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.
  Sarah Wolf (she/her)

  Member

  July 22, 2024 at 2:31 pm

  As much as possible, I try to make assignments relevant and specific to students’ lives. For example, in my public health class, I ask them to assess how healthy their own neighborhoods are from the standpoint of the built environment (including walkability, air quality, pedestrian fatalities, etc), population health indicators, and access to healthy foods, etc.

  In my personal and community health classes, most of the assignments are personal in nature such as setting setting personal health goals using the SMART methodology and tracking their progress toward those goals over the course of the semester. I am planning this semester to have students assess the food environment either on campus or in their home neighborhoods. I also assign a peer suicide prevention training called Q.P.R and assign an extra credit assignment to do Naloxone training where participants learn how to administer the antidote for an opiate overdose. Both of these trainings empower students with the skills to save a life and both are especially relevant given the mental health and drug overdose crises of today.

  I would like to do better about making the connections between less obvious topics and the students’ lives.
  Careen Purcell

  Member

  July 23, 2024 at 3:18 pm

  I can help students connect the course content to their current and future personal lives by providing time and opportunities within the classroom, lab, and clinical environment. For example, when students are taught that one attribute of a nurse is being compassionate to all human beings they provide care for, they can connect compassionate behaviors in their personal lives when they care for a sick relative, a friend that has experienced trauma, or in response to global traumas such as hurricanes, famines, or people who are homeless. Making these connections can foster relevance and purpose in what the student is learning and their actions that demonstrate compassion.

  The readings suggest an active classroom strategy, “Building Connections for Classrooms.” I am considering incorporating this learner activity in my class. It will take time and effort, but I will try it. Students will actively engage in the process because it allows them to brainstorm and make connections from their lived experiences. According to Dr. Chris Hulleman from the University of Virginia, personal connections to content enable students to understand how they are learning and that the content they are learning is valuable to them.
  Katherine Joubin

  Member

  July 25, 2024 at 8:13 pm

  For my cell biology course, I allow students to choose any cell biological topic for their research report. I encourage students to connect this assignment with any outside interests. Many students choose topics related to diseases that affect people they know and others choose topical areas, such as why does COVID result in loss of smell. The goal is to show students that the course work will directly help them understand scientific questions they encounter in their daily life.
  Karyna Pryiomka

  Member

  August 7, 2024 at 3:45 pm

  I am really excited to try out a mapping activity asking students to think about their career/grad school plans (I work primarily with seniors) in very specific terms and actively connect the concepts in the course to the specific job activities or grad school requirement, helping them build those connections and see the value of the course content.
  John Beaumont

  Participant

  August 14, 2024 at 12:28 pm

  As a linguistics and language professor, I think it is important for students to have a sense of the language they use in various contexts (past present and future). The course I often teach is LIN 110 The Structure of English, which explores that grammar (morphology and syntax) of various forms of English. The course problematizes the concept of there being a standard form of English and invites students to determine what the structure of their English looks like in the various contexts of their lives (home, friends, college, work) and how they feel about what they find. They due this through a variety of scaffolded activities, including ones in which they examine the structure of their English in an original narrative and in a piece of academic writing of their choice.

  • This reply was modified 1 week, 2 days ago by John Beaumont.
  • This reply was modified 1 week, 2 days ago by John Beaumont.
  Lara Stapleton (She/her)

  Member

  August 14, 2024 at 4:24 pm

  In your course(s), how can you assist students in connecting the course content to their current and 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?

  I can lead writing exercises that help students to connect the course content to their lives. I might have them imagine a situation both in their lives now, or in the future, in which they write an important letter. We can brainstorm examples: convincing an institution to change policies, writing a letter about why they show skill and integrity useful for a job, apologizing for a mistake, asking for an apology, writing a politician, being a politician, explaining a new system to employees.

  I believe English courses are a good place to make such connections because all students absorb culture in their free time. It may be music or films, video games or poetry, they engage in a wide range of culture. We can bring our critical thinking to those experiences and write about which works are personally important or culturally important or relevant.

  We can make those connections through writing and discussion. Hearing how various students make these connections will help them broaden their minds to various possibilities.