Article: Course Design
Beyond the Essay: Making Student Thinking Visible in the Humanities
Derek’s
Recommendation
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.
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.
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