Teaching Academy Retreat: Engaging the Diverse Classroom

January 16th I attended the UW Teaching Academy Annual Retreat. The topic was, “What can I do in my classroom to create a welcoming teaching/learning environment for all students?” This is a very important topic on campus right now, as we’ve learned that students from underrepresented groups are not performing well in many of our large, gateway courses. This is more true at UW than at most of our peer institutions and it is true even for students with high ACT scores.

In preparation for the retreat, we read Can We Talk about Race? And other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation by Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D. I’ll add this to our office bookshelf. If you’d like to take a look it’s a quick read and we focused on Chapter 2.

At the workshop, we heard some interesting presentations and worked on some challenging case studies in small groups. We also heard from a student panel, which was so enlightening. I learned about some excellent materials developed by CIRTL, in particular their book, Reaching All Students: A Resource for Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics, which I’ll place on our bookshelf, but is also freely available online (!!) I plan to go back to this for classes in all disciplines. This is a topic we should be thinking about for future LILI Forums and Retreats.

Learning Spaces of the Future (ComETS event)

Roberto Rengel from the School of Human Ecology provided some frameworks for thinking about spaces. His background is in interior design and architecture, as well as corporate space design. He talked about enduring characteristics of learning activities and learners.   A good place is convenient, safe, functional, comfortable, inspiring, and multidimensional. Multidimensional spaces address the person as a whole (individual, social, complex)… because people are different in their characteristics and circumstances, designers of informal spaces need to account for different personalities and tasks. Other issues include acoustical properties and luminous environment (combination of natural and artificial lighting), warmth. Inspiration can come from style, furniture, materials, colors and graphics. For a space to be used, it should be part of something bigger than itself.

Carole Turner and Tom Wise talked about “Classrooms of the future.” The learning environment should be technology-rich, take into account leraning outcomes, and blending experiences inside and outside the classroom. Every space on campus should contribute to the learning experience. We discussed whether classroom time is a chance to cover material or facilitate learning. There were two views: that a variety of learning spaces enable learning outside the classroom, so that the classroom time can be used to frame ideas; and that technology enables delivery of content outside the classroom so that the classroom time can be used to facilitate learning through a variety of activities. Tom Wise talked about the FP&M process for buildings: program statement, design development, design/drawings review, bid documents, construction process.  FP&M has “Classroom Design Principles.”   The UW Madison Master Plan includes Education (out to bid), Biochemistry, WID, SOHE, Sterling (L&S), and Union South.

Because I facilitated the panel, I didn’t take notes there or finish this post until today.  The panelists were Cal Bergman (Housing), Jo Ann Carr (School of Education), Carrie Kruse (College Library), and John Staley (Infolabs).  Each presented “on the ground” experiences designing learning spaces.

A lot of interesting perspectives were shared, but the most important outcome seemed to be communication and information-sharing.

Digital Storytelling

I spent Thursday at the systemwide Digital Storytelling Conference put together by Cheryl Diermyer of AT.  From the program description: “While there is no doctrine defining a digital story as a distinct genre, it has become generally associated with a short film (less than 5 minutes), which is a mixture of a written and recorded voiceover with still and moving images, and often a soundtrack. Digital stories are often told in the first person voice and can be used to create connections between students, instructors and content.”

There were many great speakers at this conference, including Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling (why didn’t I know about this when I was at Berkeley?).  Unfortunately, I missed the faculty panel for another meeting, but I look forward to talking to Margaret Nellis of UW about her project.   Many applications of digital storytelling involve community organizing, oral history, and service learning.

The most interesting speaker for me was Liv Gjestvang of the Ohio State University Digital Union.  I originally met Liv at the Learning Technology Leadership Insititute this summer, and she has a really interesting background as a video artist and community-based work.   OSU’s Digital Storytelling Program is more academically-focused and she talked about some of the lessons learned in building faculty and staff participation in a program that both tied to the academic mission of the university and retained the personal aspect of storytelling.  Librarians actually initiated their program and remain integral to it. They’ve created an online repository and YouTube page.   I’m looking forward to talking more with Liv and connecting with the librarians she works with.

