Team-Teaching Experiment Exceeds Expectations
Last spring, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences announced support for faculty development and team teaching by awarding two faculty pairings stipends to develop spring 2015 courses with an interdisciplinary focus. The collaborations among Daniel Lipson (Political Science) and Rosemary Millham (Secondary Education), and Anne Roschelle (Sociology) and Luz Porras (Languages, Literatures and Cultures), have produced dynamic, engaging courses that have both inspired the professors and provided their students with a multi-faceted, comprehensive look at contemporary issues.
The courses, “Climate Change Science, Politics, and Policy,” and “Inequality, Gendered Violence, and Migration in Guatemala,” both originated, interestingly, with puzzles the professors hoped to solve.
Millham, a geologist whose research focuses on mineralogy and dust emissions, has worked as a researcher in atmospheric sciences at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, a major hub of climate research. When Millham received a newsletter from a professional association on the subject of climate change, she was alarmed by the imprecise language and incorrect information that frequently informed public policymaking.
“As a non-political science person, I look at this and say, ‘How can they set policy on this when they don’t understand the science?’” she said. Millham found an ally in Lipson, a political scientist whose research interests include environmental and energy politics. For years, the two have been discussing team teaching a course on climate change, which would combine their expertise in science, politics and public policy.
Some troubling news from her native country inspired Porras, a lecturer in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, to develop a team-taught course. Last April, she began seeing an increasing number of news reports about unaccompanied minors fleeing the country in large numbers and seeking asylum in the U.S.
At a faculty meeting, she approached Roschelle, a sociologist who has done extensive research on poverty, transnational feminisms and interpersonal/community violence, and posed a question. “I said, ‘Anne, would you like to work with me to figure this thing out with Guatemala?’” recalled Porras.
Both teams submitted proposals for their courses, which were reviewed by a faculty committee and then-Interim Dean Stella Deen. Each faculty member received a $2,500 stipend to develop the course last summer, with funds provided by the LA&S Dean’s Fund and the Faculty Development Endowment Fund. Two additional $300 stipends were allocated for faculty members to give guest lectures that would enhance the interdisciplinary nature of the classes.
Climate Change a Hot Topic
The faculty members drew from their areas of expertise to develop the syllabi and course readings. Millham relied on primary source material for climate data, including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and the NASA Climate Center websites. She organized the course’s science readings by topic, which included greenhouse gases, arctic sea ice, cloud formation, wildfires, hurricanes, freshwater availability and the predicted extinctions of flora and fauna.
“My goal was to create a cohort of concerned citizens who were informed on how to interpret the data and how to analyze that data themselves, not relying on other people to tell them what it means,” said Millham.
Lipson sought to situate the climate change movement within the broader U.S. environmental movement, explore the politics of climate denial and enable students to distinguish among policy reforms intended to curb climate change.
Because their course met once a week, Lipson and Millham opted to divide the course meeting in half, with Millham lecturing on the science of climate change first, followed by a political discussion led by Lipson in the second half. Both professors chime in on each other’s lectures, providing context and raising questions.
“We flow. We’re constantly referencing things that we learned in the first half of the class,” said Lipson.
As new studies, surveys and climate maps are released, the professors incorporate them into their discussions. Students also read either a national daily newspaper or news magazine daily to keep up with current news on the topic.
Students submit written reflection papers each week, which comment on the previous week’s readings as well as class discussions. Exams contain both a science section, which requires students to review data sets, interpret data and reflect on significant climate changes given specific parameters; and political science sections, which ask students to comment on political and policy issues discussed in class.
Lipson said grades on the first exam, were “much higher than my typical grades,” and both professors have been impressed by the students’ willingness to tackle such complex material.
“They really are troopers,” said Lipson. “Most of them are not science students, but they’re taking this class where they’re expected to learn the science, but also to link the science to the politics, and even if the politics weren’t enough to study, the policy itself is incredibly complex. You can’t understand cap and trade proposals or carbon tax proposals or subsidies to the oil industry versus renewable energy without having some savvy about economics. So much of the policy is tied in with understanding the science and what government needs to do to impact scientific changes but then it’s also tied in with what costs is this going to have? How are companies going to evade or are incentives really going to work? The title is ‘Climate Change Science, Politics and Policy’ and it’s basically three classes in one.”
Abbott Brant, a journalism major and political science minor who will graduate this May said she took the course to learn more about a topic journalists will “be talking about for many years to come.”
Brant, the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Oracle, and an intern at the Poughkeepsie Journal, said the class’s combination of hard science and political science have allowed her to make an informed opinion about climate change.
