Active Learning in the Humanities with Todd Clary, Stephen Sansom, and Carolyn Aslan

I see a lot of scholarly work on active learning in the STEM fields, but much less about active learning in the humanities. So when I read an article about active learning in a large-enrollment Greek myths course at Cornell University, I wanted to learn more.

In this episode, I talk with the authors of that paper: Todd Clary, senior lecturer in classics at Cornell University; Stephen Sansom, assistant professor of classics at Florida State University; and Carolyn Aslan, senior associate director at the Center for Teaching Innovation at Cornell. All three were involved in redesigning Cornell’s Greek myths course as part of Cornell’s Active Learning Initiative.

The interview digs into active learning in this course, especially the use of classroom response systems, as well as pre-class assignments, revised assessments, and more.

Episode Resources

·       Todd Clary’s faculty page, https://classics.cornell.edu/todd-c-clary

·       Stephen Sansom’s website, https://www.stephensansom.com/

·       Carolyn Aslan’s CTI page, https://teaching.cornell.edu/person/carolyn-aslan

·       Cornell University’s Active Learning Initiative, https://teaching.cornell.edu/programs/faculty-instructors/active-learning-initiative

·       “Active Learning Techniques to Enhance Conceptual Learning in Greek Mythology,” https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/870835 

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Chapters

• 1:46 Meet the Educators
• 9:07 Course Context
• 12:51 Active Learning
• 20:30 Pre-Class Work
• 25:16 New Assessments
• 32:10 Greater Student Learning
• 37:04 Outro

Transcript

Derek Bruff (00:05):
Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff.. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time. A couple of years ago, right around the time I launched this podcast, I bookmarked a study about the integration of active learning in a large enrollment course in the humanities. I see lots of scholarly literature on active learning in the STEM courses, but much less work on active learning in humanities. I often hear that humanities faculty don't need to learn about active learning because they're already doing it in all of their discussion-based courses. And that may be true, but I also know that there are a lot of large humanities courses that involve a lot of lectures, if not outright continuous exposition by the instructor.

(00:55):
That's why this paper on active learning in a large enrollment Greek Myths course caught my eye, and I'm excited to share an interview today with the authors of that paper. Todd Clary is a senior lecturer in classics at Cornell University. Stephen Sansom is an assistant professor of classics at Florida State University, and Carolyn Aslan is a senior associate director at the Center for Teaching Innovation at Cornell University. All three were involved in redesigning Cornell's Greek Myths course as part of Cornell's active learning initiative. This episode pairs very well with the previous episode featuring Becky Marchiel and her approach to teaching habits of mind in the History Survey course. However, this episode digs a little deeper into active learning in the humanities, particularly some creative uses of classroom polling, as well as more about collaborative course redesign.

(01:47):
Thank you, Stephen, Todd, and Carolyn for being on Intentional Teaching. I'm excited to have you on the podcast today and hear about this really interesting course you all collaborated on. Thanks for being here.

Todd Clary (01:57):
It's a pleasure. Thank you for having us.

Derek Bruff (02:00):
Let's start with the Cornell Active Learning Initiative, which is part of the reason the three of you are together. What is the Active Learning initiative and how did each of you get involved with it? And maybe I'll ask Carolyn to give us the overview of the initiative.

Carolyn Aslan (02:16):
Yeah, so the Cornell Active Learning Initiative, it's one of our big teaching initiatives here at Cornell, and the way that it works is that departments prepare a grant proposal, and in the proposal they identify a set of courses that they would like to make substantial revisions to involving usually incorporating a lot of active learning, but other kinds of revisions, like to the assessments or to other teaching methods. And if the grant proposal is successful, we give them money, and most of the money is used to hire a teaching postdoc who has a PhD in that subject of the department. And the advantage of that model is that the postdoc is an expert in the field, and so they can really collaborate with the faculty members to design discipline specific active learning so they can really get in and design the activities and worksheets and polling questions from the lens of actually having expertise in that.

