Presentation Title
Participatory Curriculum Design: Letting Students take the Lead
Start Date
26-7-2021 9:30 AM
End Date
26-7-2021 10:30 AM
Session Number
1
Conference Track
Student Learning
Description
Educators continually strive to increase student engagement and deep learning in their classrooms. This pursuit has led to a proliferation of evidence-based pedagogy shared widely in conferences, journals, books, and professional organizations that focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL). Still, implementing consistently effective and engaging learning experiences remains elusive to many teachers. Educators tend to experiment with different approaches. They adopt those that are effective and discard the ones that are not. While this is a reasonable approach, it often fails to leverage an immensely valuable resource: students.
Participatory curriculum design (PCD) provides students the opportunity to co-create their own coursework. It frames the classroom context as one that is emergent and collaborative. Students take the responsibility to ideate, formalize, implement, and participate in learning experiences including classroom activities, presentations, projects, and even quiz and exam questions. PCD is similar to learner experience design. But instead of the instructor bearing the responsibility of learning students’ perspectives and then designing curricula, it appoints the students as co-creators who collaborate with the instructor and each other.
This session will present an approach to PCD developed over the last two semesters. Participants will see how learning objectives can be used as a guide, and met, while students develop and engage in learning experiences of their own design. They will see examples of student-generated assignments, presentations, and exam questions and learn effective ways to integrate PCD into a variety of class contexts including face-to-face and remote settings.
Included in
Participatory Curriculum Design: Letting Students take the Lead
Educators continually strive to increase student engagement and deep learning in their classrooms. This pursuit has led to a proliferation of evidence-based pedagogy shared widely in conferences, journals, books, and professional organizations that focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL). Still, implementing consistently effective and engaging learning experiences remains elusive to many teachers. Educators tend to experiment with different approaches. They adopt those that are effective and discard the ones that are not. While this is a reasonable approach, it often fails to leverage an immensely valuable resource: students.
Participatory curriculum design (PCD) provides students the opportunity to co-create their own coursework. It frames the classroom context as one that is emergent and collaborative. Students take the responsibility to ideate, formalize, implement, and participate in learning experiences including classroom activities, presentations, projects, and even quiz and exam questions. PCD is similar to learner experience design. But instead of the instructor bearing the responsibility of learning students’ perspectives and then designing curricula, it appoints the students as co-creators who collaborate with the instructor and each other.
This session will present an approach to PCD developed over the last two semesters. Participants will see how learning objectives can be used as a guide, and met, while students develop and engage in learning experiences of their own design. They will see examples of student-generated assignments, presentations, and exam questions and learn effective ways to integrate PCD into a variety of class contexts including face-to-face and remote settings.