Teaching & Technology

Since joining the project in Fall of 2006, Heather has sought to approach mental health issues from the perspective of civic engagement, having her students make connections between theory and direct experience in the community.

Heather Voke explains that her Community-Based Learning class, Civic Engagement and Education, grew out of the concerns of an undergraduate student who said that Georgetown did not offer sufficient opportunities for students to study the civic engagement of young people and the processes through which youth become civically engaged. In response to these concerns, Voke created a class that gave students the opportunity to participate in the surrounding community and learn from those experiences.

Throughout the semester, students have opportunities to make connections between theory and direct experience, allowing one to influence the other. That is, students not only apply theory to the world outside the classroom, but they use their experiences in the community to augment the application of theories in subsequent classroom discussions and assignments.

Students in Voke's class take a guided tour of D.C. neighborhoods, interview local activists (including youth activists), work with D.C. public school students, and spend hours with residents and local organizations looking to identify a community problem. Students then research previous attempts to address the problem, develop and implement their own solution, and conclude the semester by evaluating the effectiveness of the solution they created.

Voke notes that going out into the community and being civically engaged offers a perfect context within which to raise issues related to mental health: how does one cope when confronted with injustice and the knowledge that one cannot solve all the problems of the world? What do we do when we realize that our own privilege is inextricably linked to privileges that have been denied to others through no apparent fault of our or their own? Through the Engelhard component of the class, students focus directly on managing the stress and conflict that accompanies recognition of individual responsibility and social injustice.

With the help of a campus mental health professional and via their own personal reflection, students learn about effective strategies for coping with confrontation in discussions about controversial issues with others, including violence and race-related prejudice.

Professor Voke explains that when she incorporates mental health and wellness themes throughout the entire course, she finds that her students are more engaged and reflective about material. Additionally, Engelhard has positively influenced her students in that it has continuously fostered an atmosphere of openness in her classroom.

Engelhard Goal

My main goal in this course is for my students to develop an appreciation of the complexity of the context of teaching and learning. I want them to understand that schooling and education are, for better and for worse, about much more than the transmission and absorption of factual information within the classroom. I want them to see that teaching and learning are inextricably connected to the social, political, and moral context in which they find themselves. And I want them to understand that education and schooling affect not only the facts we come to know, but also how we feel, how we treat others, what we believe to be true and good, what we do in the world, and ultimately the kind of world we create for ourselves and others. I want to empower them to become active agents within their own educational process and, by extension, within their communities.

PHIL-157 : Community-Based Learning: Civic Engagement/Public Education

This course focuses on the relationships between civic engagement and education in a society that seeks to be a liberal democracy. Specifically, the course focuses on two central dichotomies: (1) the role that education ought to play for a society to function as a liberal democracy as opposed to the role that education actually does play in our society and its consequences for our democracy; and (2) the role that the public ought to play in education in a liberal democracy as opposed to the role that the public does play in education in our society and its consequences for our democracy.

As part of a Community-Based Learning curriculum, students will participate in the surrounding community and learn from those experiences. Throughout the semester, students will have opportunities to make connections between theory and direct experience, apply theory to the world outside the classroom, and use experiences gained in the community to evaluate theory in the classroom. In the fall semester of 2008, the Engelhard module of the course focused on moral responsibility and the psychological response to injustice within the community. Maia Shanklin, a representative from Peaceoholics, spoke to the class about violence and conflict resolution at Ballou High School, the public school in Southeast D.C. where students volunteered.

In her Medical Anthropology course, Sylvia Önder wanted to push students to think about difference in new ways. Specifically, she focused on the experiences of those with “diverse abilities” and of students who are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Önder organized the course around two new pedagogical strategies: “embodied experiences” and anonymous posts to the class website. The embodied experiences presented students with tasks that forced them to move outside their comfort zones through a series of “dramatic enactments.” Activities ranged from transgressing social norms like eye contact, to taking on a “disability” and observing how it impacts one’s interactions on campus, to participating in a mini-boot camp to simulate the physical and mental conditioning of student veterans. The anonymous assignments were designed to give students the opportunity to share their honest reactions to their experiences without worrying about how their thoughts would be perceived by the professor or their classmates. These posts as well as student reflection essays revealed the impact the Doyle approach had on student experiences in the course.

