Author: Lauryl Tucker

by Shelley MacLaren

First, a proviso. My classes are not studio art classes. I do not pretend for even a minute to teach students to draw, and I do not assess their drawing skill or their improvement in drawing for any of my classes. Nonetheless, the assignment that I’m most excited about including in my syllabi is a sketchbook.

In his review of Susan Hrach’s Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning from late August’s The CraFT, Steve Raulston emphasized the power of sensory experience and surprise in learning. 

The sketchbook assignment harnesses the benefits of both. It is also an assignment that requires students to slow down, and to make careful and specific observations. It gives them creative license and a personal means of engaging with the material. It underlines connections between class material and their own lived experience. It incorporates practice in both understanding visual information and communicating through visual means. As an almost incidental benefit, it provides thorough documentation of students’ ongoing engagement with the class. 

The sketchbook runs through the entire semester. In response to prompts in the syllabus attached to particular class days, students complete a drawing, or set of drawings, or, when preferable, a creative written response, that connects to class material, approximately once per week. Alongside their drawing, they are asked to provide two or three reflective bullet point observations. What did they notice or understand differently as a result of the process of observation and representation? 

I first used the sketchbook in my FYP class “Building Place,” where engagement with places and buildings in and around Sewanee made for an obvious fit, and parallel to the reflective writing used by many faculty members in FYRP. Since then I’ve used the sketchbook multiple times in ArtH365: Modern and Postmodern Architecture, assigning elevation drawings, rough floor plans, and details from buildings on campus and in the Village each week. In that class the sketchbooks encourage students to think about how they experience buildings, and how to understand representations of buildings. It is also intended to help them attend to echoes of the iconic but far flung examples studied in class in the built environment we inhabit every day – postmodern details in Gailor, the Brutalist massing of Cravens, the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Chapel of the Apostles, and the New Urbanist nostalgic branding of the peaked roofs and color palette of the Village.

ArtH323 students sketched All Saints’ Chapel as we considered cathedrals – pretty straightforward. They’ve mapped their own home towns to think about landmarks and associations, and drawn their city halls.When we read excerpts of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (On the Eloquence of the Vernacular), they described the slang they hear in other places, but not in Sewanee, and vice versa. The week we talked about foundation legends we visited the narthex of All Saints’ Chapel to unpack the “historical” windows. For their responses that week I invited proposals for interventions and new windows over the doors. The week we read Cennino Cennini’s Craftsmans’ Handbook, the prompt asked them to go outside and find a material with which to make marks and try it. To make the many personifications we’ve studied more vivid and meaningful, I asked them to think of a contemporary virtue and how they would represent it so that they could see it, understand it fully, and embody its characteristics in their own behavior, or a vice so hideous they would flee it, and avoid embodying its traits. 

In all my classes I have found that the sketchbook accomplishes multiple purposes:

To draw something requires slowing down to look and play out the process of observation, and then to wrestle (for most) with translating that information into representation through the hand. They must not only slow down to attend to visual information, but are then responsible for communicating what they have observed in a visual representation. The bullet point reflections prompt analysis of the results of the process. 

It’s an activity that is low stakes in terms of grades assigned to each sketchbook page or individual prompt, but that requires students to carve out some time and quiet attention each week. They must stop and be still, and to engage with a question or topic related to class creatively. It makes a space, in ways that I suspect most activities we ask of them do not. It is certainly very different from the exams and reading and seminar discussion I ask of them otherwise. 

It is playful, and even joyful. The prompts, even the most straightforward of them, give students license to make creative and personal choices about what to draw, and where to place their efforts and attention. Twice each semester I ask them to share the sketch they consider to be their favorite or most insightful with their classmates in a quick exhibition. The class acts as a jury and votes to award a prize for the best drawing. Those exhibitions are fun, but also offer the students a chance to share their drawings with one another. The best examples serve as models for the rest, and the performance for their peers raises the stakes. Each time I have been impressed and surprised by most of the examples shared, and everyone in the class gets to be impressed and inspired too. 

The sketchbook assignment underlines connections to be made between class material and students’ own experiences. This has been especially useful for a class focused on the art and architecture of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Italy. Creating meaningful prompts to which students can respond from their own lived experience has underlined and enforced the relevance of what can seem like esoteric material, and encouraged prolonged consideration of parallels and connections.

