TEACHING & LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
Teaching Activities
If American Civilization and this associated website are being used as the principal sources of learning material for a taught unit, then the following suggestions for possible teaching activities may be helpful. The mix would obviously be constrained by timetable and staffing limitations.
Lectures
A lecture format might be found useful where large groups of students have to be taught for such tasks as:
- Updating the material (or some of it) provided in a particular chapter of the book
- Augmenting the material through the addition of further information about a particular topic or institution.
- Developing particular lines of argument in cases for instance where the text or website refer to recent major debates and discussions on institutions or policies.
Seminars
Where staffing permits, smaller groups of students could be taught in seminars which might be used for any of the following purposes:
- Permitting student-led discussion of issues arising from a specified section of the text.
- Responding to students' questions about specific items or terms from the text.
- Examining primary documentation which the students have been asked to download from the internet and read prior to the seminar. The website in particular provides a number of links to sites from which short historical documents as well as many other, institution-specific, documents can easily be accessed for consultation on-screen or for downloading.
- Guiding students on aspects of the assessment process for the course unit. Such issues as the expected type of response to term definition questions of the type which appear at the ends of the chapters and guidance on the marking criteria for essay work lend themselves quite easily to seminar presentation.
- Supervising student practice on likely types of assessment artefacts.
Tutorials
Again, where staffing permits, very small groups of students might be taught through a tutorial process. Within this particular format, it might very well be appropriate for tutors to set and mark essay work, to give students detailed guidance on the standards expected in essay work, and to give some indication of the standards expected both in the presentation of material and in the provision and laying out of bibliographies.
Such issues as the need to reference essay work appropriately and to understand the nature of plagiarism and the necessity to avoid it might very well be best addressed in this kind of teaching environment.
Student Working Groups
If it is wished to encourage students to engage in collaborative or larger group work, tasks could be specified for completion within a limited time frame.
Individual or Group Presentations
Students could be asked to make oral presentations either individually or as very small groups in order to report back on the collaborative work done in working groups of the type referred to above. This might indeed constitute one or more of the assessment tasks where it is wished to examine students by this method.
Presentations of this kind could be made either in front of a professor/assessor if the presentations are being used as part of the assessment process or they could be made simply to other groups of students if peer assessment procedures were felt to be appropriate.