Embodied experiences present students with tasks that force them to move outside their comfort zones through a series of “dramatic enactments.”

Önder believes that communicating the Doyle-inspired goals of the course with her students was essential to deepening their engagement with the theme of diversity. In her words, “This made it possible to go much farther in one semester than the normal approach, and made students feel alert to differences and similarities between themselves and others in the class.”

Jennifer Lubkin wanted to expose her international students to different perspectives and to help them develop critical thinking skills as preparation for eventual success in U.S. university programs.

The students engaged with local Deaf culture through a reading assignment (the memoir Deaf in D.C. by Madan Vasishta), a discussion with the author, events at Georgetown’s DiversABILITY Forum, and a field trip to Gallaudet University. Lubkin was gratified to be able to share in an authentic learning experience with her students, as she herself gained a new perspective on Deaf culture.

Gina Wimp (Biology) began her teaching career by emulating her own professors who had largely relied on traditional lectures and textbooks. However, she soon realized that there were better ways to ignite students’ interest in the rapidly changing field of ecology.

Wimp challenges her Global Climate Change Ecology students to dive into primary sources, and teaches them how to approach both popular and scientific literature with a critical eye. By comparing articles from different sources, students learn how to evaluate data representations and experimental designs. Wimp finds that students take satisfaction in scrutinizing articles for inconsistencies or misrepresentations as they develop these new critical skills and become more active readers. Students, Wimp stresses, need to be able to differentiate “good science” from “bad science.”

Taking advantage of the controversial nature of the course subject, Wimp encourages students to follow news items on the topic and to write letters to the editor, further engaging them in debates on environmental policy. Wimp also involves her students in citizen science initiatives such as Project Budburst, which asks participants to monitor the phenology of a particular tree over time. Again drawing on what she feels was lacking in her own educational experience, Wimp wants her Ecological Analysis students to be able to apply the statistical concepts they are learning to their own research. She sends her students out into the field early on, so that they can practice working as research scientists.

Students have to deal with the real world and real data. As an ecologist, the sooner they can learn that, the better.
—Gina Wimp

Students also learn the skills of a research scientist by working directly with Wimp, who strives to develop collegial relationships with her students. She brings her students to the muggy salt marshes of New Jersey and North Carolina to conduct fieldwork on the changing ecosystems there. While Wimp’s students are motivated by her expertise in the field of ecology, Wimp in turn is inspired by the excitement her students bring to the topic, and is committed to empowering them as scientists.

At a time when so many educators are discouraging students from relying on Wikipedia for assignments, a few are taking a different approach: encouraging their students to become active participants in the process of knowledge production on Wikipedia. It’s part of the Wikipedia Education Program (WEP), which aims to have students and professors engage with the online encyclopedia as a teaching and learning tool.

For Professor Adel Iskandar, an adjunct professor in the Communication,Culture and Technology (CCT) program, Wikipedia provides a malleable platform for knowledge production that reflects the current period of social change, especially in the Arab world. All three of his courses last year—Embattled Media: Conflict and War Journalism; New Media, Innovation, Community & Dissidence; and Media & Communications in the Arab World— involved students working collaboratively on Wikipedia articles about media and politics. Iskandar’s students not only learned but also contributed new material to Wikipedia to teach others.

Each of Iskandar’s courses has had two Wikipedia components: article creation and in-class group edits. Creating articles means that the students have to become explorers, discovering legitimate sources on emerging social movements and technological advancements. Iskandar guides students to write creatively but neutrally about technological phenomena as they unfold, stating the facts without taking sides. He also reiterates the need to make articles relevant for the Wikipedia community and the public at large. To edit, students have to think critically about what would be worth adding to the articles. Here, Iskandar encourages his students to collaborate and find a balance with multiple perspectives. Such guiding principles help augment high-impact learning outcomes such as media and information literacy, critical thinking, and writing skills development. How has Iskandar ensured that this online collaboration will continue even after his courses end? For one thing, he has helped transform the program into a transnational initiative, supporting a WEP in Cairo, Egypt. Not only did his students create new articles for the English Wikipedia, but they fostered a new incentive for translation as the Arabic-language Wikipedia develops. Adel Iskandar’s efforts in his courses and this international partnership will encourage students to be active collaborators and engage with Wikipedia as a platform for knowledge production as well as curricular learning.