(03:21):
And it also means they can act as basically a thought partner for the faculty so they can talk through the course together. And a lot of faculty say just how beneficial it is does kind of have another set of eyes in the room, but also another brain in the room to kind of see what's going on and see how things are going and what needs to be adjusted so they can really help faculty kind of get going with active learning and get more comfortable with it, especially for people who might have not done very much with it before, having another person in the room to help out is really turns out to be a really great thing. So we didn't invent this model. We adopted it from other places. The Science Education Initiative started by Carl Weiman at places like UC Boulder, and University of British Columbia. But we've been finding that it's been working really well at Cornell for over 10 years now.

Derek Bruff (04:15):
10 years. Has it been that long?

Carolyn Aslan (04:17):
It's been actually probably 11 now.

Derek Bruff (04:19):
Yeah. Okay. Wow. Okay. I'm old, apparently. I was like, yeah, you guys were the new adopters of this, right? Carl Weiman did something similar a while ago. Yeah, it's been a while. Lemme ask Todd, I assume you were the faculty member and Stephen, you were the postdoc in this scenario, Todd, what led you to get involved with the active learning initiative there?

Todd Clary (04:42):
Well, so it was really the myth class, the Greek myth class, which I took over in the fall of 2016 from a retiring professor whose name was Dave Mankin. He really just ran it as a big lecture,

(05:02):
And I think it was a hugely popular class back in the nineties with enrollment that had gone over 300. But as time went on, the enrollment had steadily declined. So I took it over in 2016, but my experience with the big myth class was as a lecture also. And so I started just lecturing, asking students questions on occasion. When you do that, you usually get maybe one or two students who participate. They're the same old suspects. Yeah. When Steven was hired as the active learning postdoc here, the department asked me to revamp the myth class in that setting. And it was fun. It was great. The students responded, and I mean, now the low point of the myth class enrollment was about in the upper sixties

Derek Bruff (06:11):
Okay

Todd Clary (06:11):
The first couple years that I ran it as basically a lecture, it was in the low seventies. It didn't really blow up, but once we started doing the active learning, it quickly went up to 90 and then into the hundreds, and now it's in the two hundreds.

Derek Bruff (06:30):
Wow, okay.

Todd Clary (06:32):
Yeah.

Derek Bruff (06:32):
Word has gotten out. Yeah.

Todd Clary (06:34):
Yeah. So it's been great. It really is. Yeah.

Derek Bruff (06:41):
So Steven, how did you come to be involved in this?

Stephen Sansom (06:46):
Well, this postdoc in active learning was my first job out of graduate school, so I got the job offer, but I had been strangely fortuitously prepared for it as a graduate student. I had co-taught with three different professors and three different classes as a graduate student, like lectures. And I was also fortunate that one of the professors I first TAed for and then co-taught with was a senior faculty, had done everything you can do in an academic career, top of her field, had worked in the dean's office a little bit, but really wanted the experience in the classroom to be more interesting and exciting for her. And so what she decided to do was to get plugged in with the Center for Teaching. I went to Stanford for graduate schools, and so she plugged in and asked what they could do, and we were fortunate.

(07:40):
At the same time, Carl Weiman was also renovating a lot of the teaching on campus in stem, which had spilled over into academic spaces. And so that Stanford, they had redesigned several of their rooms to be meant for group activities. And this was in large lecture halls that had tiered seating, but not as like a movie theater, but with tiers of tables with four seats per table and a big whiteboard and clickers. That was for Chemistry 1 0 1. And so for the class I worked with, we were in a weird space that they didn't know what else to do. I think it used to be like a stacks in an old library or something, but they wanted to make it a lecture hall. So they installed a series of monitors around the perimeter and there were these unwieldy posts in the middle of it. And so they had these larger tables that could seat eight students that were modular.

