More Thoughts on Modular Course Architecture

My spring semester is over. Undergraduate students have completed an anonymous evaluation of my comparative politics course, in which I experimented with modular architecture. In this course, students chose one of five different themes to focus on for the semester — political identity, democratization, revolution, genocide, or globalization. The themes were cross-indexed by geographic region; for example, in a particular week, all students’ readings were about Latin America. At the beginning of the semester, all students read journal articles on all five themes as an introduction.

A few non-scientific conclusions about what students wrote in their evaluations:

A few students — despite regular reminders — refuse to acknowledge the importance of  the “plan ahead” concept. Yes, this book is 300 pages long. No, it’s not something you can read the night before the essay on it is due. That’s why I give you a syllabus at the beginning of the semester.

Some choice is good, but too much is bad. The reading assignments for the genocide theme were all books. I let each student in this theme choose three books to read, which meant that a given student wasn’t obligated to read anything for some of the geographic regions. A few students said they felt lost in class discussions as a result.

Groups needed to have members that were all doing the same thing. Throughout the semester, students had to do group presentations that consisted of close-readings of assigned texts. Students did not select the themes in equal numbers, so some of the groups that I created contained students who had chosen different themes. Students in these mixed groups said this hampered collaboration — one or two members of the group would contribute nothing. My expectation was that students would teach content to each other while they were putting their presentations together. So that didn’t work out. In the future I will either need to drop this kind of collaborative task or figure out a way to ensure relatively equally-sized groups, each containing students who have chosen the same theme.

Class discussions helped students see connections between different historical events and apply theoretical concepts to new situations.  One of my personal goals as a teacher is to facilitate students’ ability to  integrate knowledge, so I would like to develop more formal ways of doing this — graded writing assignments, if possible — in the future.