Over the past fifteen years, Anne Rosenwald (Biology) has come to realize that the collective brain power of her students is a much more powerful teaching tool than the stand-and-deliver lecture format. “Why not use that collective power by getting students involved in teaching each other and in independent research as much as possible?” asks Rosenwald.

There is so much to learn that it is probable students will not remember even ten percent of the facts. My job is to sift through the material, emphasize the main points and give students a hierarchy on which they can hang the facts.
-Anne Rosenwald

Even in a large course like Biochemistry with a hundred students, Rosenwald integrates genuine research projects in the curriculum—expecting her students not only to design experiments, but to interpret the results and evaluate their methodology. Rosenwald champions the idea of giving undergraduate students a real flavor of what being a research scientist is like, and doing so as early as possible in the students’ time at Georgetown.

She works with two national groups, the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT) and the Genome Education Partnership (GEP), which are dedicated to bringing cutting-edge research techniques to undergraduates. Specifically, these efforts take advantage of dramatic innovations in genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics. Rosenwald equips her Biochemistry students with free online tools for protein and DNA analysis. By using those web tools, the students are able to see first-hand what investigation is all about. Additionally, as part of Biology’s department’s initiative to shape Georgetown undergraduates into more adept communicators of science, Rosenwald incorporates one-on-one writing assignments. She works to increase students’ aptitude for fluent expression of scientific terminology and stresses that students must first know their audience. Rosenwald emphasizes that precision in science writing is just as important as precision in lab work. This is an ongoing process, one that students engage in at the beginning of their undergraduate careers and continue through their senior thesis experiences. As she continues to find new ways for her students to practice research and writing skills, Rosenwald is committed to giving her students a lasting approach to the material.

For his class Introduction to the US Political System, a course that boasts an enrollment of nearly 150 students, Mark Rom turned to a course blog to help stimulate class discussion and personal interaction among students. Because class discussion can be intimidating in such a large class, Rom decided to integrate a course blog into his curriculum in order to ensure that all students had the opportunity to engage in meaningful discussion about American politics.

Because Rom’s course fulfills a major requirement for government majors and a general education requirement for the College, Introduction to the U.S. Political System is guaranteed to draw a crowd. With the majority of his students studying in their first or second year at Georgetown, Rom believes that it is especially important for students to interact both with each other and as a class through dynamic conversation.

I see student engagement with the course blog as a really constructive form of activism, where people write their ideas and putting them out there for public consumption.
—Mark Rom

In order to move discussion beyond the handful of outgoing students brave enough to speak in front of 150 people, Rom requires students to write three posts per week on the course blog. Posts can range from an entry on almost any aspect of American politics to a response to another student’s post. Rom is impressed with the length, depth, and breadth of discussion that has grown within the blog. Although many students began the semester with shorter, less analytical pieces, Rom has seen a major increase in quality of conversation and in the quality of writing seen in the blog posts throughout the semester. Rom believes that students improve their writing and analytical skills through repeated practice, which is another reason why the blog has been a useful pedagogical tool for Rom’s large class. Although students are only required to write three short posts per week, Rom notes that if he took all of the students’ posts and put them into the format of formal papers, many students would find that they had written the equivalent of twenty-page papers over the semester.

Because it is all too easy to forget class content once a course is completed, Rom believes that the blog will become a part of the way students think and communicate on a daily basis, even after the class is over. Rom hopes that constant engagement with the blog will allow students to construct their own meaning of American politics that will remain with them indefinitely, as opposed to passively absorbing lectures that will be forgotten when the class is over.

In his course on Dante and the Christian Imagination, Frank Ambrosio found it difficult to teach students to move beyond basic levels of interpretation and to relate Dante’s Divine Comedy to their own lives.

Inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts, Frank Ambrosio envisioned a digital version of Dante’s Divine Comedy which would allow students to create personalized annotated versions of the poem. With the help of CNDLS’ Eddie Maloney and Bill Garr, Director and Assistant Director for Research & Development, this project, known as MyDante, became a reality.

Our goal is to introduce Dante to a whole new generation of readers, in a way that makes Dante at home in our world and us at home in his.
—Frank Ambrosio

MyDante teaches contemplative reading through a combination of digital tools and pedagogical resources. The site acts as a guide through the Divine Comedy, leading readers through a cohesive interpretation of the text through commentaries by Ambrosio and other materials. It enables collaboration among students by providing a structured virtual space for discussion. At the same time, it makes the reading experience profoundly personal by allowing readers to create their own annotations, images, and reflective journal entries.