(08:32):
You could roll 'em around, do whatever you wanted to. And so we taught a class of about a hundred students in there that had a lot of group work, but it was on ancient athletics. And so they were engaging old mosaics texts, sat in papyri and this, that and the other to try to understand what athletics was in the ancient world. And it was through that experience that I felt incredibly prepared for the interview for the A LI postdoc. And it seamless from my experience as a graduate student totally without thanks to no effort of my own. I was just lucky to have professors who wanted to make things more interesting in the classroom.

Derek Bruff (09:08):
Yeah. Todd, give me a little more context. In the class I, I mean, I have my understanding of what a classics department, Greek Myth course is all about, but what do you see as the goals of the class and who are the students who typically enroll in this course? I'm assuming you don't get 200 classics majors in a course like this.

Todd Clary (09:27):
No, as far as the students go, I mean, you get majors from all across the board, chemistry majors, political science majors, a few classics majors. But yeah, it's definitely a course designed for people who have absolutely no background in Greek myth. Hopefully. There's also a little something there for the people who have the background in Greek myth on the first day we do a bio myography where everybody posts on Canvas. What has been your experience with Greek myth? And invariably the biggest thing is Percy Jackson. So

Derek Bruff (10:14):
Yes, that makes sense.

Todd Clary (10:15):
I would say

Derek Bruff (10:17):
Typically aged college students, yes,

Todd Clary (10:20):
60 to 70% of the students have exclusively experienced Greek myth through Percy Jackson. So yeah, we get people all across the board.

Derek Bruff (10:34):
And where do you try to take them in a course like that? What are your kind of high level course goals for a course like that?

Todd Clary (10:42):
So yeah, the high level course goals did not change at all with the active learning. Some of the lower level course goals did, but not the higher ones. So really my goal was always to expose students to scholarship at an expert level that is going on in my field right now and has been going on for the past 20 years or so. And the main thing there is what we call the oral palimpsest, which is arguments that aim to reconstruct the oral tradition that existed before the texts that we have. So sort of shooting back into the prehistory of oral Greek oral traditions. And the way that that has been done is by triangulating visual images on Greek VAEs with the text themselves. And my PowerPoints were always very visually based, all kinds of pictures of Greek vases, all kinds of pictures of even Renaissance paintings.

(12:01):
I mean, so converting this to active learning was great because we could focus on the images even more. I mean, I used to show the students the images and then lecture on them. And I don't think a lot of the students really reached the level of observation that we do now, because now we show them the image and we say, okay, you've read this passage in Iliad, now you see this sort of similar passage in the vase. What are the similarities? What are the differences? And we have a whole class discussion, and I think the powers of observation go way up. And then once you do that, you can move on to the more advanced arguments pretty quickly and with more comprehension going forward, I think.

Derek Bruff (12:52):
Yeah. So let's talk about those classroom activities. So let's start with polling. What were some of the ways that you used polling in this myths class

Stephen Sansom (13:03):
Had, I mean, had experienced using Poll Everywhere as a graduate student in some large lecture courses. So I was most familiar with that program. And so we used a variety of its features. Of course, we had the multiple choice A, B, C, D, which is super useful form for a variety of different skills that you want to target. It can be very simple kind of thing. It can be completely introductory. They have no experience with the text that you're dealing with or dealing with, or it's something maybe deeper where they've had a lot of background and now we want to parse, differentiate, whatever it might be. But we also used short answer where they would write a sentence or two in response to something, a question, a prompt that then would sort of float down the screen in a kind of fast, slightly chaotic, but gave us the opportunity to let them have a few moments to process to articulate which was the most valuable thing, and then have some accountability by having it float up on the screen.

(14:12):
And then we could look and select, oh, I really want to verbalize that word, that phrase, while it floats by, and you can mess with it there. But we also, what was really fun is using the clickable image. So we were having 'em use their phones where they'd have their smartphone out. There would be the slide on the screen as well as on their phones. And we would say, okay, so here's an image of a Greek vase. We did those two kinds of things, text and images. So if it's an image of a vase visual culture, they would say, okay, I say, clicked on the most important feature of this vase based on the concept of the day. So they're thinking about, I don't know, justice or something. And on the image, there's a picture of someone holding a pin or a chisel or adjudicating or a conflict with two people sort of fighting each other or something like that.

