2.10 Discussion Board IV: Connections (Required to earn certificate)

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  Posted by CUNY Mindset Initiative on March 11, 2024 at 10:57 am

  💬 Discussion:

  • In your course(s), how can you assist students in connecting the course content to their current & future personal lives?
  • How will students connect what they care about to what they are learning?
  • How will they actively engage in the process of making these connections?

• Elizabeth Klein (she/her)

  Member

  June 22, 2024 at 7:10 am

  Dear Casandra,

  I really like the idea of the 21st century connection to content and doing it via a Padlet. I love this idea of reinvention. I do this with a writing project and after they get over the initial hives from having read a short story and re-invent it, they have a blast.
  Best,
  Liz Klein
  Elizabeth Klein (she/her)

  Member

  June 22, 2024 at 7:12 am

  Dear Victoria,

  I love the ‘response to inspiration’. Maybe I’ll bring that into my teaching of writing course?

  Best,
  Liz Klein
  Elizabeth Klein (she/her)

  Member

  June 22, 2024 at 7:29 am

  Since I teach graduate students who are studying to be teachers, I usually ask them at the beginning of the course what brought them into teaching and why they really want to teach. This is usually a tipping point in which I ask them whether they are teaching or if they are not currently teach where they want to teach. If they are career changers I try to ask them how they can bring some of the same skills to the classroom, but sometimes it makes them more self-conscious, so I usually focus on the vision and what they want to learn.

  Secondly, my projects involve identifying a learner and teaching the learner or at least interviewing and prepping a lesson. But after the more technical aspects of prepping lessons and tutoring a tutee that they choose, we go into a creative project. In the other class that I teach it is about 70 percent creative and 30 percent skill and it makes them uncomfortable at first. We work through the discomfort by starting with reinvented stories in which they must chose an short story aimed at an adolescent audience, read it critically and then re-invent it. This starts their juices going for the longer memoir project. The memoir project builds up with smaller freewrites and brainstorms. They truly share a slice of their life. I write with them (not in the class) but at home to share my vulnerability and they create an end-product to share with the class. The students that do not want to write memoir can stick with developing a short story. But fiction reflects the author’s life too!

  Back to my first class, which is the teaching of reading…. I have students write a children’s book and they can choose the audience they want and the topic as long as it’s fiction or a social story. They learn a great deal by authoring and illustrating a book. This term I gave an alternative project which is a digital identity project and I rolled it out. All of them wanted to write the children’s book. We used AI for the illustrations or Canva. They had a wide variety of choices. I met with them individually and they met in groups to support each other. The question of getting them to care and connect was not that hard. The students not only love it, but word gets around that I teach this project. Some incoming students come in with ideas already fleshed out. Some of them say, ” I have always wanted to write a children’s book”. I re-direct them to the purpose of the project, which is to create student-centered, personalized and differentiated teacher materials and they all get it! I’ve only had two students in the years I’ve done this say that they did not like creative work and did not like choice. One of them wrote me two years later after he complained and sent me baby pictures of his children. I guess that I had impact after all!
  Olga (she/her)

  Member

  July 17, 2024 at 2:41 pm

  My personal favorite connection exercise is the Renaissance “moral compass” activity, which highlights every student’s individuality and brings attention to psychological likenesses. It analyzes two sculptural versions of David by Donatello and Michelangelo. I divide the class into four quadrants, identifying them by temperaments prevalent during the Renaissance: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholic (the students test their personality types before class). We briefly discuss their behavioral traits and focus on how emotional makeup affects human actions (e.g., like a prototype of contemporary CBT psychology and personality types). Then, we aim to analyze the unsurmountable challenge David faced (i.e., a shepherd boy fighting a mighty warrior) as a version of a contemporary “underdog” story, something all students understand because of their own experiences with adversity. Each temperament group identifies visual signs of psychology in the sculptures, deepening their understanding of the artistic aim of creating these works, comparing and contrasting them with personal choices they would make in dealing with a challenge. Ultimately, this exercise teaches how identical formal traits, like furrowed eyebrows or downcast eyes, acquire multifaceted interpretations of the artworks that students love. It allows them to see that not only one “correct” meaning exists or should be known about a given artwork but that a plurality of views or approaches—often contradictory—exists, and when they are acknowledged, the world looks richer than before.