Content area
Full Text
Three ways that faculty members can help students connect course content to the world around them.
Last week I stepped out into the backyard at 10 p.m. on a cold, crisp evening. While the dog took care of his business, my eyes wandered up to the night sky and my mind drifted to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Frost at Midnight": "I was reared/In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,/And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars." I had just taught the poem in my British-literature survey, and Coleridge's depiction of the stars as a city-dweller's lifeline to the natural world struck me with fresh intensity.
The next morning I climbed onto the elliptical in my basement for my thrice-weekly torture session, and started watching the second episode of Run, a short-lived British television series depicting life among London's tough underclass. As I watched a heartbreaking story about the fate of a recent immigrant to the city, I made a mental note to recommend the show to my survey students when we read Zadie Smith's short story "The Waiter's Wife" later in the semester.
Small connections between course material and everyday life pop up all the time, in almost any course I teach in my field. That probably happens regularly to you, too, both with your classes and your research projects. When we are deeply embedded in our intellectual pursuits, the world seems to orient itself around them. New connections form continually. Reading the news, watching our screens, talking with peers or our children -- all of those things become moments of potential connections with our disciplinary passions.
That phenomenon, according to research in teaching and learning, is what separates you (an expert in your field) from your students (novice learners in your field).
As the authors of How Learning Works argue, "One important way experts' and novices' knowledge organizations differ is the number or density of connections among the concepts, facts, and skills they know." Experts have thick tapestries weaving together all of the many things they know. New experiences are threaded easily into that tapestry, continually expanding and reshaping it.
By contrast, new learners tend to have information, ideas, or skills lodged in their minds in discrete, isolated places. Connections that seem...