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 Charles Chang, Linguistics
With so much course material to review in section, we are left with little time to get students comfortable with doing the technical things they need to be able to do to fully engage with the course material…In the end, students were offered the chance to come get their hands dirty with phonetics, and they came — even though it was on their own time, and even though it was on the weekend. Who woulda thunk?
by Sereeta Alexander, Education
Social loafing and diffusion of responsibility may permeate and ruin group work, to the dismay of the teacher and the students who do actively participate. … I have learned to design group activities that either inherently entice (or even incite!) participation or that are structured in a manner clearly requiring each student’s contribution.
by Maria Goodrich, Integrative Biology
My goals when teaching Bio 1B are…to help [students] move beyond rote memorization of definitions … and to make [them] comfortable with using scientific literature and the scientific method to answer questions. I tried to meet these goals by assigning each of my students to find a focal organism that would help them connect to the course material throughout the semester.
by Jelani Mahiri, Anthropology
The production of “field notes,” descriptive writings about one’s field research, is an ambiguous enterprise for most students, yet an important part of anthropological methodology. Thus a key issue for professors and GSIs is: How do we build on students’ previous writing experiences, but move them beyond the notion of field notes as a personal journal, for example, to conceptualizing field notes as concrete description of events, interactions, people, and places within their research setting?
by Leonard von Morzé , English
Students taking my reading and composition class may be better at uncovering sources than I am. Adept at searching Google Scholar and other online databases of articles…my most resourceful student writers continually demonstrate the capacity to plug appropriate and erudite-sounding quotations into their research papers…It might be useful, I thought, to get them to resist some of the familiarity they believed they already had with the research paper.
by Karen McNeill, History
That semester students completed the best batch of research papers I have ever received. I cannot say that the quality of student writing improved dramatically, but the quality of the research and analysis did.
by William Scott, History
To them, the history of architecture meant telling the story of the construction of a building, rather than thinking through the ways that campus spaces produce and reflect changing ideas and practices of education, gender, engineering, race, memory, ornamentation, and the environment, to name but a few subjects…I dug into my teaching background and realized that I needed to take my students on, of all things, a field trip.
by Louis-Benoit Desroches, Astronomy
My semester as a GSI for Astronomy 7A…reminded me of my time as an undergraduate taking the same type of course, eager to learn all I could about the wonders of astronomy. And indeed, students walk out of that course and the Berkeley astronomy undergraduate program in general with an excellent astronomy education. But just as I did when I was an undergrad, students here are asking for more.