As usual for Teaching Matters sessions, the conversation last Thursday (3/5) was rich with idea-sharing. We were talking about what “moves” we make in our classroom to help our students see the connections between all of their courses and articulate how their liberal arts education has impacted them. Here’s a list of some of our ideas:
- Opening a class by asking students to share something they learned in another class that week then together finding how that connects with the content of the day,
- Having a “liberal arts moment” each week when you explicitly link what the students have been learning in class to other disciplines (labeling this conversation as a ‘liberal arts moment’ strengthens students understanding of what it means to be a liberally educated person),
- Pointing out when terminology is used differently in other disciplines, which helps students to stop and ask questions instead of making assumptions about what words mean,
- Leaning into students’ varied expertise and major backgrounds to have them help teach each other about course concepts, and
- Prompting students during team projects (in and beyond the classroom) to pause and think about all the different ways of thinking and approaching problems that they bring from their various courses and how that sets them up to be dropped into any context, figure it out, adapt, and problem-solve.
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