MyDante builds on Ambrosio’s commitment to convincing students that the texts they read are significant to their own lives. In class, Ambrosio helps to make Dante’s poem meaningful by relating it to poetry by Pablo Neruda, sculptures by Michelangelo, and the film Dead Man Walking. Students enjoy and remember his courses; Ambrosio has been selected by students to receive both the Edward Bunn and Dorothy Brown teaching awards. Ambrosio is currently at work on a public version of MyDante, which will allow students, teachers, and researchers across the world to join a diverse interdisciplinary community of Dante readers.

Due to our engagement with MyDante, the course became far more than a philosophy course. It became an interactive journal, a colloquium, a journey, and a cross-disciplinary synthesis of scholarship.
—Rob Begin, student

Mahlet Tadesse wanted to give students in her Probability & Statistics course (MATH 040) as much feedback as possible while ensuring that their assignments were sufficiently rigorous, despite the logistical difficulties associated with teaching a large class.

Tadesse finds that students need to do a lot of practice problems to reinforce the statistical concepts learned in the classroom. However, grading the work of two hundred students every week is impractical. In order to give students timely feedback, Tadesse introduced a web-based technology called MathXL, which offers multiple-choice and free-response questions, tutorials, and instant evaluation of student answers. Students were assigned MathXL problems weekly, in addition to biweekly traditional textbook exercises.

In addition, when Tadesse taught MATH 040 in Spring 2009, she continued to incorporate the i>clicker system in her lectures, as Kimberly Sellers had done when teaching the course in Fall 2008. Like Sellers, Tadesse finds that the use of clickers increases student engagement and helps identify statistical concepts students may not have grasped well. Based on the mid-term evaluation Tadesse conducted, both the i>clicker and MathXL technologies were quite popular among students. About fifteen percent of the students were so much in favor of MathXL that they suggested making all of the assignments web-based.

However, Tadesse feels that traditional textbook problems have a lot to offer that cannot be easily captured with the current web-based exercises and prefers to continue using both types of assignments. Tadesse adopted and extended the model launched by Sellers for MATH 040 and continues to experiment with new ways of engaging and pushing her students. Transitioning to large-format lecture teaching may be a challenge, but Sellers and Tadesse prove that with innovation, collaboration and hard work both students and teachers can still enjoy a beneficial classroom experience.

Global Solver is a science policy communication tool that brings together scientists and policy makers to engage students in the search for innovative solutions to the critical challenges in the areas of energy, environment, global health, and security. Students in Francis Slakey’s Science and Society: Global Challenges seminar collaborate to draft science policy legislation and submit their bills to Congress.

Global Solver not only encourages students to share their work with one another, but also allows experts to comment on student work, dramatically increasing the opportunities for student interaction with authorities in the field. Legislation drafted by students using Global Solver has been introduced into Congress. For example, one group wrote a resolution calling for a reduction in plastic bag usage; another student developed a bill designed to improve awareness of bleeding disorders.

SPI teaches science students to 'think outside the textbook' and directly engage with Congress and industry on real world issues. Students break into groups, identify a societal problem of their own choosing, develop a political science-based solution, and then advocate for their idea—they are graded on what they accomplish. In just the last four years, three student groups have had their ideas signed into federal law.
—Francis Slakey, Co-director, SPI

For her TLT project, Dana decided to make changes to her cross-listed course Contexts for the Study of Sexuality (ENGL-319/WGST-204). She had two challenges. The first was encouraging students to learn from one another and practice academic collaboration. The second was increasing student engagement with the field of Queer Cultural Theory. Because her students had such varying levels of experience in studying gender and sexuality, some students tended to be less comfortable than others during class discussions; Dana hoped that she could use technology to encourage collaboration and help foster active participation in the difficult discussions that could unfold.

Dana used a class blog, a wiki, and ePortfolios in order to work toward these goals. The goal of the blog was to extend student engagement with the topics of the class outside the classroom and to provide a sense of lightheartedness that would help keep the class fun.

Dana’s students participated in three types of posting: presentation posts, which they wrote prior to presenting in class, reflection posts, which they posted after class to continue the discussion, and comments on reflection posts.