(15:09):
I don't know, whatever it might be. And they would just drop a pin on it just like you do on Google Maps or something like that. And then we would display it, and we could just use that to guide our focus on what is important and what is not about this image. And we could do it for text too. Here's a poem. Here's eight lines of a poem. Where's a word that reflects this theme? And I have to look at all the words and be like, okay, okay, what is this about? I was looking back, and they would oftentimes get to a good answer, a majority of them would, or if they didn't, it gave us the opportunity to talk about it more and let 'em drop another pin.

Derek Bruff (15:50):
Wow. Those are questions that aren't, maybe there are better answers and worse answers, but there's not necessarily a correct answer to all of those.

Stephen Sansom (16:00):
Better and worse is the scale that a lot of we in the humanities work on. It is a scale. It's important to acknowledge the scale. Everyone can engage with this spectrum of better and worse, but it's usually not as effective as the right and wrong when we're trying to get people into the discipline. So yeah, better or worse.

Todd Clary (16:23):
Another thing, a function on poll everywhere that we've used to great effect is the word cloud. I like those. So one way we use those is I will cite a passage of scholarship that's pretty obstruse has some big terminology in it, and just ask the students, what word here do you find? Maybe? Do you not know? What word here do you find most interesting? And it's a great way to instigate conversation because then you get the word cloud, and right in the middle will be this big word, I don't know, paleolithic. And then you get to define the Paleolithic period is here to here, and this is what people were doing then. And then other satellite words are not as big, but also shamanistic might be on there. I'm thinking of one passage in particular, and then you can talk about shamanism and you get some lively discussions going there. So the word cloud has been really good too.

Derek Bruff (17:37):
I love, so the word cloud for a passage of scholarship, what's the word you don't understand or what's the key word? Because it's kind of a multiple choice, but there's just too many choices to represent it in a, B, C, D format. But it gives you so much information about how your students are encountering that text. And just like the clickable image with some text, you're doing close reading with the students as a batch with 60 or a hundred or 200 students. That's really powerful. Carolyn, what would you add to this?

Carolyn Aslan (18:13):
Yeah, I was going to add something similar that it's these certain skills, especially in classics or humanities in general of close reading, close observation, just the discussion part of it that they're using Poll Everywhere to get everybody to do it altogether in the class and to do it with the instructor there to respond or then develop it into a bigger discussion. So it's just been a really nice tool to try to get all the students doing it. Sometimes a challenge in these big classes where how do you get everybody to look carefully at an image? It's actually not that easy because just telling them to look doesn't really get there. You have to tell 'em to look for something and do something, and then you start to get more involvement.

Derek Bruff (19:02):
So my wife in past careers has been an art teacher. And so I'll go to an art museum with her now, and I'll get a little taste of what she was like in the classroom where we'll see some work and she'll say, what do you see? And that kind of very open-ended. What do you see? Question is great when you have one student or a small number of students, but what do you see gets harder to manage when you've got a bigger class? And so I can imagine having a more focused question, like you were saying, what do you see here that represents the concept of justice, right? That's a little more focused. And that kind of, I think probably sharpens the engagement with the students.

Carolyn Aslan (19:46):
Although I also just like the question, what do you see? And you could do that as an open-ended, like what Steven was saying, and an open-ended response.

Derek Bruff (19:53):
Yeah. Yeah. Free response or word cloud for something like that. And some of it may depend on, like you said, where you are in the learning sequence. So if you're opening up a new concept, you might say, what do you see as a way to understand what the students are bringing to that kind of visual analysis, knowing that they may be all over the map, and that's okay, but then later in the process you may be wanting to assess particular concepts, and so you'll have a more focused question at that point.

Carolyn Aslan (20:23):
Absolutely. Totally.

Derek Bruff (20:24):
So I gather you also, you mentioned kind of outside of class assignments. I think one of the questions I get from faculty a lot who we're trying to move to more active learning in the classroom is how do you get students to come to class prepared appropriately to engage in those types of discussions? And so what were some of the changes you've made to the course to get students to class prepared?