I see a lot of potential for libraries and information literacy in this kind of program:

• There’s a potential for students to develop/demonstrate a continuum of skills from information use to production of knowledge.  It would be interesting to take a team approach to developing courses that do this.   Lots of opportunities for engagement and assessment of student learning outcomes.
• Could we support people looking for images and audio and help them manage the intellectual property issues?  Some projects used geocoding, which is an intersting tie-in.
• There’s an opportunity for reflection in students telling their own stories, which is part of information literacy beyond learning outcomes that we don’t get at very well.
• We saw some examples where faculty interest students in their research / courses by creating videos.  I can see potential for using this to get students excited about their role in the research university.
• Use it to explain to students different majors or disciplines.
• Librarians at OSU created a digital story about OED and an interesting special collection, so about a particular resource or making research exciting.

The OSU examples are here, and we saw many other interesting examples I could share if people are interested.  Some intersect with other technologies like geocoding.

First-Year Conference: Large Lecture Courses

I’m very interested in large lecture courses because they’re inherent to large, public research university environments and becaue there’s often an assuption that it’s logistically impossible to give assignments/assessments other than multiple-choice tests.  It was really inspiring to work with some brave faculty at UC Berkeley who were willing to explore transforming large lecture courses with research assignments.  I learned so much during that project about assignment design, but also about a variety of strategies for engaging students in these environments.

Cathy Middlecamp, Chem 108 for 100+ non-chemistry majors.  It’s important not to alienate students in first-year math/science courses.  Goal is to organize disparate topics into a foundation so that students can get to the good stuff later on, but many students may never take upper-level chemistry courses.  Instead, “teach through” big ideas (air quality, global warming) to the underlying chemistry and draw chemists into the world of people.

Jonathon Martin “Introduction to Weather and Climate” 385-405 students.  Martin does an early-semester survey and meetings with individual students — generating that intimacy transforms the class, this year met with forty students early and knows many by name.  Socratic method transforms lectures, willing to pause for fifteen seconds or more until peer pressure works in favor of a verbal response (doesn’t like clickers because it promotes anonymity).  Humor, human interest, fairness, approachability and enthusiasm are key to approach.

Kathy DeMaster is a TA in Nelson Institute and teaches IES 112 and 113.  These courses are structured so that she attends large lecture and meets with of sections of 20-25.  Brings in digital camera and learns names by second day and asks people to write down some of their interests, thoughout the semester, writes each student 2-3 emails to show she is in touch with what students are concerned about and connects people to job announcments by maintaining a database of students/interests.  To create a collaborative and participatory classroom, writes a list of things to master on the board and has students in groups plan course (what and how to go about it) and set the rules for the classroom environment, then brings typed syllabus the following week.      Asks students to explore multiple perspectives by arguing perspectives they don’t agree with.

Michelle Sizemore, TA in English, teaches in large introductory literature courses, 200 students where she facilitates discussion sections of approximately twenty.   Challenges may be tied to the content of the course (e.g. connecting to content that may seem remote, dealing with controversial issues).    Tries to build a comparative framework that provides students who are unfamiliar with academic discourse with another point of entry.  These could be related to popular culture, with goal of getting every student involved despite range of prior experience and learning styles.

Claire Wendland teaches Anthropology 104, which has 800 students in two lectures and 36 sections, and is the largest course at the university.  As a novice to teaching very large courses and first year students, she is surprised by the intensity of students’ grade focus, some of the lecture material that makes them uncomfortable, that students show up to the office hours without invitation but need help to know what do do there.  Many students are going through a difficult transition from being the star in their high school to being more average in this environment, so it’s important to engage with them in ways other than grading.  Can be useful to talk about the work in third person rather than “you.”  Important to talk about strategies for being efficient at meeting expectations.  In college, there are fewer opportunities for feedback than in high school, so gives self-graded quizzes that are discussed in class and may show up on exams.

Lessons for librarians?  Hope these notes give you a window into a few classrooms, since we usually see what’s happening through conversations with students, the syllabus, or the written assignment.  The more we know about the environment of a particular course, the more we can become an integral part of the learning experience there.  Maybe we should have a role in these large courses other than or in addition to library instruction or teaching students how to complete a research assignment…?  The idea that we can be a familiar face and someone who knows students’ names is a familiar one to librarians, but the one that many students are learning how to have appropriate interactions with authority figures is an important one.

