The Promise and Potential Pitfalls of a “Learning-Centered” Approach to Creative Social Inquiry: Lessons Learned from an Undergraduate Seminar on Authoritarianism through Literature and Film

Abstract

Political science faculty have access to a wealth of innovative pedagogies thanks to a comprehensive literature on teaching and learning in the discipline and related fields. Yet, from among the hundreds of documented possibilities, how does one go about deciding which to incorporate into a given course? Few articles have much to say in response to this basic question, as most begin with a particular method, assignment, or assessment in mind and proceed from there. Drawing on the work of Fink (2003) and Wiggins and McTighe (2005), among others, I argue that, instead of taking the choice of activities as the starting point in course design, teachers—and, by extension, students—would be better served by first contemplating the desired results of the course and only thereafter devoting consideration to content and instructional methods. In making this claim, I reflect critically on my experience teaching a writing-intensive first-year seminar on comparative authoritarianism using “learning-centered” and “backward” course design. My experience speaks to both the potential pitfalls associated with the learning-centered model and the enormous promise that it represents.

Keywords:

• authentic assessment
• backward course design
• learning-centered course design
• learning goals
• learning outcomes

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers for constructive and supportive feedback and to Joan Middendorf for her extensive contributions to faculty development around pedagogy and course design.

Notes

Gelbman (2011), Olsen and Statham (2005), Omelicheva and Avdeyeva (2008), and Sum and Light (2010) also link their pedagogical approaches to learning outcomes, although not explicitly as the starting point for course design and activity selection.

For more on course “uncoverage” versus course coverage and on “uncovering” knowledge, see Wiggins and McTighe (2005), especially Chapter 10.

According to a study of Harvard faculty and students, when asked, “[W]hat single change would most improve their current teaching and learning[,] … both faculty and students highlighted the importance of ‘the big picture,’ the ‘big point of it all,’ and not just the details of a particular topic” (Light 2001, 66).

For examples of authentic assessments/assignments, see Indiana University's Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL) (2011a). More recently, Trueb (2013) describes a policy paper assignment in her foreign policy course that mimics “real life.”

The CITL Web site includes a step-by-step introduction to backward course design (CITL 2011b).

One groups had two members, and I joined to make the third member.

The idea of using motivating moves is taken from http://dreams.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2010/01/Motivating-Moves.pdf.

The full text of Havel's essay is available at http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/700.

In addition, during the semester many students expressed surprise that the issues facing the characters were not always so different from those we face here in the United States. While students indicated a greater connection on a personal level with the characters we met along the way, they did not necessarily link empathetic learning to having bolstered their overall learning experience in the course.

I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this.