The goal of the wiki was to encourage students to practice academic collaboration. Dana used the wiki as the platform for an assignment in which students generated definitions to words that the class had identified as keywords in gender studies. Students chose the keywords that most interested them and worked in groups to research and come up with a robust definition for each keyword. This assignment was based on Raymond Williams’ book Keywords, in which he discusses the evolving meanings of key words we use to understand our society.

The goal of the ePortfolios was to encourage students to provide helpful feedback, incorporate one another’s feedback on the next paper, and learn from one another. In addition to helping students trace the trajectory of their learning, the ePortfolios also provided a space for students to read and comment on one another’s papers. Students used their ePortfolios to post all their research and papers, including their final projects.

Dana’s overall goals were to encourage collaborative work and increase student engagement and active participation. The three technologies employed—the blog, the wiki, and ePortfolios—were all more or less helpful in achieving these goals.

The blog worked well in increasing student engagement and active participation, though this class did not approach the blog with as much lightheartedness as previous classes have done. This probably was a result of the gravity and intenseness of this particular class, but Dana is considering ways to keep future students from thinking of their posts as formal essays.

In the end, the wiki platform was not as useful as Dana had hoped in overcoming her students’ aversion to group work. She found that most groups split up the work amongst their members and thus ended up researching and writing in parallel instead of collaboratively. Dana is thinking about ways to create a class environment that better fosters collaboration using technology and other pedagogical tools.

Dana found that the ePortfolios did indeed help students share their work and give feedback, providing students with easy access to one another’s final projects at all stages. There were some difficulties because students were confused about where to post and were sometimes frustrated with the platform, but overall the ePortfolios were successful tools for achieving the class goals.

Professors participating in the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative ask their students to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework. In the fall of 2010, Rochelle Davis (SFS) integrated Wikipedia into two of her classes, one for undergraduates (Theorizing Culture and Politics) and one for graduate students (Introduction to the Study of the Arab World). With the help of campus ambassadors and online Wikipedia ambassadors, students either created new articles or improved existing articles on topics ranging from Arabic hip-hop to Georgetown’s Nomadic Theatre to the Monastery of Saint Anthony.

In the spring of 2011, Rochelle Davis and her students are participating in the project as part of their class on Refugees in the Arab World. This project has pushed students to think critically about the reliability of sources, collaborative writing, and writing for a public audience. Though students find the project challenging, most ultimately find it to be a worthwhile academic project.

Turning in a paper and getting it back with a letter on it is far less rewarding than submitting an article onto one of the world’s most renowned knowledge bases for all to see. It makes putting all those hours of work into a project seem far more relevant and practical.
—Adrien Bien, student At Georgetown

In the fall of 2010, Rochelle Davis (SFS) integrated Wikipedia into two of her classes, one for undergraduates (Theorizing Culture and Politics) and one for graduate students (Introduction to the Study of the Arab World). With the help of campus ambassadors and online Wikipedia ambassadors, students either created new articles or improved existing articles on topics ranging from Arabic hip-hop to Georgetown’s Nomadic Theatre to the Monastery of Saint Anthony.

For her Doyle curriculum infusion project, Libbie Rifkin targeted her Humanities and Writing course on The Poetry and Culture of Washington, D.C. Her first-year students, who came from Georgetown’s Community Scholars program, represented racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds. These students had spent the previous summer on campus getting acclimated to college life. For her Doyle course, Rifkin hoped to capitalize on the tight bond formed among her students over the summer to foster peer-to-peer teaching and learning.

Rifkin set out to create the conditions that would allow her students to help each other. Feeling like her teaching style had become too “top-down,” Rifkin sought ways “to disseminate authority, particularly with respect to developing ideas for papers.” Her redesign efforts centered on blog assignments that asked students to mentor one another as writers. While she found that her students still needed significant guidance from her during the paper-writing process, Rifkin was impressed with the quality of their informal writing on the blog and found that her new approach led to “far better, richer, and more carefully thought through [writing] than in previous semesters.”

The blogging assignment also allowed Rifkin to tap into her students’ personal experiences by providing a forum that bridged analytical and reflective writing. Through the blog, students were able to see how their experiences differed from their classmates’. Ultimately, this diversity of perspective became the basis of their writing practice as they used the blog interaction with peers to bring their own writing into better focus.