Assignments

Reading the chapter in Bean forced me to think about some of the courses I took early on in my undergraduate career. As some of you may know, I started my undergrad work at a community college. There was one instructor in particular who gave us assignments similar to some that Bean describes. I ended up taking 3 of his history courses because the assignments, take home essay exams, required application of principles we'd covered in class without rudimentary memorization of dates and such.

We had a few grouped courses offered called Learning Communities, that paired two classes from different departments. The one I took was with this history instructor and a biology instructor and was entitled History and Health. One of the take home exams, for example, asked us to explain Mendelian genetics and the history of the civil rights movement in the US by analogy. The assignment read something like this:

On the planet Occuli is dominated by a group of humanoid creatures which only have one eye (making up about 1/4 of the population). They treat those with two and three eyes as second-class citizens. Two-and three-eyed creatures (which are approximately 1/2 and 1/4 of the population, respectively) are not allowed to use the same facilities and are required to use alternate transportation, etc. Using your extensive knowledge of genetics, explain the phenomenon of the one-, two-, and three-eyed beings. Then advise the one-eyed creatures about what sorts of actions they can expect if their oppression continues, drawing on your knowledge of history.

I'm sure that I haven't done the assignment justice in my recreation of it, but that is it in essence. It was a highly enjoyable semester and I learned a lot from the class(es) and from the assignments themselves.

Unfortunately, I find myself wondering how to implement something similar in my own classes. Does anyone have any ideas yet?

--Bri