First Year Seminar…Kick It Up a Notch! (Active Learning Strategies that Encourage Academic Discourse) Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi Chloe Yowell – email: chloe.yowell@tamucc.edu Class Website: critical.tamucc.edu/wiki/ChloeYowell/home Background of First Year Seminar and Learning Communities at TAMU- I. CC: When Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi became a four year university in 1994, it adopted a learning community approach for its first year students. All freshmen, enrolled in 12 or more hours, are required to take two semester of First Year Seminar as part of their Triad or Tetrad. Structure of the Triads and Tetrads Triad All of the Triads and Tetrads include a First-Year Seminar and a First- Year Writing class. These are small classes of 25 students or less. In addition, Triads include a large lecture class (such as General Psychology or U.S. Government and Politics), and Tetrads include two large lecture classes. The classes within each Triad (or Tetrad) are "linked," in the sense that students enroll in all three classes (or four classes in a Tetrad) at once, as a "package deal." For example, students might enroll in a Triad which includes: First-Year Seminar (UCCP 1101 or UCCP 1102) • English Composition (English 1301 or English 1302) Tetrad • Human Societies (Sociology 1301) • A Tetrad which the University frequently offers consists of the following courses: First-Year Seminar (UCCP 1101 or UCCP 1102) • English Composition (English 1301 or English 1302) • U.S. History to 1865 (History 1301) • U.S. Government and Politics (Political Science 2305) • First-Year Seminar First-Year Seminar (FYS) instructors attend the large Triad or Tetrad lecture classes with their students, act as teaching assistants/graders for those lecture classes, and help their students to: Explore the interconnections among the Triad/Tetrad courses; • Develop their critical thinking and significant learning; • Clarify their personal values, goals, and strengths; • And, develop their ability to learn through study, discussion, writing, cooperation, and • collaboration.
Academic Discourse II. What is it? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, academic discourse is: “familiarity with a subject, conversancy, and mutual intercourse of language.” Why consider it when teaching first year students? We all participate in a variety of discourse communities: workplace, sports, crafts, church, etc. Each has its own shared terms, values, ways of operating, etc. Knowledge of this discourse is necessary to effectively participate within the specific community. The community of academia shares its own ways of thinking, valuing, speaking, and writing. When students join the academic community, (i.e., enroll in college), learning to speak, write, and think in the discourse of that community enables them to be more effective participants. We want our students to be able to “join the conversation”. I asked my colleagues to think of shared terms, values, and/or ideas that are common to academic discourse that they believe students are not familiar with when entering the university setting. Here are just a few of the long list I received: critical thinking, civic engagement, rhetoric, egocentrism, perspectives, ideology, meta cognition, paradox, paradigm, bias, homogenous/heterogenous, marginalized, etc. The First Year Seminar class exists to help students with success strategies for university life. Let’s “kick it up a notch” and have them explore, grapple with, and integrate academic discourse into their education! Active Learning Strategies III. “Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in classes listening to teachers, memorizing pre-packaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences and apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves” ( Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education, Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson). Common Lesson Structure (adapted from Dr. Glenn Blalock, English professor, Baylor University): 1. Students work alone first, writing, listing, responding to (a) specific prompt(s). (When students have time to think/develop individual responses, they are able to participate more fully in the group activity.) 2. Then they join a group to share/compile/do something further with their individual responses, as a group. 3. Instructions for group activities (and for whole class activities) should help students understand what they are supposed to do. If asked to "listen," offer more guidance: listen for what reason, how, why? In other words, be conscious of what students will be doing and consider how their 'doing' can be more intentionally "learning." 4. Groups share results of activity with whole class, which is opportunity for synthesis, application, etc., with the teacher as participant. 5. Whole class activity is followed by an individual activity that invites students to reflect (metacognition) and to connect their individual and group results with the whole class results.
Active Learning Strategies/Activities Current events are a great way to get “material” to implement the following strategies. Students need/want to know what’s going on in the world around them. Other articles, over subjects that you find interesting and/or are passionate about, can be material used for these strategies/activities. Your options are limitless! Also, video clips have been extremely successful tools to generate interest and spark discussion. I’ve found clips from all the major news websites as well as those from youtube.com. For example, I wanted to discuss various perspectives on the immigration debate. I simply went to youtube and typed in “immigration debate” and found numerous short clips depicting a variety of perspectives. I showed these in class to enhance our discussion---worked unbelievably well! During these lessons, I refer to terms such as critical thinking (analyzing others’ views), civic engagement (knowing the world around us is the first step!), rhetoric, ideology, egocentrism, etc. to encourage familiarity with academic discourse. Find Illustrative Quotes Bring in copies of an article (or any text) you would like your students to discuss. Students spend the first 10 minutes or so reading through an article or portion of a chapter assigned as pre-reading. Have them highlight/underline quotes that they especially agree with, disagree with, find interesting, or find particularly difficult to understand. Whether you discuss in groups or whole class, students now have something to contribute. They can discuss/question/affirm the points they’ve underlined. Recalling a Memorable Experience Starting a discussion by getting students to talk about a memorable experience in their lives that somehow connects to the topic is a great way to get your students engaged. Because most students think they are experts on their own experience, starting out with personal stories is often much less intimidating for them than launching straight into a discussion of the strength and weaknesses of a theory. This has worked well for me with various discussions [the middle east situation (we remembered our 9/11 experiences), media’s influence on society, hurricane Katrina and racism, First Amendment freedoms, etc.)]. It also works well when discussing study skills (exam prep, time management, note taking, etc.). Hatful of Quotes Prior to discussing a text (article/book excerpt/news clip), type out sentences or passages from the text onto separate slips of paper. For class, put these into a “hat” (or envelope) and ask students to draw one of the slips out of the hat. Students are given a few minutes to think about their quote and then asked to read it out and comment on it. If you use the same 4 or 5 quotes, students who go later will have heard their quote read out and commented on by those who spoke earlier and they can affirm, build on, or contradict a comment a peer has already made on that quote. Structured Buzz Groups Prepare a few questions about the reading ahead of class. Put students in groups of 4 or 5 to answer the questions. Although they don’t have to cover all the questions, have them try to finish as many as they can and to record their answers in writing. The groups’ answers are either submitted at the end of class or reported to the reconvened large group to spur on further discussion. Problem-Posing Strategy Submit to students a problem, framed as an open-ended question, to which they must propose and justify an answer. Again, consider current event problems, study strategy problems, etc. (For critical thinking purposes, emphasize differences in view points.) A great way to do this is to have students write down their
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