Todd Clary (20:50):
So I can answer the big one here is that the first couple years that I did the course, the midterm and final had multiple choice true false sections that were basically just factual. Who is the God of the sea, Zeus, Pluto, or Poseidon, and those were actually really unpopular with the students. I mean, some students are fact-based, so it wasn't unpopular with all the students, but it was unpopular with a lot of the students. And then part of the active learning initiative really taught me that that's not exactly what I want the students really to get from the class. I want them to get these higher level conceptual concepts from the class and focus on those. So what we did is we took the multiple choice format and moved it into what we call a reading exercise that is due before the class on Canvas and it's open book, and the questions are linear. Question one is from book one of the Iliad. Question two is from later on in book one of the Iliad. Question three is from book two in the Iliad as far as the reading assignments go. So this basically assures that they've done the reading before class, and that's really what they need to prepare.

(22:21):
Yeah, that was great and very popular too,

Derek Bruff (22:25):
Really.

Todd Clary (22:26):
Yeah. Yeah.

Derek Bruff (22:28):
I was going to ask, how did your students respond to some of these changes? Clearly the enrollment has gone up, that's a signal of something happening, but why would students appreciate a pre-class reading quiz?

Todd Clary (22:40):
Well, I think it's because it's open book and linear, and I think they appreciate it because it holds them to task for actually doing the reading, and yet at the same time rewards them for doing the reading. And the questions are not real conceptual. They're pretty simple. So as long as you find the passage in the text and answer it, I think they appreciate that it's pretty straightforward and that they are very grade motivated. So I think they appreciate that they can just go through and get that part of their work done and get the grade.

Derek Bruff (23:21):
Okay. Yeah. So it's easy to get a hundred percent on that type of quiz, and I assume it contributes five or 10 or 15% of their course grade?

Todd Clary (23:34):
Yeah, I think it is 15%, and we do put in one or two. They're usually about 15 questions, and we do put in one or two questions that take a little bit more. So the typical scores, the 13, 14 out of 15.

Derek Bruff (23:54):
Well, I'm also reminded, again, to kind of look at comparisons across disciplines. So I teach mathematics, and after I taught my statistics course a couple of times I realized how much some of my students were struggling with the notation that was involved, not the computation or the concepts, but just frankly, there's a lot of Greek letters and they're not sure what they all mean all the time in statistics. And so I found myself asking pre-class reading quiz questions about the notation. And so I can imagine students who are reading the Iliad, which is not trivial to read, having some checkpoints to kind of make sure they're getting some basic comprehension out of it. I think a lot of the times students who don't do the reading, whatever the reading is, is because it's overwhelming actually, and they don't feel equipped to kind of navigate it well enough. And so if nothing else, you're also giving them some kind of signposting. These are the key characters, these are the key events that you need to be paying attention to.

Todd Clary (24:53):
Yeah, that's another point is, I mean, we always have, we're going to do a big, the lecture's going to focus on a particular scene or two particular scenes in the Iliad. So we definitely have three or four at least questions based on who's who in that scene, what's going on in that scene. So it definitely prefo them on what we're going to focus on in lecture as well.

Derek Bruff (25:17):
Well, Todd, you mentioned the traditional assessments you had in this class. I gather you also made some changes to how you did assessment, and I find this often happens when you start changing the learning experiences. You start to reevaluate the assessments as well. What does the assessment in this course look like now?

