Collection

Alternatives to Traditional Essays

There is much value in the traditional essay, but it’s not always the only, or even the best way to accomplish our teaching goals. Recently, instructors have been experimenting with a wide range of alternatives to the take-home essay, a process that the advent of generative AI has only accelerated.

Course and Assignment Design

Updated December 2024

The "students as producers" approach to assignments design encourages students to tackle open-ended problems, to operate with a high degree of autonomy, and to share their work with wider audiences.

Derek Bruff

I've seen the "students as producers" approach work in a wide variety of courses to help students move past "busy work" and engage deeply with course concepts.

View excerpt

Students as Producers: Collaborating toward Deeper Learning

Derek Bruff

For our end-of-year event, we wanted to show our campus what “Students as Producers” could look like, so we held an event we called the Celebration of Learning, an exhibition of twenty-five student projects from across the university: Research by first- and second-year undergraduates conducted within a biology lab course. Original short stories written for a Spanish course. Video documentaries created by future teachers to explore social and philosophical aspects of education. A water conservation education program aimed at children, developed by students in a service-learning course. These were just some of the products of student learning on display at the Celebration of Learning. The projects, posters, presentations, and performances shared at the event represented significant learning experiences for students. They also represented courses that were thoughtfully and intentionally designed by faculty to foster deep learning...

hdl.handle.net/1803/9446

Article

Was this resource helpful?

The unessay is an assignment popular in history and related fields that asks students to complete a creative project instead of writing a paper.

Derek Bruff

When you give students their choice of medium to make an evidence-based argument, you can be delightfully surprised by what they produce!

View excerpt

The Unessay: A Creative and Audience-Focused Assignment

Perspectives on History

Critics of the way historians teach and interact with the public have boomed in the past decade, in large part because history majors in colleges and universities have been on the decline for some time. This downward trajectory has forced historians to rethink how they present their work, what kinds of audiences they reach, and ultimately how they train the next generation of historians. The unessay is just one step in rethinking what a history education means, and it’s a powerful tool to get students to think through the future of the discipline with us.

www.historians.org/perspectives-article/the-unessay-a-creative-and-audience-focused-assignment-september-2023/

Article

Was this resource helpful?

Paul Hanstedt argues that courses can and should be designed to present students with “wicked problems” because the skills of dealing with such knotty problems are what will best prepare them for life after college.

Derek Bruff

I love how Paul Hanstedt encourages readers to dig deeper with their stated learning objectives and how he talks about the role of audience in student writing and production. This is a great exploration of the design of more authentic and meaningful assignments.

View excerpt

Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World

Paul Hanstedt

How we teach our students is also crucial in the development of authority. If what we are talking about is a kind of authorship of the world, it follows that the learning process that prepares students for this kind of active, thoughtful response to the problems we face must allow them to practice these skills. In other words, the only way to truly develop authority is to practice it, consistently, from the start, in ways at first small, then increasingly large. We need to develop authority in ways that are perhaps less complex (although never simple), then increasingly more complex, that allow students to fail, fall down, and pick themselves back up again. Authority should allow student to learn how problems are solved with the deliberation, creativity, resilience, and collaboration that allow them to understand that they are capable of solving problems and that solving these problems leads to a rewarding relationship with the world and with themselves.

doi-org.proxy1.library.virginia.edu/10.4324/9781003443858

Access Outside of UVA: www.routledge.com/Creating-Wicked-Students-Designing-Courses-for-a-Complex-World/Hanstedt/p/book/9781620366974

Book

Was this resource helpful?

It's traditional to ask humanities students to represent their learning through essays, but essays need not be the only tool in our toolboxes. This teaching guide outlines a variety of activities and assignments for making student learning visible in the humanities.

Derek Bruff

This guide came out of a workshop that Nancy Chick and I developed several years ago. Nancy has a deep understanding of the cognitive moves that humanities instructors ask their students to make, and she provides many ways to help students show those moves.

View excerpt

Beyond the Essay: Making Student Thinking Visible in the Humanities

Nancy Chick

These three ways of talking about teaching and learning—making faculty and student knowledge visible, externalizing representations of personal understanding, and having students create, produce, or perform their own interpretations or conclusions—shift students away from the role of passive recipients or consumers to creators, producers, or performers of knowledge, understanding, interpretations, and conclusions. The next two pages offer examples of humanities-based activities and assignments designed to fulfill these goals.

cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/beyond-the-essay/

Article

Was this resource helpful?

This blog post walks through the details of multiple iterations of a podcast assignment in which students were asked to create 10-12-minute audio stories about codes and ciphers from history.

Derek Bruff

Several years ago, I replaced an essay assignment in my first-year writing course with a podcast assignment. This blog post of mine details the assignment and how it changed over time, with attention to in-class supporting activities and a link to my grading rubric.

View excerpt

Building a Better Podcast Assignment

Agile Learning

I’m excited to share that my cryptography students and I will launch the third season of our class podcast, *[One-Time Pod](https://derekbruff.org/blogs/fywscrypto/historical-crypto/one-time-pod/)*, this fall. A few years ago, thanks to some work with a Center for Teaching learning community on teaching with podcasts, I decided to replace one of the paper assignments in my first-year writing seminar with an audio assignment. Students were asked to take a code or cipher from history and describe its origin, use, influence, and mechanics. The assignment has both a storytelling component, in which students use the audio format to construct a narrative about their chosen code or cipher, and a technical communication component, since they’re asked to explain their code or cipher’s encryption and decryption using nothing but sound.

derekbruff.org

Article

Was this resource helpful?

Want to recommend a resource to add to this collection? Send us an email.