The sketchbook serves beautifully to document students’ engaged participation with class material week to week – whether or not they have not been present in class. It serves as an “engagement” grade, 15% of their grade overall, a number I used to divide between attendance and rather general impressions about their contributions to class discussion. 

The sketchbooks are a joy to grade. It is very fast to look at drawings, and easy to assess their effort.  What I look for is serious effort to respond to the prompt, and I grade them prompt by prompt. As with an exam answer or a short writing assignment, a solid effort earns a B, an especially thorough or insightful and creative answer earns an A, a cursory answer a C or lower. 

Most students’ sketches offer at least conscientious, and more often above-and-beyond, effort.

The sketchbook assignment offers play and surprise, time to slow down and observe carefully, and space for students to engage with class material from a personal and creative perspective.

“Do we really need to read whole books?” The student held up a particularly thick monograph assigned in my seminar.

In years prior, my instinct would have been to offer a brief response about how my discipline “is a book discipline,” one that favors books over journal articles or other formats. Privately, I may have justified my preference for “whole books” with some tired, derisive explanation about how students “don’t want to work hard” or how “standards have lowered.”

But the student who raised this question surprised me: They had demonstrated a strong work ethic and commitment to the course; their comments in class and their papers engaged deeply with the assigned readings. We were approaching the end of the semester (and course evaluations), and I realized with some embarrassment that I needed to take this question more seriously. What followed was an insightful exchange with my students about various modalities of reading in the college classroom, especially about students’ growing preference for digital formats.

To begin exploring digital reading pedagogy, I turned to Jenae Cohn’s (2021) Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading, a recent publication of West Virginia University Press’s Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series edited by James M. Lang (of Small Teaching). Although the book’s focus is on digital reading, Cohn addresses concerns shared across text formats and disciplines, as well as across time and place; at its heart, it is a book about reading, not just digital reading. Following an introduction, “Why Teach Digital Reading?”, the book is divided into 3 parts: “Skim,” “Dive,” and “Surface.”

The introductory chapter, “Why Teach Digital Reading?”, is essential for anyone who remains skeptical of the necessity of improving our (digital) reading pedagogy. Cohn describes the challenges of teaching digital reading in the college classroom as “an inertia gap,” in which “we keep trying to apply print-based reading strategies to digital reading spaces, but upon realizing those strategies don’t work, we move toward blaming the digital space itself” (13). Blaming the digital space itself might look like technology bans in the classroom because students are “too distracted”, or assuming that students are knowledgeable “digital natives” (PDF annotation anyone?).

Cohn’s approach is to persuade the reader in the Introduction and Part 1 of the need for alternative strategies (discussed in Parts 2 and 3 of the book), offering gentle correctives while still respecting the personal choices of the instructor. “What this book advocates for is an awareness of our choices, choices that involve not just relying on convenience or habit but that are shaped by thoughtful interrogation of the learning activity and what we want our students to gain from the activity in different sets of material spaces” (25). The problem is that when we do not give ourselves and our students informed learning choices, we “potentially limit what is possible” in the first place (18).

Part 1, “Skim: Understanding Historical, Affective, and Neurological Perspectives on Reading Technologies,” is a fun jaunt through history, psychology, and neuroscience. In Chapter 1, “The Chained Book,” Cohn incorporates numerous amusing passages from Socrates through the present-day lamenting how new reading technologies and practices preclude learning, or worse, are feared to be the harbinger of intellectual and societal decline. Although digital formats may be new, anxieties about the logistics of reading are not. Regarding feelings about reading, my preference is still for “the held book”. (I chose to read a book about digital reading in paperback format, after all.) Thus, I found Chapter 2, “The Held Book,” resonant in its exploration of how the affective intimacies of printed reading material, especially affect generated in childhood, shape our attitudes toward reading, learning, and teaching. Not only do university faculty express preferences for print over digital, but many students do as well. Cohn cites two decades of survey data, including from small liberal arts colleges, that suggests that students also prefer printed books. However, “[students] may very well opt to read in digital spaces out of convenience, accessibility, and efficiency” (79). Cohn argues that “our job now is to consider how we might harness those emotions to productive ends” (85).