Todd Clary (25:39):
So yeah, the first big thing was moving the multiple choice, true false to the reading exercises. Then what that also enabled me to do was get more into the abstract concepts on the midterm and the final, well, on the two midterms, now we have two midterms or prelims, and we have a final creative project. So the final creative project was another big innovation

(26:16):
Where students get to basically innovate on, we call it a hometown myth project, and it's in three phases. So the first phase is they find a myth from their hometown. If they're from a tiny town and obscure place, they can't find a myth. Then we let them do the state, or sometimes it's just the country. If they're from Korea, they find a Korean myth, and the first stage is they just cite three or four different tellings of the myth. Really, the one prerequisite is you have to have at least three different tellings so you can compare and contrast them. And then the second stage is write a brief essay comparing and contrasting the similarities and differences in the three or four different tellings you've found. And then the last one is, the last creative part is, okay, do something that retells the myth in your own. Make it your own, whether this be a painting, whether it be a podcast, a, sometimes they do text threads between different characters in the myths.

Derek Bruff (27:37):
Yes, I love it.

Todd Clary (27:37):
Chats, we've had advertising campaigns based on Pecos Bill, different stuff. In fact, my office that I'm in now is now littered with all kinds of creative projects all over.

Derek Bruff (27:54):
That's great. Oh, man. Well, and I instantly went, I grew up in South Carolina, and when I was in maybe middle school, there were a lot of stories about a lizard man who was running around. Lee County County's over in South Carolina, so I would have to do a deep dive into the lizard man of Lee County.

Todd Clary (28:12):
Apparently there's a lizard population, a lizard person, population under LA too.

Derek Bruff (28:17):
Oh, good to know. Good to know.

Todd Clary (28:19):
Yeah, that's great. That's great. One other thing we did that's probably worth mentioning is group portions of the exams. So we have the exams are three questions where you compare an image and one of the readings, texts from the readings, and then once everybody does the three questions on their own, then there's a 15 to 20 minute period at the end where they get in groups in the classroom, usually groups of four or five, and collaborate on the last question that they answered together. And the way that works is if the group does better, then your grade goes up. If the group does worse, it doesn't affect your grade. So it's a situation.

Derek Bruff (29:12):
Nice. So what motivated that change?

Todd Clary (29:16):
I should let Steven answer that because he was the real driver behind that.

Stephen Sansom (29:20):
Well, this was an instance in which I was meeting weekly with the other postdocs in the active learning initiative and hearing about what they were doing in class, and it was just overhearing conversations, seeing presentations from them. It was, I think that economics was doing this kind of two stage exam. I think some was probably coming from biology and Michelle Smith. There are certain many other aspects of things I was interested in were, but it was hearing how exciting it was for them and how it clicked. Well, two things. It first sounded insane going up to a classics faculty and saying, okay, so this is the big, most important super tons of points compared to other smaller assignments and the general assessment scheme of the class, and we're going to make some of it group work. What do you mean? How do we know these kids learn anything?

(30:13):
But then when you think about all of the preparation that students do for an exam, just the intense amount of study they're going to study for anything, they're going to study for an exam, and so not only can you leverage all of that intense preparation for an exam to have them learn something from it, but they get to share it and learn from each other while they're in that major preparation, high stress, high anxiety, that then gets kind of diffused a little bit when they're talking to each other. They're not freaking out as much. The amount of laughters and smiles that I've seen in an exam room on exam days now with two exams, which I still do in other classes that I teach now, even beginning language classes, it's electrifying every time I do it still. And you can hear them all talking about on topic content

Derek Bruff (31:09):
The whole time. Yeah. Yeah. Friendly laughter happening during exams is not common across higher ed. Carolyn, what would you add? Were there other elements of this course redesign that you think we should talk a little bit about that stood out from your perspective?

Carolyn Aslan (31:33):
This is a small innovation, but I share it from this class is that one of the things I started doing is having students take photographs of their work. For example, if they did a worksheet and then they get to keep the worksheet, but then they would upload the photograph to Canvas as kind of an accountability way of checking that they did it, but it was also very easy to grade it and Todd wasn't collecting 200 papers. It's something so simple, but I feel like it's one of those things that I've learned from them doing this, and then I've been sharing it with other people.

Derek Bruff (32:10):
Todd, I'm curious. You've been teaching this class for a while. Do you believe these improvements have led to greater student learning? And if so, why do you believe that?

