by Clare Ibarra, History Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2017 The reality of teaching History at the university level is that the professor and the student walk into the lecture hall with two totally different expectations of what it is they will accomplish in that space. While students believe they will…
by Martin Eiermann, Sociology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2017 Problem: Many students might initially perceive works of social theory as obtuse relicts from another era that remain interesting to a cadre of academic experts but are of limited utility to everyone else. This sentiment is only heightened by a canon…
by Carli Cutchin, Comparative Literature Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2017 Thesis statements are the bread and butter of a good college essay – or so conventional pedagogical wisdom would say. As a Reading and Composition instructor, I would see students struggle time and again when asked to write a thesis.
by Vanessa Brutsche, French Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2017 One of the skills that I target in my Reading and Composition courses is the ability to read beyond basic content (plot and characters), and to move fluidly between the abstract and concrete levels of a text’s meaning. In literature-based courses,…
by Hayden Shelby, Environmental Design (Home Department: City and Regional Planning) Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 For the first week of class, my students in Environmental Design 100: The City: Theories and Methods of Urban Studies were expected to read three difficult, foundational works of urban theory. When I attempted…
by Caitlin Scholl, Comparative Literature Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Something that I struggled with since I first started teaching R1B courses was how to design assignments in such a way that my students develop their research skills incrementally throughout the semester. Anyone who has taught the second part of…
by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Rhetoric [A]sked to write an essay that deals with more than one primary text, [students’] tendency is ... to either illustrate the ways in which the texts make equivalent arguments, or to pit one text/author against the other… I realized that I needed to do more to teach students what it means to bring two texts “into conversation.”
by Ashley Leyba, History Over time it became clear to me that, more often than not, the discussions were a showcase of what I, and not my students, found intellectually exciting. I wanted something more for my students.
by Sarah Mangin, English We spent a few minutes venting about our most memorable Kafkaesque ordeals, from S.A.T. testing nightmares to transcript requests ... By cultivating a collaborative environment for thinking about literary allusiveness, our class found opportunities to make these references first familiar and then potent.
by Wendy Xin, English How, I wondered, might one instill an understanding of composition useful to engineering, political science, history, biology, literature, and math majors alike, when the nature of assigned readings across disciplines varied so widely? And how would the class find pleasure in engaging metacritically with the concept of narrative at 8 a.m., a time when most of us aren’t even used to experiencing narrative?