Readers pressed for time or eager for practical information about “productive ends” might skip Part 1 (pages 33-91) and “dive” into Part 2 (pages 127 – 225). In Part 2, “Dive: Exploring the Digital Reading Framework to Promote Deep Reading Practices,” Cohn develops a framework which promotes “deep reading practices” through curation, connection, creativity, contextualization, and contemplation.” Cohn devotes a chapter each to these five “C” concepts. Each chapter includes: a discussion of relevant scholarship; multiple activity plans for the classroom; and a summary of “key takeaways”. The main drawback with the suggested activities is that they seem to skew toward the humanities or social sciences.
Part 3, “Surface: Critically Approaching the Adoption and Use of Digital Reading Technologies,” is by far the shortest section of the book (pages 251 – 298, excluding the references section). In it, Cohn addresses the ethical implications of digital reading, such as issues of privacy with online learning management systems, which some have criticized as “extractive” in nature. “Data collection in educational environments is predatory,” Cohn argues, “unless students and instructors have full and equal access to the data collected” (262). How instructors practically can manage privacy concerns with learning manage systems, unfortunately, is not addressed in depth in the chapter. In her conclusion, Cohn considers principles, practices, and futures for digital reading. This final chapter serves not only as a concise summary of an otherwise expansive approach to reading, but also functions as a flow chart or checklist in designing, administering, and evaluating digital reading activities. Part 3 also helpfully includes an appendix listing tools for digital reading. Readers seeking “how-to” guides on digital reading tools, however, will have to look to the suggested references for more information. Cohn’s book richly describes and cogently argues the “who, where, when, and why” of digital reading, but the “how” receives less attention.

Skim, Dive, Surface offers something for every instructor. “Take what’s useful and leave the rest” is advice Cohn offers her students, and she extends the same invitation to the reader (135). As I design my Spring courses, I will be revisiting the suggested activities in Part 2 and the recommended digital reading tools outlined in Part 3. Assigning “whole books” (or books at all) is part of a broader, timely conversation among many faculty at present, such as in the Center for Teaching’s recent panel on the use of textbooks. In the (post)pandemic era, we find that our students have become more accustomed to working with text in digital form, and perhaps we have, too. (Text)books are expensive, and as we pursue Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion goals, including accessible educational materials in our courses is more important than ever. Skim, Dive, Surface is an excellent place to start.

Review of Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, by Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.

By Sean Patrick O’Rourke, Professor, Rhetoric and American Studies

If most of us already know that strong relationships are, as the authors of this book put it, “the beating heart of the undergraduate experience” (1), why should we read the book? The answer is in the subtitle—Relationship-Rich Education is about how those relationships can and should be changed from “happenstance” for “some” students to a central experience for all. Working from the empirically well-established assumption that relationships are important, Felten and Lambert (both of Elon University) interviewed 385 people (204 of whom were undergraduate students) on 29 diverse campuses across the country. Drawing upon these interviews and the stories they reveal, the authors develop a comprehensive approach to cultivating relationships that matter in higher education.

The guiding metaphors of the book stress interconnectivity. Felten, Lambert, and their interviewees speak repeatedly of “webs” of relationships or “constellations” that form student “networks” that in turn encourage, support, challenge, and deepen the learning experience. Student “webs” include other students, teachers, advisors, coaches, tutors, alumni, and a wide range of staff members. At the center of it all, however, is a robust classroom experience that fosters high quality relationships devoted to learning.

