by Mark Fisher, Political Science This...made me think quite differently about the GSI’s role in section...While our first impulse is often to try and “translate” the lecture into an idiom they are more comfortable with, this experience convinced me that the greatest service we can perform for students is to teach them the skills needed to speak our language.
by Sarah Chihaya, Comparative Literature How could I possibly communicate the intertextual quality central to the novel’s style to my students, when most of them didn’t have the exhaustive literary and historical background that Pynchon’s proliferating cultural references — which swing wildly from erudite literary digs, to Sixties-specific pop cultural allusions, to puerile humor — seem to demand?
by Kevin Krasnow, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management I decided to leverage my own research to devise an inquiry-based experience for students to explore the history of our own Sierra Nevada forests...This led to a lively discussion...[and the students] were engaged in a way that they never would have been if I had merely told them the history of fire in the Sierras.
by Shawhin Roudbari, Architecture When students brought their own work to this “theory class” they crossed a threshold...It’s one thing for students to read that postmodernism in architecture was partly a post-Fordist reaction to a modernist ethos. It’s another thing for them to situate their own work in an un-periodized historical context of the present.
by Alejandra Figueroa-Clarevega, Molecular and Cell Biology During discussion sections I became aware that my students were...studying the material as individual, independent, non-related facts. It was like trying to assemble a 3,000-piece puzzle without having a picture to refer to. Thus my goal became to help my students understand the context that would allow them to collect the facts more easily, group similar ideas together, and be able to place them in relationship to each other.
by Stephanie Langin-Hooper, Near Eastern Studies One of the most involved and successful projects that I designed was a miniature replica of underwater shipwreck excavations. Using large turkey roasting pans, water, sand, and an assortment of miniature objects, I recreated three underwater shipwreck excavation sites...The students became the archaeologists and were divided up into excavation teams...Through a multi-sensory engagement, this project successfully opened the eyes of my students to the dynamic process of archaeological excavation.
by Ermine Fidan Elcioglu, Sociology In the beginning of the course, I argued that “reading” was not the same as “critically reading” something. I distributed a worksheet that enumerated the questions I wanted students to be actively thinking about when they read a text...In order to practice this skill, I devoted every other section to critically reading a carefully selected paragraph or set of paragraphs from the assigned readings.
by Aaron Lee, Astronomy I found that students were far too trusting of their calculators, possibly due to a fear of math, and they blindly accepted whatever the calculator returned. My solution...was to include weekly activities that taught students how to relate new concepts to familiar experiences to develop their intuition about the subject matter.
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 Naomi Leite, Anthropology The first section presents a double challenge...Simply put, how can a GSI use the first section to engage a disparate group of students who are not necessarily enthusiastic about their enrollment in a course whose topic they don’t yet understand?