“With something like climate change or any modern day policy, if you’re going to cover it in the news, or if you’re going to consume any news, it’s easy to take what you see and what you read at face value,” said Brant. “I think it’s really important both as journalists and news consumers to be able to formulate your own opinion, see if it’s accurate and have background knowledge about these things that really have a huge impact on our lives.”
In their first team-teaching experience, Lipson and Millham have learned a great deal from one another, and have enjoyed the opportunity to explore a new method of teaching.
“I’m a social animal and a lot of my profession, I haven’t broken out of the box of the solitary,” noted Lipson. “You teach your own classes, you write your own research in front of your own computer in an office by yourself. It’s not really playing off of my strengths. I’ve always wanted to team-teach. It’s great, getting to learn some new techniques.”
Lipson said he, too, was a student in Millham’s class. ”I’m sitting in on a science class once a week for 75 minutes, learning – and it’s not typically how I think, not typically how I teach. It’s kind of cross-fertilizing and learning techniques.”
Millham agreed. “I am a student also in that classroom, and I’ve learned so much about politics and policy over the last several weeks. It’s been enlightening for me.”
Guatemala’s Past and Present
After months of conducting extensive literature reviews, selecting articles, films, poems and discussing their goals for the course, Roschelle and Porras had a fleeting, and comic, moment of uncertainty their first day of class. “The first day we were like, ‘How do we do this? Does one person stand, does one person sit?’” said Roschelle with a laugh.
The division of labor in the classroom “emerged organically” after that. “Depending on what the material is – if it has to do with art or literature, Luz starts the class,” noted Roschelle. “If it’s more about social structure, I’ll start the class. If we sit in a big circle, the students talk, then Luz says something, then I’ll say something. It’s very give and take and very respectful.”
Believing that the increased migration and asylum seeking among Guatemalan youth could only be understood in the context of Guatemala’s violent history, Roschelle and Porras structured their syllabus to provide insight into the important periods in the country’s past: the Guatemalan spring of the 1940s, the overthrow of the democratically elected president in 1954 and the conflicts that raged for 36 years and resulted in a death toll of 250,000. Issues pertaining to genocide, gendered violence, poverty, environmental degradation and immigration were also included to give students a full picture of the struggles endured by Guatemalan citizens.
Porras credits their work in developing a “strong syllabus” with enabling the movement and flexibility characteristic of their co-teaching. “It’s very important that you are well organized. We tackled that from the beginning. I’m very happy that Anne has the skills to do that. I’m a creative being. That’s my forte, but Anne’s very structured. Without one or the other, it wouldn’t have worked.”
Porras and Roschelle meet once a week to discuss the readings and develop study questions for the following session. They talk on the phone constantly to discuss their teaching and strategize ways to present the often painful material in a way that doesn’t overwhelm their class. Both agree that team-teaching a class has made them work harder than ever before, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by their students.
“I think they have good communication skills,” said Roniel Urena, a junior and Spanish/Latin American and Caribbean Studies double major. “They just know naturally when one professor should talk and when the other one should. I think it’s all part of their planning process. I really don’t know how they do it, but I can definitely see that they have worked hard.”
While Roschelle admits to seeing “everything sociologically,” Porras brings her personal experiences as a Guatemala native to her work.
“All the stories that Luz has told me, all of the experiences that she has are mirrored in the academic literature. It’s amazing,” said Roschelle. “You could not write this if you wanted to. You read something from a very academic point of view – it’s theoretical, it’s very dense, and then it’s like, ‘This is just like what she said.’…It really breathes life into the class in a way that if I just taught the class, it would not be the same. It adds a component that’s amazing.”
Having professors from different backgrounds and disciplines also enabled students to feel comfortable expressing their thoughts, said Yoana Duarte, a Sociology major who will graduate in the fall.
“Everybody would share in that class. Because they are two professors with two different opinions, it made it more comfortable for me to speak up,” said Duarte.
Porras and Roschelle found their collaboration so stimulating that they developed a summer study abroad course in Guatemala. The course will focus on human rights and expose the students to social movements led by Guatemalan activists.
Students will participate in service learning projects, including the construction of an adobe oven for the Kaq’chikel (Mayan community) to enable them to cook and sell food year-round and become more self-sustaining. The 16 students who have enrolled in the course have participated in a variety of bake sales and a raffle to raise money for the project.
Porras and Roschelle traveled to Guatemala in January to set up the field sites, and believe the experience will be enriching for both those who have taken their course this semester and others who will be exposed to the country for the first time.
“I wanted them to just listen to people who are passionate and believe in what they’re doing,” said Porras, noting that students will meet with Guatemalan activists, scholars and a Mayan spiritual leader. “I think it’s a really great age to expose them to activism. I personally feel they don’t get enough of that in this country and in Guatemala, people don’t really have much of a choice. If they believe in something, they have to work together.”