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New
Courses, New Teaching Techniques
Assistant professors who participate in the University Teaching Fellows Program design a new or greatly revised undergraduate course and spend some time during the year discussing what constitutes effective teaching. Here are courses planned by the 1997-98 University Teaching Fellows:
While carefully crafted and delivered lectures can be an effective means for teaching engineering, there are a number of limitations to this approach which I would like to try to address by use of the case teaching method. This course development project is not intended necessarily to replace my existing teaching approach, but is rather an "experiment" to determine how much and where case teaching might be able to contribute to the teaching of quantitative engineering courses. This strategy will be applied to the redesign of the introductory second-year chemical engineering course in material and energy balances.
Erik J. Fernandez, Chemical Engineering
The traditional
survey of twentieth-century music was never easy to teach: twentieth century
classical music seems to fragment, dividing again and again into wildly
different styles. But beyond this difficulty, the traditional focus on
modernist composition has also come to
seem problematic. Teachers at a number of schools have begun to seek a
new approach that would recognize popular music, jazz, and world music,
and give appropriate attention to musical activities other than composition.
In a new 300-level course, "Music in the Twentieth Century," I will introduce
the diversity of musics and musical activities in our century.
During the tenure of the fellowship I will reexamine my current teaching practices with the view to improve student understanding and application of a new course, EVSC 457: Micrometerology. I will develop instructional tools to help facilitate my teaching about the interactions between the atmosphere and the terrestrial biosphere. The principal feature is the development and application of project-type field laboratories in which students will be offered a particular natural phenomena (i.e., energy and mass exchange at the ground surface-atmosphere interface) to examine in the context of the subjects studied in the classroom. Students will work in groups to address a particular phenomena, find means of applying concepts covered in class, and devise scientific methods to seek answers to posed questions. In addition to achieving instructional goals, field laboratories will provide students practical working knowledge of instrumentation, methods of scientific inquiry, and interpretation and presentation of scientific knowledge. José D. Fuentes, Environmental Sciences Italian 374, "Italian Theater," combines a traditional approach to canonical literary texts of the Italian dramatic tradition with an interdisciplinary slant aimed at bringing
together creative writing, editing, directing, and performing. Plays by Machiavelli, Ariosto, Goldoni, Pirandello, and Dario Fo are read, discussed, and analyzed, both from a literary and a performative stand. At the same time, through consecutive steps, the students jointly conceive of a play of their own, write it, rehearse it, and finally perform it publicly at the end of the semester. While remaining a class on Italian literature, Italian 374 will give the students the opportunity to take some of the rhythm of Italian comic verse away with them as a permanent part of their voices, habits of thinking, reading, and writing.
Alessandro Vettori, Spanish, Italian, & Portuguese
"Women and the Bible" provides a forum for exploring the intersection of gender issues and biblical studies at a number of important levels. Topics for study include the cultural contexts within which women have traditionally approached scripture, as well as the recent emergence of feminist perspectives on the Bible; the social position of women in Israel and in the early church; biblical narratives with female protagonists; feminine imagery used to express theological viewpoints; and the social and cultural ramifications of monotheism.
Current engineering students require a better grounding in the integration of computer and information technology applied to the design, development, implementation, and control of complex large scale systems. I propose to develop an Object-Oriented Modeling and Simulation Studio. In the studio, students can practice cooperative learning while
performing the art of object-oriented modeling, which focuses on decomposing a complex system around key system components and their behavior. I plan to use my time as a Teaching Fellow to develop course materials that emphasize the active and collaborative learning of object-oriented modeling and simulation within the context of the modeling studio.
© 2004-2007 by the Teaching Resource Center of the University of Virginia
