2007 Active Learning Grant Recipients
Joan Hawkins, Communication and Culture
Hawkins will use her grant to develop a new course (C420 Topics in Media History: The History of the American Avant-garde) that will make both the rich history and the continuing practice of American avant-garde cinema more immediate, vital, and vibrant to students. She will invite a series of speakers to class: a scholar working on the films of Maya Deren, a film festival coordinator, and a practicing filmmaker; and will also include a creative component requiring students to make a film or design a festival as a final project.
Melissa Gresalfi, Education
Gresalfi will revise P251 Psychology for Elementary Majors, required of all potential elementary education majors for admission to the School of Education, to create opportunities for students to engage with theories of learning and development so that they become tools for their future teaching—a way to understand what is happening in their classroom, and a resource for makng decisions about curriculum design and implementation. Through dilemma-driven activities that require the use of different theories in order to reach a solution, students will reach a fuller understanding of the theories.
Burnell C. Fischer, Public and Environmental Affairs,
Sarah Corbin, Public and Environmental Affairs
Fischer and Corbin's revision of E162 Environment and People incorporates a "hands-on" field experience on the IU campus to get students to think about the university as an ecosystem, and about the implications of their actions on the campus environment. Students will thus become aquainted with tree identification field keys, data collection methods, and quantitative and qualitative data recordkeeping and data analysis; their findings will be used to build a database of characteristics of IU woodlands which will aid future classes in determining how wooded areas on campus have changed over time.
Yuqing Wu, Informatics
Wu will redesign I308 Information Representation to build a learning community among students in the form of groups and to include group projects that link course materials to real-life problems. Wu will balance knowledge background and personalities of students in creating groups to maximize their chance for successful group efforts. Students will choose from among proposed topics for a database development project, including banking customer information management, supermarket inventory, or rental records of a car company. Each stage of the process involves groups presenting their work to the rest of the class, who then provide a critique.