Todd Clary (32:23):
Oh, definitely. I think that when I was just lecturing and just putting out these really tough concepts that involved all this triangulation and then filtering out irrelevant information from relevant information, one thing that I was really surprised about when we started doing the polls is how many students weren't getting it. It's like, oh, geez, okay, well, 50% of the class doesn't actually understand this. Okay, well, let's back up. And so in terms of repeating the material over again so that more people could understand it, and then moving forward to different arguments about the same concept, but using different scenes, the active learning really helped. I mean, the tests have gotten harder, I think, and yet the performance has been better over time. So yeah, it has helped a lot, and it also has helped the class to stay popular, even though that's really why that was sort of the underlying reason why I wanted to do the article, because as I said, there's Greek myth classes or the big flagship classes for classics departments all across the country, and I wanted to show that you could keep a class engaging and popular and yet still teach these really difficult concepts, not have to dummy it down.

(34:07):
Yeah,

Derek Bruff (34:09):
Still doing, still making it challenging, but also engaging and supportive for the students. Yeah, that's great. Steven, you mentioned that you're doing two stage exams and you're teaching now, so you've moved on from Cornell. Are there other kind of bits of this course that show up in your teaching now?

Stephen Sansom (34:27):
I have spent more time before I teach a course, identifying the concepts and skills that I want my students to get good at than before. This is the most challenging thing. It still is. Every time I teach a new course or reteach a course for me, one of the reasons I got into classics is because I love the stuff. I love the objects, I love the texts, I want to read them and I want to experience the text. I want to experience the object. And so the danger, or I guess maybe it's sort of the natural inclination from that would be to just give them these texts and show it to 'em and be like, isn't this beautiful? And this is like if you talk to any creative writer, that's not how you engage people with a poem. If you're writing a poem, you're not just going to be like, isn't this a beautiful thing?

(35:24):
It's like, that's not what it is. You have to let them do something with it. They have to see the constructive of it or be moved in a way that they weren't previously as beforehand. And so when I approach a course now, it's like, what do I want the students to get good at? And I have no doubt in my mind that they're not going to get good at it unless they can practice it as much as possible. So where I say as little as I need to say to give them all that they need to practice and get better at whatever, we want them to get good at close reading, visual literacy concepts from whatever we're working on in the class.

Derek Bruff (36:08):
Yeah, I love that. And I think that's critical, particularly for humanities courses where students often do think they come in thinking it's about the stuff, right? It's about the characters, the stories, the dates, the places, right? All these hard to pronounce names, but there's a lot of skills that you're trying to develop and kind of critical reasoning that you want students to engage in. And so prioritizing that, both in terms of how you describe the course at the high level, but also how it functions on a day-to-Day level, I think is really important.

Stephen Sansom (36:40):
And it results in what you want. I mean, like what Todd was saying, it's like they actually engage with the stuff more and they like it better. They're like, this is my favorite class.

Derek Bruff (36:51):
Well, thank you all three of you. This was really great. I appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast today and pull back the curtain on this really engaging course. Yeah, thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having this

Carolyn Aslan (37:02):
It was a great conversation.

Derek Bruff (37:06):
That was Todd Clary, senior lecturer in classics at Cornell University, Stephen Sansom, assistant professor of classics at Florida State University, and Carolyn Aslan, senior associate director at the Center for Teaching Innovation at Cornell. Thanks to all three of them for taking the time to talk with me about the redesigned Greek Myths course. I don't know if I'll ever get around to writing a second edition of my teaching with Classroom Response Systems book, but if I do, I know I'll be sharing some of their great ideas for clickable image and word cloud polling questions. See the show notes for more information on all three guests, as well as a link to their article about the Greek Myths course. Also, I would love to hear your thoughts on active learning in the humanities, or for that matter, the Lizard man of Lee County. If you happen to spend some time in South Carolina in the show notes, you'll find a link to send me a text message with your thoughts, and you can always email me at derek@derekbruff.org.

(37:58):
Intentional teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCDEAwebsite where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the Intentional Teaching Newsletter, and my Patreon, where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.