Relationship-Rich Education comprises six lean chapters bracketed by an introduction, a conclusion, and a “Postscript in a Pandemic.” The first chapter establishes four guiding principles: all students must experience genuine welcome and deep care (19-24); every student must be inspired to learn (25-28); every student must develop a web of significant relationships (28-33); and every student must explore questions of meaning and purpose (33-39). Chapter Two, “Why Is This So Hard?”, identifies the barriers to a relationship-rich education, including students who feel isolated and insecure, classrooms, curricula, and reward systems that work against relationship building, and the many non-relational demands on faculty and students alike. Chapters Three through Six detail how universities can become relationship-rich places to learn. Chapter Three stresses the importance of cultivating an institutional culture that values and rewards relationship-rich education. Chapter Four focuses on the classroom, “the single most important site for students to experience welcome and care, to be inspired to learn, to build webs of relationships, and to ask questions of meaning and purpose” (80). Chapter Five reconnoiters the vast terrain of non-classroom programs and practices now available on many campuses and investigates the ways in which, inter alia, living-learning environments, civic engagement activities, peer tutoring, and the like help to form relationships that enhance and enrich student learning. Chapter Six explores the importance of quality mentoring and especially the “mentoring conversation,” which may not be the long-term mentor/protégé ideal (one we rarely see anymore anyway) but is nonetheless an often game-changing moment in a student’s life. The conclusion seeks to identify strategies and practical applications that can make campuses relationship-rich learning communities and the postscript stresses the importance of relationships in and despite a pandemic that forced us apart.

The book is valuable in many ways and can help those of us devoted to making the University of the South the kind of residential liberal arts college it ought to be. It can deepen our conversations about affordable housing for faculty on the mountain, for instance (faculty presence at student activities such as debates, performances, exhibitions, and research helps build a relationship-rich community), illuminate the negative effects of one-year here, next-year gone faculty turnover (relationships are best when they are sustained over time), and explain the loss students feel when they are unable to find a seat in required classes (given the centrality of the classroom to students’ relationship-rich education). The book would also suggest, I think, that student retention is but one strand of a much larger web of student success and that attention to a larger culture of learning should also include creating intellectual challenges, asking meaningful if difficult questions, and inspiring learning and the curiosity that drives it.

By Joseph Coll, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Politics

            Two quizzes a week! Why would I subject my students to that and why would I volunteer for that much grading? Simple–I have found it to be incredibly advantageous for my students and, thanks to Brightspace, not much additional work on my end.

Every week, my (typically 100/200-level) students take a ‘pre-quiz’ and a ‘post-quiz’. The pre-quiz is taken prior to the start of that week’s class, covers things the students have not learned yet, and does not count towards their grade, though they are instructed to take the pre-quiz as if it was graded. The post-quiz is then taken at the end of the week after the students have learned the material and is graded. Additionally, the post-quiz includes a reflection question that asks students to look back on a few pre-quiz questions they got wrong and reflect on the thought process that led them to choose the answer they chose on that pre-quiz.

This pre- and post-quiz format provides several key benefits worth outlining: It primes students about the big ideas for the upcoming week, demonstrates short- and long-term growth, provides an alternative means of participation, and provides an avenue for students to engage in self-reflection and critical thinking. Of course, these quizzes also provide other benefits, such as serving as a study tool and ensuring frequent individual feedback/assessment.

First, students often have a difficult time understanding what to ‘take away’ from readings or lectures. The pre-quizzes indicate to students the big ideas, concepts, or terminology of the upcoming week, providing a signpost to students of what to look out for.

Second, the pre- and post-quiz setup demonstrates to students their short- and long-term growth. Comparing differences in pre- and post-quiz scores each week shows students how much they learned in the last several days. Additionally, throughout the semester, students are asked to compare reflection question responses from earlier in the semester to demonstrate to students how far their critical thinking skills have come.

Third, the pre-/post-quiz set up gives students an alternative way to interact with the material. For those who may be reluctant to speak during class, the reflection questions provide them an avenue to dive deeper into the material by reflecting and expanding on what they learned. Through the reflection question, students have explored tons of different ideas and received feedback on these ideas.

Last, the reflection question provides students an opportunity to reflect on their answers before they learned the material, which helps them identify their thought process and how their own assumptions may cloud their judgement. In doing so, this question boosts critical thinking skills while also incentivizing self-reflection.

Okay, Joseph, but why would I want to write and grade two quizzes a week per student? That is a lot of work! Besides the above-stated benefits for the students, it is not that hard or time consuming. Thankfully, Brightspace allows you to copy quizzes (but how do I make a quiz?). Once you make a quiz, you can copy (see Fig. 1) and rename it. I call my pre-quizzes pre-quizzes, post-quizzes post-quizzes, and have them separated by category in Brightspace. Brightspace is set to auto-grade and provide feedback for all non-written response questions. Then, instead of a traditional quiz where students see what they got wrong and move on, the reflection question allows students to tell you where and why they went wrong, and you can help them going forward.

