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Last Thursday at the first Teaching Matters lunch of the year, we explored different strategies for fostering student engagement in ways that add joy to learning and teaching for our students and ourselves. Andy McCall (BIOL) talked about having students observe and then draw a plant specimen and how he emphasizes the value–and pleasure–of trying things (like drawing), even if we’ve been told long ago that we weren’t good at them. Dosy Alvite (SPAN) shared exercises she uses in her Spanish classes that start by focusing on building community, then giving students opportunities to practice communicating even with limited vocabulary or knowledge, and then solving problems together in Spanish–all as part of helping students get comfortable doing something (speaking a foreign language) that they might initially fear. Laura Russell (COMM) discussed the concept of joy as a relational process that requires sparking connections between students and giving students roles as “meaning creators.” One strategy she uses is a show-and-tell exercise where students each bring in an object that represents a key concept–like “resilience”–to them. As they share their objects and explain their thinking, the class works through the different aspects of the core concept together and everyone gets invested in the learning process. Our discussion underlined the value of teaching practices that frame our classes as spaces of exploration, curiosity, and trying hard things in the interest of fostering our students’ full engagement with each other and our course material. |