By describing periodicals from the 1840’s for the class, students in Elisa New’s seminar begin to understand the course material and find a voice in the classroom.
This close reading activity challenges students to “translate” poetry into propositional statements in order to make students more attentive to the nuances of language.
How do you craft a good thesis statement? In this activity, students work together to refine their ideas and put together possible evidence for different topics. The purpose is to teach students how to connect their thesis statement with the rest of their paper, and to revise the two in tandem (start with a draft thesis, bring some evidence together, revise the thesis to better reflect the evidence, revise the evidence to better fit the thesis, etc.)
In her class "France and the World: Human Rights, Race, and Revolution," Rachel Gillett had small groups work on different questions in order to stimulate discussion.
In this activity, David Weimer used different articles on "segregation academies" following Brown v. Board of Education in order to teach students how to evaluate information from a source and consider the origin of the information.
In this activity, Nicole Deterding used a case study in her Sociology of Education section to integrate and apply theories of different types of capital (human, social, and cultural) and to clarify student understanding.
In her sociology sections, Nicole Deterding used a controversial pop-sociology article written by Kay Hymowitz, the author of Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, as a case study for Professor Mary Brinton's theory on the relationship between institutions and individual behaviors and actions.
In her classes, Professor Judith Ryan uses (or encourages her TFs to use) little strips of paper with words from a literary text in order to get students to explore the functions of individual words in text.
