the student first achieves a gut sense of the physical situation. Put plainly, all of the math in any science class makes sense if the student first has an intuitive mental picture of exactly what is going on.
by Kate Elkins, Comparative Literature In presenting a very "postmodern" novel, I wondered what approach to take to ensure that students did not become frustrated. One of the challenges in teaching composition classes is that students bring to the classroom a wide variety of interests and backgrounds. Few will go on to study literature, and many embark on the study of literature with a fair amount of skepticism. I therefore hesitated to approach the work using a standard "literary approach."
by Terry O'Brien, Integrative Biology In my experience, no matter how much students practice...skills, few are able to develop a clear conceptual matrix for those skills without significant guidance from the instructor. A direct approach to this problem means that the instructor first provides students with the scaffolding of concepts for each skill.