Faculty members teaching six Grand Challenge Experience courses this fall say they’ve enjoyed opening students’ eyes to the unnoticed connections of a research campus, and they hope it leads to a new way of engaging student participation and thinking.
The price of supper
Students preparing a meal for the Grand Challenge course, “Fictions of Sustainability,” will be asked to write about the environmental and social impact of the shared meal later in the course. The students prepared vegetarian spaghetti, salad, garlic bread, pumpkin pie and pumpkin seeds for their meal.
The courses, open only to first-year students, are the first part of a multi-year pilot program meant to invigorate general education by anchoring the courses to topics students care about. The idea for Grand Challenge Learning at the general education level emerged from the ongoing Campus Conversation on Undergraduate Education, initiated in 2013, with some of the details fine-tuned by follow-up working groups.
Jamie Jones, a professor of English, said her course, “Fictions of Sustainability,” uses literature to teach environmental issues and vice versa.
Students are learning about agricultural issues that touch on labor, the environmental and social risks of industrial agriculture, as well as access to healthy food, through narratives and classic novels such as John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”
“Students in my course learn about sustainability by reading and writing stories,” she said. “They learn to read and write critically like students in any rigorous English course at the university. What’s unique about our course is that we think very explicitly about how to apply the ideas of careful, patient observation and critical thinking to experiences as well as texts.”
One component of Jones’ class is a meal planned and prepared by students. Another has them visiting the campus Waste Transfer Station as they follow the full route of the area’s food system.
“With the meal, they are asked to reflect carefully on the cultural assumptions that underpin their own attitudes about shopping, cooking and eating,” she said, “and about the visibility and invisibility of sustainability concerns in local food markets.”
She said even defining the concept of sustainability is a topic for students to consider.
“It’s a vague term that is easy to embrace, yet hard to define precisely,” she said.
Laura DeThorne, a professor of speech and hearing science, is teaching a course on autism to 24 first-year students originating from a variety of colleges and departments.
“Although the course meets a life science general education requirement, it approaches the topic from an interdisciplinary perspective,” she said. “It examines the critical intersection between health and identity and asks, ‘When does an individual difference become a disorder, and who gets to decide?'”
Classroom prep
The idea behind the Grand Challenge courses is to give students a more comprehensive and hands-on way to learn. Here, a student in the Fictions of Sustainability course cuts up spinach to add to the vegetarian spaghetti.
She said the classroom learning builds on field trips to research laboratories including the Biomedical Research Center and community service centers.
“The students are encouraged to seek first-person perspectives from individuals who identify as autistic regarding each topic covered in class,” she said.
“Stress and Health in Urban Communities,” taught by Ruby Mendenall, a professor of sociology and African American studies, looks at how race, gender and economics can affect an individual’s health.
“Our experiential approach to community-engaged scholarship will examine how Chicago neighborhoods with high levels of violence affect African-American mothers’ mental and physical health,” she said.
The course utilizes a variety of teaching techniques, including interactive lectures, classroom discussion and debate, films and collaborative learning.
The class will culminate with students conducting a needs assessment of the Englewood community in suburban Chicago.
“Students will take ethnographic field notes and describe how the event addresses the grand challenge of health disparities and discuss what else could be done,” she said. “They will also discuss what community members say about the study and the findings.”
Editor’s Note: See related story at Initiative rethinks how general education courses are designed and delivered.
