CORE invited University Wide Teaching Award winners to tell readers about some of the practical strategies they use in their teaching – why they use them and why they work. Here is a sampling of their replies:
I am very fortunate to be in one of the few disciplines where small classes are still a reality. This gives me the opportunity to spend many hours with students outside the classroom, discussing and assessing their creative work and career options, and actually helping them move from the world of the university into the "real" world of our profession. I always include senior level students in any professional project I undertake, whether it is as an editorial assistant, a dramaturgical assistant, or even a project coordinator. For example, through publishing student material in Questionable Activities: Canadian Theatre Artists Interviewed by Canadian Theatre Students, a chapbook series of several volumes published by Playwrights Union of Canada and distributed nationally, our theatre department students are given a professional publishing credit and the beginnings of a resumé.
One of my preferred strategies in teaching is involving every single student in the class-work-discussion by dividing the class into groups to tackle issues – questions given in advance. Each group, acting as a panel, makes a presentation to the rest of the students in the class who will ask questions or make comments about the presentation. This usually leads to more interesting interactions which involve all of the students.
Last year a number of suggestions for first day activities were posted to the WMST-L listserv (a listserv for teachers of Women's Studies). The first day I met my Women's Studies class, I used one of the recommended exercises – I asked students to write down, anonymously, when they first realized they had a gender and I collected the results. When I prepared my first lecture the following week I was able to incorporate these student responses and to use the students' own words and experiences as concrete examples of the theories I was presenting. This worked extremely well. Many students remarked in their journals how pleased they were to see how their thoughts were not simply collected, but taken seriously – and how valuable it was to know they were hearing classmates' stories. It worked well on another level, too – this class grasped quickly the notion that gender still 'matters' and moved beyond arguments about the relevancy of feminism that have tended to bog down the introductory class. Moreover, I think the class understood right from the beginning that their classmates had valuable, diverse knowledges to share.
When I tell people that I run a listserv for my courses, they often express concern that it must be a lot of work. It is – but the listserv also makes other aspects of my work as a teacher easier. In my experience, the learning that takes place on the listserv is reflected in a deeper understanding of the course material, better outcomes on assignments, clearer writing, improved performance on exams and more productive tutorial discussions. Participation is mandatory and awarded a grade on a pass/fail basis. I use the listserv to help students gain computing skills and to give them first hand knowledge of the benefits and perils of information technologies; as a remedial tool – to help students catch up, fill in the gaps, and as a place to revisit difficult points made in lecture or tutorial; to increase the variety of ways people can participate in class – the listserv has its own rhythm, separate from face-to-face tutorials; as an ungraded writing assignment – writing on the listserv helps students to explore ideas and struggle with language without the pressure to be 'right' that more formal assignments tend to produce; as an enrichment tool which advances critical thinking – to challenge students and encourage intellectual risk-taking; and to help students to feel part of a vital intellectual community through the distribution of information related to campus activities, publishing and conference opportunities for undergraduates and, most importantly, through the sharing of ideas, questions, and resources with the teaching team and each other.
Good teaching and effective learning involve an intimate, but not suffocating, attention to words – written words and spoken words, and their myriad interconnections, sometimes clear, often complex and ambiguous. In order to experience and communicate this, I try to link texts, readers, and seminar members through a particular technique. For each week's seminar discussion, I ask students to write out two to three brief comments/questions/responses concerning the readings for the week. These are then circulated and read before seminar discussion gets under way. The idea is to move, interactively, from the written texts of authors and students to the spoken words of seminar discussion and then back into a further exploration of the written words. Naturally, not all contributions will be brought up – nor, sometimes, should they be! – and addressed each week; and it is part of the teacher's task to ensure that certain issues are covered. But, by and large, it is pleasurably surprising to see how frequently seminar members themselves make connections between the various contributions, maintain an openness and equity in their approach to one another, and so on.
I like to use the blackboard more often than the overhead projector. The blackboard is particularly useful in brainstorming and when reactions or ideas are to be collected regarding certain themes or subjects (I usually use brainstorming for challenging issues and controversial subjects). Students also take turns in going to the board to write their answers or ideas. That does not mean I ignore the role of modern technology in teaching, but I humanize it in adapting its role to certain mechanisms of my approach to realize specific objectives.
All three of these writing assignments require a balance between teacher-driven instructions and student-controlled content and structure. These often comprise part of the participation mark and invite students to make connections between the course, books, university and their part-time jobs, etc. These are all very flexible assignments and work best when they measure the major thematics of a course as it filters through individual student's frameworks. One year, I collected the journals five times and used them as a forum for on-going, one-to-one conversations with students about the deconstruction of masculinity. For the final journal assignment, I forbade students to use language and, instead, had them create images which reflected how their thinking about masculinity had changed over the year. The results were remarkably insightful and inventive. Not only were they "reading" and deconstructing images, sound-bites, magazine photographs, etc. as text, but they had integrated and could redeploy image as their own text for critical analysis of discursive formations.
I don't think anyone can actually be taught how to write. What I do is select from a large pool of applicants people who demonstrate a strong voice and who have something to say. Then, through a series of exercises and methods, I begin to help students understand where that voice is coming from and how to access it, how to hear what it's saying, and, finally, how to listen to the message and give it theatrical life. Part of the methodology I employ includes work with universal archetypes that form the basis of the world story, defying cultural or temporal definition. We also explore the four elements and understand through them balance, interaction and conflict. We work on understanding theatrical action and how it fuels daily activity. This course might better be called "play-making" as plays are not simply written. Or "play-wrighting" in that, like cartwrights and wheelwrights, we make theatre and writing is only one way to do this. In an era where we're fortunate enough to be able to participate in the erosion of borders and boundaries of theatrical convention, it is clearly vital for students of play-making to feel free to make theatre that organically produces form out of content.
Especially effective with first year students, this exercise requires students to stage debates or opposing points of view as a parody of the day-time talk show in order to help students understand the way overly simplistic framing methods reduce complicated issues to either/or, good/bad effects. In addition, this structure also allows students to present and rebut especially controversial interpretations or perspectives.