2008 Active Learning Grant Recipients
Constance Cook Glen, Jacobs School of Music
Glen has received an Active Learning Grant for the revision of the course Z101 Music for the Listener. Z101 is an introductory music appreciation course that explores European and American classical music and is intended to promote the expansion of a greater level of conscious listening and engaged thinking about music. Although this is a large class with more than 100 students enrolled each semester, the grant will allow for the design and implementation of in class small-group activities as a way for students to analyze and synthesize music terminology and apply it to the music examples listened to prior to attending class.
Carol Hostetter, School of Social Work
Hostetter will redesign S371 Social Work Research and S472 Social Work Practice Evaluation to include a technique called “First Exposure Learning.” The technique encourages students to encounter and clarify issues found within the homework reading assignments before they meet in randomly assigned discussion groups during class time. What this method does is “flip the class,” so that students’ first exposure comes outside of class and the processing comes inside the class, rather than the other way around.
Lisa Sideris, Department of Religious Studies
Sideris plans to use her Active Learning Grant to implement a greater use of technology and guest lectures in R300 Religion and the Global Environmental Crisis. In order to bring three global environmental issues and religious/ethical responses “home” (climate change, destruction of ocean and global food issues), R300 students will collaborate with students enrolled in a similar course, Religion, Ethics, and Technology, being taught by Michael Northcott in Fall of 2008 at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. A prominent Christian ethicist with expertise in the ethics of climate change, Northcott plans to organize his course around this theme using his new book The Moral Climate (2007), which the R300 class will also be reading. Collaboration between the two courses will include video conferencing discussion groups and a wiki forum where students will collaborate on papers, exchange ideas about the impact of climate change here and in the UK, and debate the ethical issues raised in the readings.
Karen Wohlwend, School of Education
Wohlwend will apply her Active Learning Grant to fund the production of video case studies as a learning tool, bringing a virtual elementary classroom into a university setting for E339 Methods of Teaching Language Arts in the Elementary School. Despite opportunities to experience literacy engagements in the university classroom, students have difficulty making the transition when applying methods to unpredictable and diverse situations with real children in actual classrooms. The goal of the project is to create a seamless transition from academic learning about theory and practice in the college classroom to practical application of teaching methods in the actual elementary classrooms.
