Undergraduate Students
One of the central commitments of the Teaching and Learning Initiative is to create new opportunities for students to work in partnership with faculty, staff, and other students in the analysis and revision of courses and teaching approaches. These opportunities provide you, as students, with rare chances to work collaboratively with faculty and staff members, to develop as learners and as leaders, to better understand your own learning needs as well as the learning needs of other members of the educational community at the College, and thus both help you take the greatest possible advantage of your undergraduate years and prepare you for real-world relationships and responsibilities.
Depending on the role you take up, you earn course credit, hourly pay, or stipends. Click on the links below to explore new opportunities. The contact person listed can fill you in on details and answer any questions you have.
In addition, the Teaching and Learning Initiative is open to developing new opportunities that do not as yet exist, so if there is a teaching or learning opportunity that you would like to pursue but that does not currently exist, please let us know and we will work with you to design a forum within which to address it. Suggestions can be directed to the Coordinator of the Teaching and Learning Initiative, Alison Cook-Sather (acooksat@brynmawr.edu).
Do you want to...
- Work with faculty to develop or revise a course or to re-imagine departmental offerings?
- Work with faculty to develop or revise a course using technology?
- Offer constructive feedback on a faculty member’s teaching?
- Partner with a staff member in a reciprocal teaching and learning relationship?
- Mentor a staff member learning to use email and the World Wide Web?
Revising and Reimagining Departmental Offerings
The Teaching and Learning Initiative can pair or team up students who wish to work with individual faculty members or departments to help them reconceptualize a course or a program of study. Drawing on your unique perspective as a learner, you will help a faculty member or department imagine and design courses so that they might be most engaging to students and best prepare you and other students for your futures.
Contact Name: Alison Cook-Sather
Contact Email: acooksat@brynmawr.edu
Developing or Revising a Course Using Technology
Talking toward Techno-Pedagogy: The Teaching and Learning Initiative can convene a team consisting of a member of the library staff, a member of IT, and a student to support a faculty member as he or she develops or revises a course. This approach builds on the model of techno-pedagogy that informed workshops offered at Bryn Mawr College in the summers of 1999, 2000, and 2001 and supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. If you are interested in being a part of such a collaborative effort should a faculty request this kind of support, please refer all questions and comments to the individual(s) listed below.
Comments from Participants
“As a student... I am usually encouraged to give feedback about what’s working [in a class] and what isn’t and to develop ideas about what would work better, not to participate directly in making changes.” -Student
“[What developed in the workshop was] the recognition that emerged in the minds of different groups about what it is that the others do and what they have to offer each other.” -Librarian
“The student participation…was really invaluable to me as a faculty member because even though you have [course] evaluations, here we are talking about this stuff and thinking about it and right there you’ve got this sense of, well, no that’s not going to work at all.” -Faculty Member
“[Our goal is] an evolved role on our campuses. . . over time, whether it’s through our own actions or by changing other people’s perceptions of us, that we could have more sophisticated involvement with teaching and learning issues.” -IT Person
Contact Name: Alison Cook-Sather
Contact Email: acooksat@brynmawr.edu
Website: Talking toward Techno-Pedagogy
Offering Constructive Feedback on a Faculty Member's Teaching
In response to faculty interest and a growing body of research that argues for the benefits of eliciting and responding to students' perspectives --- benefits to teachers and to students --- we have created the Students as Learners and Teachers Project under the umbrella of Pedagogical Diversity. Through this project, students assume the role of consultant, visit faculty members' classes, and share their perspectives. The Coordinator of the Teaching and Learning Initiative and experienced student consultant prepare students for this new role, and the Coordinator meets with each interested faculty member, identifies with that faculty member aspects of her/his pedagogy s/he would like to explore, and arranges for a student consultant. The Coordinator can arrange the following opportunities:
- Student observes a single class one time and focuses on a pedagogical issue identified by the faculty member.
- Student observes a single class multiple times and focuses on a pedagogical issue or issues identified by the faculty member.
- Student interviews students enrolled in a class using a set of questions the faculty member and student develop together.
- Student does a combination of observations and interviews within a class.
- Student videotapes a class and meets with faculty member to discuss it.
Comments from Participants
Student Perspectives
"It was exciting to me to be considered someone important, someone with important things to say."
