Rani: As our pedagogy seminar comes to a close, Jonathan and I want to take some time to thematically and ideologically wrap things up before we present our final project with one another. Personally, I approached this seminar with a fair amount of hesitation and largely an open mind – I had never participated in an academic enterprise to teaching, much less to a science course. For the most part, this seminar lived up to my expectations of scope and theme as well as trajectory, and as the semester progressed we’ve had several pit stops at pertinent topics: aids and experimentation and assessment, to name a couple.
In an exercise of reflection, we would like you to think about one or two or all of these questions.
- Why did you decide to join this seminar?
- What is one thing you’ve gotten out of this seminar?
- What is one thing you wanted to discuss but didn’t find the time or space to?
Jonathan: First, I’d like to respond to Rani’s blog. Looking back over the course of the semester, I am so pleased with the way that our seminar has turned out. In all honesty, my expectations coming into this class were fairly low and uninformed. I wanted to join as I have an interest in education, but also as a way to better understand the material of our class. The true strength of this class however, in my opinion, is it’s size. More specifically, the comfortability that we feel with each other as a result of the small size of our class. I think the discussions that we have as a group reach a depth that would not be possible in a larger class. What do you all think about the size of our class?
Also, I would like to get a sense of how our class feels about our final projects. Do you think that having this broad of a project is a strong way to end the course? How would you change it if not?
Excited to hear what everyone has to say! We look forward to seeing you all on Tuesday.
Rani and Jonathan
