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Marj Terpstra: Christian perspectives on teaching

Thursday, January 15, 2009

In Marj Terpstra’s Fall EDU 202-203 class each student was required to write a paper exploring his/her Christian perspective on teaching. The main objective of the assignment was to enable students to synthesize their thoughts after a brief study of educational philosophies and curriculum. The final products, however, ended up being more than “just any ol’ perspective papers.” They were literally works of art!

The students wrote their Christian perspectives, peer-edited each others’ writings, and then polished their own writing. Each also chose a symbol, visual or song to help them meaningfully share their perspective with others, as well as to help encapsulate it for themselves. Then they read aloud and recorded their perspective (using GarageBand), requiring them not only to write their thoughts, but also to speak the words and hear their perspective in their own voice and confront whether they actually believed what they had written.

In a computer lab, Marj started by modeling the recording and exporting processes for the students. Then, using GarageBand and external microphones from AV (and operating in “whisper mode” except for those who were recording) they recorded themselves reading their Christian perspective. They also added their visual, song, or video (some needed to use iMovie), exported it, and either emailed it to Marj or uploaded it to the class wiki on KnightVision. Amazingly, the majority of the class completed the project during the 50-minute lab time.

GarageBand not only allowed the students to pull together their symbols and voices into one medium, but it also helped them recognize how easily audio recording could be used in the classroom so they could begin to think about using it with their future students.

When assessing the activity, Marj focused on the content and text of her students’ perspectives and not the technical recording aspects because she felt the technology was too new for most of the students. However, listening to their voices as she read their papers aided in her understanding as she evaluated them. She also used a rubric developed with other Education department colleagues.

Because this assignment was such a success, they also recorded their final assignment titled A Rationale for Leading and Managing a Learning Community. Because many of their rationales contained some of the same themes as the Christian perspective assignment, many of the students used their same symbol, but interestingly, some selected a new symbol. This second recording enabled the students to reflect on how their views might have changed and deepened over the semester, as well as demonstrated how Christian perspectives are always developing. It also gave her students an opportunity to become more comfortable with the processes of recording and exporting of audio.