Still not convinced? See what past students have said about these quizzes!

I thought the pre-quizzes were a great aspect because it introduced main topics and highlighted what we should take from the readings and lecture.

The most helpful aspect were the pre and post quizzes that we did each week. They helped me learn the information better because I was able to focus on the important information from the pre quiz, and show that I retained the information for the post quiz.

– Anonymous Student Evaluations, Public Opinion and Survey Design, University of Iowa, F2020/2021

Now, obviously, this design works better for some classes than others. I have found it to be most advantageous for lower-level classes where the students are confronting the material for the first time. With that being said, this format can be implemented in a wide variety of classes. How will you implement them?

By Steve Raulston, Department of Spanish and Italian

This well-known 14^th-century Italian manuscript illumination by Laurentius de Voltolina, depicts the delivery of an ethics lecture in a gothic hall at the University of Bologna.  The professor addresses the class from a raised, throne-like lectern. With one exception, the overachievers in the front rows sit erect, gazing raptly at the master or dutifully following along in their texts. Their colleagues in the back rows, only one of whom has taken out a textbook, look around, whisper to one another, scribble notes likely unrelated to the lecture, or doze off altogether.  The learning dynamics of the medieval classroom will strike many 21^st-century university professors and students as familiar; all that’s missing in this illumination is a smartphone. 

Susan Hrach, professor of English and director of the Faculty Center at Georgia’s Columbus State University, traces the origin of a university classroom model in which students are expected to focus for long periods while seated to two sources: the Cartesian body/mind dichotomy and the Industrial Revolution.  Voltolina’s little painting reminds us that the model is really as old as the university itself—born in the 12^th-century cathedral schools of Europe—, and that for many students it has never worked particularly well.  Those with long enough experience at Sewanee will remember that, until late in the 20^th century classrooms on the upper floors of Walsh Ellet had a raised dais at one end with an ornate seat for the professor, and rows of long, narrow tables with stiff wooden chairs for the students. Those spaces, and, indeed, the tradition of the gown on this campus, are the residue of a time when movement was not a feature of the university classroom, where engagement and learning took place from the neck up.  Since its founding, Sewanee had espoused a vision of education as the development of the whole person—intellectual, spiritual, and physical.  But in practice the pursuit of that holistic goal was compartmentalized, each of its facets confined, respectively, to the classroom, the chapel, and the playing field.

Professor Hrach is one of a generation of pedagogues who take aim at the teacher-centered classroom and the notion of students as “brains on sticks.”  Drawing on an array of recent research in phenomenology, kinesiology, linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience, she argues that the human brain is not an independent thinking device but one organ within a system of interrelated and interdependent parts which are in constant motion and dialogue.  The brain cannot think and learn except in concert with the rest of the body; cognition is necessarily an embodied process.  And from recent research on embodied cognition Hrach distills 6 key principles.

1.  Bodies are in a state of constant motion.  Our hunter-gatherer past and our physical evolution have primed us for physical activity, for movement, and for acute awareness of ourselves and our surroundings.  Our brains interpret information from internal organs (interoception), from external sensory perception (exteroception), and from our limbs about our position in space and motion (proprioception).  All three work together to make us able to absorb new ideas and experiences, to learn.

2.  Our bodies prize energy efficiency.  Long ago, under precarious conditions, our bodies evolved to survive by delivering bursts of physical exertion necessary to find food or elude danger and also to withstand periods without sustenance.  Our brains have evolved to monitor our changing environment, but, instead of exhausting scarce resources carefully monitoring every detail, they have learned to do so efficiently by predicting what we may expect based on past experience.  Because they’re based on experience and not on current observation, our mental predictions may not be true.

3.  Our bodies extend their perceptive capacities by engaging tools, technology, and other people.  In other words, our learning can be extended and conditioned by our environment and the people around us.

