Strategy: Integrating students’ personal experience
There are over 100 students in Introduction to Food Systems. For Andrea Moraes, it is important to include the perspectives of all the students in the learning process.
One way she encourages her students to participate is through personal reflections posted to weekly discussion boards on D2L Brightspace. These reflections make up part of their final grade.
First, students are asked to investigate or research something related to the course. Then they are asked to relate what they have learned to their own experience. By relating it to their own lives, students connect to the content, and every post in the discussion is unique.
Andrea’s class also includes bi-weekly groupwork assignments. She uses randomly selected groups, again to encourage her students to hear different perspectives.
Andrea has noticed that when students are asked to engage through the written word rather than having to speak aloud in class, even shy students have their voices heard.
