5/15/2023 0 Comments Speedy the geo duckStudents, at the end of the course, are asked to write a narrative self-evaluation, to be discussed together with the teachers’ last narrative assessment. Teachers offer three feedback and narrative assessment moments per course in which they discuss their progress with students individually. Students who graduate from Evergreen will definitely be able to communicate, orally and in writing, across any kind of difference.Īt Evergreen they have no grades, but narrative evaluations. How good are they in close reading? Can they give feedback to their peers? Quite interestingly we were told by the Provost that, when hiring, Evergreen makes sure that their teachers are skilled in teaching writing. All students at Evergreen are constantly actively engaged with the course content and need to work on skills, some of which they might not master yet: in fact, it is not obvious that skilled writers are also proficient in psychoanalysis or that philosophy experts can translate a quote from a short story in prose into Shakespearean English or into a police report. She did not hesitate: after 10 years of co-teaching every term with different colleagues, it is very easy to build up a database of successful techniques!įirst take home lesson: co-teaching is the best source of best practices and the best professionalization strategy.īack to my question about rigour and stimulation of the best students. I asked Kathleen, one of the two co-teachers where she learned so many different teaching techniques. In only one and a half day, they attended two lectures (one lectures on Freud for which they had to read two texts one guest lecture by me called “Ancient Eastern and Western philosophers on words that create worlds”) they submitted and discussed their essays and “response essays” in pairs they participated to a creative writing workshop in groups of 5, for which they had prepared by reading: The Sandman by Hoffman, the contribution of 4 class mates, a “Close Reading Guide” and a “Feedback Guide”). One of the most striking features of this course was the variety of teaching and learning strategies students were exposed to. It is an extremely ambitious and well-structured interdisciplinary course on psychoanalysis, philosophy, creative writing and sound art. The discussions over dinner led to new questions, on which we could focus on during the next day sessions.Ĭhiara Robbiano: As honours director of UCU, I have especially asked myself: what about rigour? Do the best students receive enough stimulation or must the teachers keep the level low enough for everyone to tag along? I was embedded in ‘ Born into Language’. This gave us as a group a great opportunity to get the most out of this relatively short visit. But can they ensure an excellent academic experience to all? We all went with different expectations and even more questions: How does a ‘radically interdisciplinary curriculum’ look like? What does it entail from teaching and policy perspectives? And how does such a thing work out for students at a state college?Īll 7 of us were embedded in different courses, some of us as observer, some had a more active role as guest speaker. They definitely do wonders about support -from strategies to welcome any kind of diversity to children day care for students-parents, from evening and weekend classes to anxiety-relief animals. Learning that all courses at Evergreen are inter or multidisciplinary, that there are no departments, no requirements and no grades made a deep impression on us.Īt Evergreen, they are very keen on ensuring both rigour and support. At the conference Trevor Speller organized a workshop on innovative teaching and academic excellence at Evergreen, attended by Michael Burke and Chiara Robbiano. Trevor Speller, Curriculum Dean at Evergreen State College earlier in the Netherlands during the National Honours Conference in Zwolle in the summer of 2017. The initiative for this trip was taken by professor Michael Burke, Honours dean of UU Honours College. the sustainability in prisons project- with 97% acceptance rate. You can find the reports that each of us has written here below.Įvergreen State College counts 3700 undergrads and offers a kind of education that might strike one as both paradoxical and wonderful, by coupling honours elements -interdisciplinary teaching, individual attention, ample opportunity for individual projects and for transdisciplinary work, e.g. In January 2018, with a contingent of 7 UU colleagues, we went to visit Evergreen State College - a LAS college in Olympia (Washington). Chiara Robbiano A mind blowing visit to Evergreen State College - a multi-authored report
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