Here’s the bottom line: like most of my colleagues, I genuinely want to share the material I teach with my students in a progressive, invested way. I want them to be able to apply classroom material to the professional world as fluidly as possible and I want them to have access to as many tools, techniques, and ideas as they can. I want them to think of this course as an essential part of their undergraduate experience. I doubt that I’m alone in these thoughts as I’ve yet to meet a colleague who doesn’t feel the same about their courses.

So, what’s the problem? Well, that’s part of it right there…rather than thinking about the problem, let’s think about the challenge at hand.

Over the past sixteen years, I’ve frequently taught a course organized around material that I love and that is central to my scholarship and artistic work. This required course focuses on material that requires students to engage with a large amount of experiential learning. It demands consistent work in a range of different learning modules using industry specific techniques, methods, and vocabulary, while affording students a chance to create several high-quality portfolio pieces in line with expected competencies in the field.

In recent years, I’ve noticed a tendency for my students to carry with them an increasing lack of interest or lived experience related to working on challenges that don’t have a clear end point, or most importantly, a straightforward way to get an answer “right.” For the most part, they want to receive an “A” and then move on as quickly as possible. While some openly embrace a love of learning, far more sing the praises of multi-tasking and finishing fast. 

I’m here to discuss what it feels like to be stuck squarely in the middle of this and the quiet realization that I might be a lot more like my students than I thought. 

What I’ve come to realize is that the real challenge of this course is its relationship to what comes before and after in our department’s overall curriculum. In most academic departments, it’s routine to debate the content and structure associated with entry level courses, and capstone experiences. Departments tend to think, and rightfully so, of the beginning and end of a curricular sequence as being crucial components of the overall experience for a student. The downside of this is that they also tend to overlook and undervalue the crucial courses in the middle. Ironically, many curricula rely on such courses in the 200 and 300 levels to lay the groundwork and pave the way for the upper-level experiences. This is particularly true for departments and programs that exist in a significantly scaffolded pedagogical approach. In short, to get to “Level 3” a student needs to develop a thorough understanding of “Levels 1 and 2.”  For years, I’ve been focused on how I can improve “Level 2” when I really should have been thinking about how we can improve the entire sequence of 1-3. 

“We” is a lot tougher than “I” in most conversations and is definitely a lot less glamorous. While one person can easily update a course or create a new learning module, it’s a much taller ask for many people to update many things, and collectively discover ways that each part enriches the other. As educators, we spend countless hours in the classroom with lots of students and frequently come together with colleagues to discuss academic and administrative matters. However, it’s often up to the individual to decide the structure, content, and particular methodology of their course.

I think that we have been missing out on something really important. Curricular innovation, whether as a part of major/minor sequence or as a much larger core component is deeply rooted in the middle. We owe it to ourselves and our students to look at these courses as guideposts for where we have been and where we hope to go and not be afraid to utilize them to spark meaningful innovation in both directions of scaffolded course work.

I’ve shifted my thinking from what should I do with the course to what should the course do for the sequence, and in turn, what the sequence should do for the course. This means that I am starting to look specifically at the relationship that this course has to the classes before and after it. In doing so, I hope to spark innovation that starts in the middle and ripples across curriculum levels.

I’m looking forward to what this new approach to the course brings and the ways that innovation from the inside out can positively impact my course, and potentially an entire sequence of related offerings leading to curricular growth throughout my program.