by Meredith Thomsen, Integrative Biology
My students’ papers clearly reflected the problems they had with group writing. For some, the sections appeared to be written by different individuals and then pieced together, with big swings in quality between sections; other papers seemed to be the work of a single student who had taken over the entire project…Spring semester, I decided to break the assignment into two sections.
by Jess Wendover, Architecture
The exercise, while sometimes comically oversimplified, demonstrated the importance of not relying on a single method of gathering data in designing a space. The students really enjoyed the activity; everyone laughed at the conflicting demands for spaces within the theater…[and] they began to see the biases and drawbacks of each of the methods of inquiry.
by Tania Martin, Architecture
I determined that students unfamiliar with primary source research need models for conducting such research and hands-on practice. This became clear from my students’ paper abstracts, preliminary object analysis exercises, and from class discussions. It was not enough to lecture about paintings, photographs, buildings, and forests — the students needed to engage with the materials themselves, and to learn to read various kinds of sources against one another.