"It was so cool to be in a collaborative relationship for the time that I was working with the faculty members. You know, we would talk about the teaching as if we were kind of doing it together almost. It was like, we’re going to work together to make a plan for how to make this class better. It happened with all three faculty members I observed. So I think students often want to be in that role, and sometimes it happens in these magical moments with certain faculty members, but to have a structure that supports and encourages that is really exciting."
"The best part of this experience is the empowerment aspect of it. Someone in this experience is being asked to change their role and not only the role they are taking on formally in the initiative but they are being asked to be much more of a colleague in the shaping of these roles and how this project is going to look."
Faculty Perspectives:
"There is often a disconnect between what I do and what students see. This experience reinforced two things for me: one is that expectations for students have to be made clear and continually reiterated throughout the class; and the other one is to take the student perspective on what I am doing."
"The student successfully identified things that really did need to be improved upon, suggested ways in which they might be improved, and the next time I had a class it was better. Correlation isn’t causation, but it’s evidence. The students take it seriously and they put thought into it and I find it valuable."
"If there were anything happening in the classroom that I might have missed, it would have come out through this experience. I don’t think there is any other mechanism for that. I would always worry. I would always be wondering, “How is this being received by students?” I feel like this was really good, I can be confident that I know how it’s being received by students. I don’t think I could get that confidence by handing out midterm evaluations or having people do them on line."
Contact Name: Alison Cook-Sather
Contact Email: acooksat@brynmawr.edu
Partnering in Reciprocal Teaching and Learning Relationships
The Empowering Learners Partnership is a program that fosters cross-contextual communication and structures for life-long learning by pairing students and staff in reciprocal teaching and learning relationships. Premised on the notion that everyone in the community has much to learn and much to teach, this partnership provides a structure within which a sharing of knowledge and interests can unfold. In the spring of 2007, partnerships focused on the following topics: Bulgarian language/ESL; crafts/computer literacy; jazz appreciation/math tutoring for staff members' daughter; the fundamentals of Islam/computer security; and cooking/Microsoft Excel.
Comments from Participants
"It never ceases to amaze me how much this partnership has made me feel like a member of a real, multi-dimensional community... The theme of community building in these partnerships is still very important to me, for I am constantly being reminded of how insular this campus really is. I am now quite thankful that I have been given a way to overcome this kind of isolation and to experience real community life once again, something which most of my peers probably won't experience until they graduate." -Shelley Nash, BMC '07
Time Commitment: 2 hours per week
Contact Name: Alice Lesnick
Contact Email: alesnick@brynmawr.edu
Website: The "Empowering Learners Partnership" Program
Mentoring Staff Using Email and the Internet
"Using Email and the World Wide Web" (EW3) is a class taught each semester to small groups of staff members focused on accessing and using email and certain features of the World Wide Web as well as developing mutually respectful and educative relationships. The class offers staff members the opportunity to learn important computer skills, and it provides you an opportunity to develop your skills as facilitators of adult learning. You are key to this course: you co-plan the curriculum, serve as supports during the class meeting time (one hour per week), and work as mentors during one-on-one, weekly meetings with staff members.
Comments from Participants
“I feel very blessed to have been a part of this pilot program. One of my favorite things (and the reason I want to teach) is sharing a learning experience with someone and growing in knowledge and passion together…Being able to navigate the web and feel comfortable with a computer is something I have always taken for granted; I grew up with it, and therefore I have always felt at ease playing around with a PC. Having to take a step back and break down those skills which I never formally learned, but acquired through years was a real challenge. I love what a supportive community of learners we became; many thanks to all those involved with this wonderful project.” - Maeve O’Hara, BMC ’08
Time Commitment: 3-4 hours per week per staff member mentored
Contact Name: Alice Lesnick
Contact Email: alesnick@brynmawr.edu
Website: The "Using Email and the Internet" Program (Coming Soon!)
"What is amazing about the TLI is that everyone involved benefits."
— Maggie Powers, Student Consultant to Faculty and Student Coordinator of Staff-Student Projects
"TLI has really helped me think of the college as a learning community—it has helped me conceptualize how learning can move from just students to other members of the college community."
— Student
"Being part of the TLI projects, I really learned how to learn."
— Student
"It’s a good experience to be able to change roles and see things from a different perspective. It just enriches your life as a student in general."
— Student