Editor's note: This article was updated on Thursday, Nov. 20 to include an additional talk that took place during the Showcase and was inadvertently omitted upon the article's first publication.
By Bri Brands
The second annual College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Teaching Excellence Showcase, co-sponsored by CLAS, the Center for Teaching, and the Office of Teaching, Learning, and Technology, displayed teaching innovation across the college, with the bulk of the showcase dedicated to highlighting the importance and impact of CLAS’s General Education program.
Andrew Forbes, professor in the Department of Biology and outgoing chair of the General Education Curriculum Committee, said that many students don’t understand why they are made to take general education courses during their undergraduate studies. Requiring these courses, he said, gives students soft skills that are applicable across all disciplines and what makes the University of Iowa stand out as a great institution.
“What emerges from this are the skills that make them more than just functional in a single field,” Forbes said. “They become adaptable, are able to call up knowledge and lessons from across disciplines and can synthesize those ideas.”
“Connecting Everyday Artistic Practices in Teaching”
Mark Bruckner, Department of Theatre Arts, has been teaching Arts in Performance since he became a professor at the university. In the class, he shares how to connect art with everyday practices, urging students to learn how to engage in art fully and openly.
“When you stay curious, open, and engaged—whether you’re an artist, scientist, mathematician, or linguist—you practice the everyday work of art,” he said.
In an intentional listening exercise Brucker leads in the early stages of the class, he instructs his students to close their eyes and focus on the ambient sounds around them, allowing them to become more aware of their present surroundings.
“This practice has helped students in the same way that the art of seeing art has helped students to walk into a space, to be able to see, and to be able to hear more intentionally,” he said.
“The Panopticon and the Gen Ed Lit Classroom: A (Mostly) Cautionary Tale”
Chelsea Burk-Betts, Department of English, emphasizes creating connections between theoretical concepts and students’ lived experiences in her Interpretation of Literature course.
Early in her teaching career, Burk-Betts was discussing the concept of the panopticon—a circular prison with a central observation tower—in assigned texts, when a student shared that their father was in a panopticon prison.
Burk-Betts used that moment as a teaching opportunity, helping students learn from each other in the classroom.
“I want to ground concepts in real experiences for a student, because this leads to a more nuanced understanding,” she said. “We all have our own unique experiences and subjectivities, so we’re not going to have the same experience of theoretical concepts.”
“A Normal Day”
When Kirsten Kumpf-Baele, Department of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures, and Cultures, teaches her Understanding Cultural Perspectives general education course on Anne Frank, she begins the semester with an activity she calls “A Normal Day.”
The activity begins with students listing their everyday routines on the whiteboard. After they are each handed an anti-Jewish law introduced between 1933 and 1943, the class works together to cross out which ordinary activities would have been restricted for Jewish people at the time.
Kumpf-Baele said they immediately gain an understanding of how marginalization and persecution impacted their daily lives.
“This is a transformative teaching and learning moment because students realize for themselves that nearly everything they do today was once restricted or forbidden for Jewish people,” she said. “Many students talk about the ways in which they have witnessed individuals' rights being stripped or an erasure of their identities in the communities they grew up in.”
“From One Student’s Challenge to an Inclusive Course Design”
After Erning Li, Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, realized one of her own students was struggling to balance food security, personal health and wellness, and academics, she decided to make a change to her course design.
As a first step of increasing accessibility in her course—which serves as a general education credit and prerequisite for more advanced statistics courses—Li redesigned the way she delivered lectures, notes, and assignments to be more affordable. Following that, she decided to take a bold leap and create her own textbook, making it 100% free for her students.
“Students empower transformative teaching," she said. “Every barrier removed opens a door.”
"Learning@Iowa - Hooks, Vecera, & Kirk"
Dana Thomann, Department of Rhetoric, is no stranger to sensitive events impacting her students. When she was a student, she watched as the events of September 11, 2001 took an emotional toll on her peers. More recently, as a professor, she saw the assassination of public figure Charlie Kirk have a similar psychological impact on her students.
In response to the Kirk event, Thomann taught works by American author Bell Hooks, discussing with students how to be emotionally brave. She also introduced them to Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences faculty member Shaun Vecera's idea of metacognition, the practice of thinking about thinking.
Along with these teachings, Thomann gave her students the opportunity to outline class discussions. Giving students the freedom to dictate the course and the tools to be emotionally open and reflect on their feelings in a safe environment is what empowers Thomann to be brave in her teaching, she said.
"[My students and I] know about radicalness and how to be open with one another," she said. "My students know that they make my classroom and they have ownership of my classroom."
“Making the Community the Classroom”
PJ Zaborowski, Department of English, transformed his Interpretation of Literature classroom into a community-engaged service-learning course. Eight times over the course of one semester, he took his students to Kirkwood Elementary in Coralville to be “reading buddies” with fourth and fifth grade students.
When teaching the course of spring of 2023, many of the fourth and fifth graders were displaced by a tornado that destroyed their homes. The next time students met with their reading buddies, they were invited to draw or share their own stories—an idea brainstormed by Zaborowski’s students following the disaster.
“The drawing activity provided them with a way to find control in their situation but didn’t manipulate them. They took control of the narrative,” Zaborowski said. “That’s what transformation looks like—it’s not a parlor trick or a sleight of hand. It’s giving our students the tools they need and putting them in a position to do the most possible good with those tools.”
Following the conclusion of the reading buddies program, the fourth and fifth graders were invited to the UI campus for a fun day with their college buddies.
“It was joyful chaos that reminded what teaching is all about: building communities of readers and thinkers who leave this classroom and our campus transformed,” Zaborowski said.
Keynote Speech: “Why We Do What We Do”
David Gooblar, Department of English, delivered a keynote speech on the importance of better teaching in higher education.
As the director of the General Education Literature program, Gooblar oversees nearly 150 Interpretation of Literature courses per academic year.
“We try to help students become better at reading literary texts, better at putting their interpretations into words, better at expressing their ideas and listening to others' ideas within an academic community, and better at seeing how various contextual factors influence a literary text,” he said.
By investing in students’ critical thinking skills early in their academic career, general education courses provide a model for the critical thinking students will need to do both in other college courses and life in general.
“Over and over again, students reported that they connected texts they read in Gen Ed lit with a variety of ideas and disciplines beyond the course itself, and found that encountering these texts allowed them to go outside of themselves and better understand views and perspectives other than their own,” Gooblar said.
Gooblar encourages his fellow faculty members and graduate students to repeatedly remind themselves why they do what they do, and to not get distracted by values other than the learning of their students.
“The center of any educational institution is the classroom,” he said. “It is the fundamentally human relationship between teacher and student, a relationship as old as any in human history around which we build our universities.”