An emergent exploration of critical instructional design.
In Design Forward, we talk a lot about flexibiliy and how we go about embracing a more emergent approach to teaching while still designing courses that feel coherent. What is the most rigidly structured class you teach or have taught in the past? If you were going to redesign this class to incorporate more flexibility and space for student choice and agency, how would you start? How do you think it would feel to teach this redesigned class compared to the existing version?
I think the more comfortable I feel about teaching, the more flexible I become about content. This Spring, while at the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, I attended a presentation from one of my NH colleagues. Her presentation was about a project on gender issues in Spanish-speaking countries. At the end of the presentation, she invited teachers to join the project. I thought this was a great learning opportunity for my students in my Spanish American Culture and Civilization course. I invited my colleague to share her project with my students. At the end of her presentation, they were very interested in participating. I struggled for several weeks to to adapt her project to my course lessons, our resources, and timeline. Finally, I created a mini-unit on gender topics. The students decided they want to conduct interviews with Hispanic women for their final product of the project. As a class, we created about 13 questions. Since some of the students are heritage speakers, they will interview some of their female relatives. The interview along with a reflection is replacing an essay about the Conquest of Colonization of the Americas that I had originally planned.