Laboratory, Meet a Seminar Classroom. Seminar Classroom, Meet Laboratory. A Story of Love (Not at First Sight)

Think you can tell the difference between a traditional, seminar-style liberal arts classroom, and a laboratory learning space? Think again! In workshop #4, graduate student and post-doc participants re-imagined their lessons to include learning methods from radically different fields.
Using ecology "fieldwork keys" to learn about poems? That's what one ecologist taught a literature graduate student to do. Thinking about bodily 'deficiencies' or population-level physiological 'problems' to teach nutrition - which often introduces undergraduates to the subject through talking of healthy bodies and nutrition when it works? That's what one epidemiologist helped one nutritionist revise their lesson to include. How about using machines and objects to teach students in an English classroom? Thanks, engineering participants!!

We began our workshop by dividing participants into groups according to their disciplines, which resulted in a fun ice-breaker!

For the first activity, each group summarized a portion of an article, which pointed out the benefits of using activities or approaches from diverse fields. Each group had a piece of information that was new to everyone else, so all groups came together to form a completed work (like a jig-saw!) It seemed that the activity helped them further appreciate why implementing teaching techniques in other fields can result in a richer learning experience for our students.

Next, to put article’s information into practice, participants worked with a simple lab activity on candles and heat combustion. Pretty much, they were asked to incorporate an activity that is not traditionally used in the science in order to “enrich” the activities. Their ideas were impressive (a debate, an argumentative paper…)! How about adding a “pre-reading” activity to prepare students on the topic. However, one participant pointed out how he preferred to have students jump straight into the text to see what they can make of it on their own. This made us re-think of the pre-reading approach from a different angle.

Throughout this workshop, participants thought about what methods make their disciplines or investigatory practices unique, and co-explored with others how these might be incorporated into learning spaces where they seldom appeared. By the end, many people reported having new teaching ideas inspired by colleagues' fields and teaching practices.

- M & D