Using Student Perceptions of Collaborative Mapping to Facilitate Interdisciplinary Learning

This article reports on a study that investigated student perceptions of the effectiveness of collaborative mapping as a teaching strategy to facilitate interdisciplinary learning. Forty-five students enrolled in an introduction to interdisciplinary studies course participated in the study. Qualitative data, collaborative maps and student evaluations were analyzed using content and thematic analysis. Findings provide new understandings about using student perceptions of learning experiences to inform classroom practice. These understandings have implications for addressing the increasing pressure to demonstrate teaching effectiveness and learning outcomes in higher education.

Exploring the Co-Teaching Experience in a Graduate-Level, Principal Preparation Course

This article presents a case study conducted by three co-instructors (one faculty member and two practicing principals) who examined their experiences co-teaching a newly revised, graduate-level, principal preparation course. Three themes were identified through their experiential stories: strengths of the co-teaching model, supports and needs, and hindrances. These primary themes, along with notable subthemes are detailed. A discussion on coteaching as an innovative teaching method in higher education is provided with a particular focus at the graduate level. Implications for practice and suggestions for future research are discussed in light of these unique findings on co-teaching experiences.

Constraints on Innovative Teaching in British Universities: An American Perspective

Effective teaching is often difficult to achieve because institutional frameworks and inertia – unique to the British educational system – inhibit teachers from being innovative. These challenges to more innovative teaching are the relatively short length of time to a degree, and the heavy institutional oversight of degree programs and individual courses. Also, the tradition of lack of regular feedback and failures in the supervision and marking of undergraduate dissertations also lead to a less-than-ideal educational experience. Fortunately, some of these challenges can be overcome and provide a better learning experience for students.

SoTL’s Impact on Teaching Goals: A Case Study from a Regional University

This study reviewed the impact of a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) program offered at a university. While there is a plethora of literature available that addresses the impact on scholars’ teaching methods and classroom research, few publications address SoTL’s impact on teaching goals. Twelve faculty scholars participated in the cohort-based program and completed the Angelo and Cross'(1993a) Teaching Goals Inventory (TGI) before and after participation in SoTL. Statistically significant increases with medium to large effect were noted for two TGI clusters. Faculty scholars’ quotes provided evidence of how their practice changed after this SoTL program.

Learning Analytics in Higher Education: A Reflection

The idea of learning analytics has become popularized within higher education, yet many educators are uncertain about what is entailed when implementing these technologies into practice. The following article serves as an overview to the field of learning analytics for faculty, educators for whom the expectations to use these technologies continues to increase. We additionally argue that those who work directly with students need a functional understanding of the learning analytics landscape in order to exercise their own expertise.

Collaborative Pedagogy in a Design Thinking Education Course

This article describes a co-taught course that mobilized a Design Thinking approach in the service of creating a prototype for an actual girls’ boarding school in Kenya. The goal of the class was to allow students to engage collaboratively with faculty, with their peers, and with experts “on the ground” to develop the various parts of the school, from the mission to the curriculum to the building design. The article describes the rewards and complexities of this kind of hands-on pedagogy in a higher education context.

Overcoming Gender Bias in STEM: The Effect of Adding the Arts (STEAM)

This study investigated female students who attended a STEM course with the Arts (STEAM) in comparison to a traditional STEM course and the impact it had on desire to pursue a STEM degree. An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare female to male students’ interest in pursuing STEM degrees. In addition, follow up data for registration in STEM subjects was calculated. The participants (N = 58) consisted of college students (35 female students and 23 male students) attending a postsecondary institution in the northeastern United States. The study found significant differences (p < .05) between the groups and a larger percentage of female students from the STEAM course than from the traditional STEM course enrolled in another STEM course at follow up. These results support the positive relationship between female students attending a STEAM course and desire to pursue a STEM degree. The implications and results of adding interdisciplinary elements to traditional STEM courses for female students are discussed.

Poetic License: Using Documentary Poetry to Teach International Law Students Paraphrase Skills

In this article, I show how the study of the poems of Charles Reznikoff – a 20th century American lawyer – helps teach the critical art of paraphrase to International law students, lawyers from The Temple’s LLM Program. Scholars have acknowledged the difficulty of teaching paraphrase to students from civil law countries, acknowledging that it too often results in patchwriting or mere recitation, drained of any text-based policy analysis. Drawing on the fields of ESL, Composition, and Legal Writing, I show how the study of the poetry helps my student learn US-style legal writing. We use the poetry of Reznikoff, who, during the 20th century, wrote poems about reported cases in which race played a dominant role. The students summarize Reznikoff’s poems into prose form and reported cases into poetry. Moving from one genre to another enhances the students’ paraphrase skills, which they then apply to a modern search and seizure problem raising the issue of racial profiling. The students now demonstrate improved paraphrase skills and are more familiar with policy analysis – skills that will greatly enhance their ability to practice law. Students in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences – any field that values critical thinking and writing – will also benefit learning these skills.

Opening Up Hispanic Literature: An Open-Access Critical Edition Assignment

Pedagogical research into cooperative learning and open educational resources supports an expectation for strong learning outcomes in both cases. This article is a guide to the implementation of a group assignment in a college introductory Hispanic literature course where students create critical editions of literary texts. The critical editions project described in this article focuses on team-building and training in group dynamics in addition to the skills of literary research. This project’s relationship to the Open Education movement is an important part of its success, in that it both uses Open Educational Resources (OER) through public domain literary texts as the objects of study in the course, and also asks students to produce OER through their critical editions of literary texts in the public domain. In this essay, we describe a group activity in which students in an introductory literature course research and create digital critical editions of literary texts, which are in turn collected and published online in an open-access anthology. Over the course of a semester, students are engaged in establishing and maintaining group dynamics, learning the basic skills of literary research, and presenting their research findings with the goal of creating a public good.