Understanding Students & Faculty: Susan Gibbons talk at CUWL Conference

Today at the statewide CUWL meeting and conference , Susan Gibbons, Dean and Vice-Provost at the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries, discussed their user research program. They are a small residential campus but an ARL member. The library’s work with anthroplogist Nancy Fried Foster is the subject of a recent monograph (free for download from ACRL) and a lot of positive press.

The presentation began with a discussion of characteristics of the “Net Generation.” As a group, these students are relatively more sheltered than previous generations. For example, they regularly seek advice from their parents on their schoolwork and have absorbed Mr. Rogers’s “you are special” message. They expect services to be customized, personalized, one-stop shopping, and in the “Mommy model” of service. These students feel pressured to succeed; 21% of those aged 15-17 have been diagnosed with some type of emotional disorder. They want to know the rules, are team-oriented, and want to collaborate in person and online. They tend to ask peers, not experts, for information. They are multitaskers, and value speed over accuracy in their work.

The next topic was techniques we can use to understand our students…

Teaching and Learning Symposium 2008

The Teaching and Learning Symposium was last week. The first thing I want to share is that the presentations will be archived online. The archive site is still a little glitchy, so I’ll send out a link once the presentations are all there. A few highlights from my perspective:

- In the opening plenary, Adam Nelson talked about three teaching/learning examples in UW-Madison’s past. From a library perspective, the most interesting was the debating societies in 1890s, which engaged important issues of the day, conducted a year’s worth of primary and secondary research, produced substantial published reports, and were extremely prestigious. These were extracurricular clubs that were more popular than football in their heyday. Also included were Meiklejohn’s 1920s Experimental College “Athens-America” curriclum and Otto’s “Man and Nature” philosophy course. Adam was very gracious in thanking the archives for helping to find the really interesting primary sources he shared.

- A Learning Circle on the “Essential Learning Outcomes” we talked about How/where/when we can engage the outcomes. We talked about how to make more explicit what courses and curricula do and what kinds of evidence we can look at to see if students have done this. We agreed that we can’t address all skills (or even one skill comprehensively) in a single course, but students move through the curriculum in many different ways so it’s difficult to build a sequence of experiences. So we’ll need to develop a collection of strategies that allow us to gather the necessary data and students to be more intentional about their college experiences.

- In the closing plenary, John Wiley discussed big forces that will impact the future of higher education: demographics, outcomes assessment, degrees and credentials, productivity of the educational enterprise, and technology. Outcomes assessment was the most interesting to me: Wiley pointed out that we rarely “apply our research prowess to our teaching” to analyze our effectiveness in promoting learning. His conclusions were that “we should be interested” in this question, and that comprehensive outcomes assessment is prohibitively expensive, perhaps doubling the cost of education. It’s hard to make a good decision about how much assessment is enough, in my experience, so it was useful to hear that perspective from the top.

The library was, as in past years, heavily involved in the planning of the symposium and the program. Sheila Stoeckel and I were on the planning committee and the Library was involved in two programs and two post-conference workshops that I’m aware of. I’ll try to share more about these once we have the information in the archive. I would be interested to hear what others found valuable.

Interdisciplinarity Teaching and Learning

I saw many library folk at the Third Annual Conference on Interdisciplinarity. I was able to attend most of the panel on Teaching and Learning this morning.

Aaron Brower opened by asking the big questions: “What if we were to start over and have a different kind of university? What would the educational experiences be? What would we want the students to know/be able to do?” He asked a question that John Wiley often asks in his talks: If students will be most productive 15 years after they graduate, what can we do now to prepare them for that moment in time, when, of course, things will be different than they are today? He mentioned that our definition of educational experiences might be about to change. He also mentioned that we will need to incorporate deeper technology experiences, and that people would have a much easier time accessing information, with Google rather than with card catalogs. This was an interesting note since Aaron is a big supporter of information literacy, so we’ll need to have more conversations on campus about what parts of information literacy will remain important if Google does become the de facto portal to information for most people. While the panel did not include a librarian, there was an effort to include faculty and academic staff to signal the increasing value of learning experiences outside the classroom to the educational experience that UW provides.

Panelist Jolanda Vanderval Taylor was charged to set the stage by introducing the LEAP outcomes. She suggested that we “let students in on the secret of what we are doing to them and with them” by sharing the outcomes and allowing students to document for themselves what they are doing. She noted that if students get the essential learning outcomes they will be prepared for the world of work/citizenship; the major they choose is really not important.