One of the things we love most about our work in the Learning Lab is the challenge of responding quickly and dynamically to unusual requests in creative assignment design. One way we foster this dynamism is by leveraging our Learning Lab Undergraduate Fellows (LLUFs), whose intuitions about what mediums and modes will appeal most to their peers yields ideas and resources that can be translated into the classroom in surprising ways. While the LLUFs certainly aren’t as expert as the faculty when it comes to the course material, they are inarguably experts on their own experiences, capabilities, and desires, and this frequently makes them every bit as innovative and capable as our senior staff when it comes time to develop creative assignments for courses.
This past week, first-year LLUF Abby McElroy played an instrumental role in developing an activity that not only produced the materials required for our support of TDM173x: Acting and Authenticity, but also generated prompts for student interaction that offer important new models for student-to-student communication and connection while we are teaching and learning remotely.
The story begins with a request from the instructors of TDM173x, who contacted us in search of ideas and protocols that could help their students record performance videos for their final project. In response, our senior staff began preparing documents and activities for the LLUFs to perform that would help us test our ideas and generate materials for the course.
Serendipitously, just as we were preparing to ask the LLUFs to undertake the “test performances” we would need to produce our materials, Abby asked us if she could develop an activity related to Poem in your Pocket Day, a celebration in National Poetry Month that invites members of the public to share poems with each other, whether on paper or by recorded-reading. The timing of her request seemed to us almost too good to be true, so we gave her the green light to draft a digital Poem in your Pocket prompt along with a video-capture protocol that shepherded her peers through the process of recording themselves reading poems, sending these poems to peers, then receiving their partner’s reading in return. This produced an asynchronous visual and oral dialogue between the students that they ultimately found quite moving, suggesting that they “felt more closely connected” to each other after going through the process. They felt that they were not only learning to capture better performances, but developing a stronger feeling of community and relatedness to one another.
In the end, we arrived at not only the capture protocol and tip-sheets required for the course we’re supporting this term, but also a host of new ideas and activity models that will help us this summer as we partner with faculty to design innovative learning experiences for the Fall. Crucially, because of the LLUFs willingness to share their activities with the Harvard community, we have video and textual documentation of the entire process, making it all much more concrete and more useful as a point of reference for the staff and faculty we’ll be designing with over the months to come.