4.  Each of us affects the embodied ecosystems of others.  If we can use other people in order to learn, they can also use us, which renders learning an inherently social experience.  A supportive environment, a network of friends, a sense of belonging to place or community are all components that facilitate and enhance deep learning.

5.  Knowledge is constructed through embodied experience.  If our bodies shape our perceptions (see # 2 above), then the latter statement must be true.  And if it is true, we should find ways for students to use their bodies in the acquisition of deep knowledge.

6.  Our bodies reward learning.  Humans are naturally inquisitive.  The brain rewards with endorphins the satisfaction of curiosity and the experience of interpreting novel events and ideas in the context of past experience.

Having laid out and explained these principles in a long introduction, Hrach devotes six chapters in three sections to exploring their implications for the college classroom.  These include a thoughtful discussion about optimizing the physical classroom to facilitate movement- and sensory-based learning, and a sustained exploration of the benefits of holding class outside; the importance of sensory perception in the learning process and ideas—beyond audio-visual media—for including sensory experience in the classroom; the fundamental importance of movement in the learning experience, and the inclusive and community-building value of moving as a group.

In advocating a physically active learning environment, Hrach is sensitive to the inclusion of students with physical limitations, acknowledging the challenge of incorporating and accommodating them in ways that are inclusive and not stigmatizing, and making suggestions for ways to accomplish that.  Citing research, she also makes the provocative argument that the need of students with disabilities constantly to negotiate a natural and built landscape that challenges them may have already made them more neurologically inclined to and primed for deep learning.

Of Hrach’s six principles, the one whose implications seem to me most important for our contemplation as instructors in a liberal arts college is the second:  Our bodies prize energy efficiency.  The brain’s tendency to conserve energy by reading present situations and predicting events based on past experience rather than on perpetual, alert observation means that when our unconscious predictions are confirmed not much happens.  It is when events defy expectation, when we are confronted with something novel that must be accounted for vis à vis our memory and be assimilated, that our perception is broadened.  Learning happens amid the discomfort of having to accommodate the new within the landscape of the familiar.  If we know that our students are going to enter our classrooms in a state of natural, evolution-induced autopilot, then an important role for us as instructors is, even subtly, to introduce into the classroom experience elements of novelty or surprise that create a beneficial degree of discomfort.  We should be benevolent disruptors of students’ unconscious predictions.  Indeed, Hrach dedicates her final chapter to discussion of the importance of pursuing what she calls “a pedagogy of discomfort”—our students’ and our own as creators of it.  Productive novelty in the classroom can be as simple as altering the layout of the learning space, introducing a new activity, going outside, incorporating movement or sensory experience—anything that tells a learning community’s efficient brains, “This is not yesterday’s class; you don’t know what comes next; perk up.”

Hrach’s consideration of the kinds of spaces that are conducive to movement and physically-engaged learning should also prove provocative to Sewanee instructors. Consider, for example, our Center for Teaching, a large, well-lit space with an intimate, static lounge area, thoughtfully designed projection and whiteboard space, and a large open area in which collapsible tables and stackable chairs can be configured for almost any kind of meeting or class.  When teachers designed a space for teachers, they opted for comfort, practicality, and, above all, flexibility.  Yet many of even our mostly recently renovated classroom spaces are filled, sometimes crammed, with space-eating individual desks or other furniture that seriously impedes movement and any reconfiguration of the space.

Finally, Sewanee faculty who read Hrach’s book are likely to experience a strong sense of affirmation, recognizing how many of her principles we and our colleagues already employ. This is so not only in dance, theater, choral and instrumental music, lab sciences, studio arts, and field-based courses, where physical engagement and sensory experience are part of the discipline.  Embodied learning happens in many, often innovative forms in more traditional fields in the Humanities. And Hrach’s principles and suggestions are compatible with other pedagogical developments like physical response and story-telling in foreign-language acquisition and the institutional initiative for inclusive teaching practices that informed the afternoon discussion, handout, and shared resources of this semester’s Faculty Gathering.

Minding Bodies reminds us that active learning is a practice in which Sewanee excels.  The new research behind its principles of embodied learning should also prompt us, as individuals, to continue to clarify or to reimagine our roles as instructors and, as an institution, to assess the appropriateness of our learning spaces, old and new, for research-based best practices.