Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education

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Spring 2015

In This Issue:

I. Introduction — Extended Student-Faculty Partnerships: Deepening Insights, Transforming Relationships, in which Alison Cook-Sather, Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor of Education and Director of the Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, frames the essays included in this issue by evoking calls for redefining the role of students in higher education and highlights the ways in which the four essays in this issue illustrate how extended partnerships between student consultants and faculty members deepen pedagogical insights and transform student-teacher relationships more generally.

II. One Year of Collaboration: Reflections on Student-Faculty Partnership, in which Joel Alden Schlosser, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bryn Mawr College, and Abigail Sweeney, Haverford College Class of 2015, focus on “three areas of experimentation and learning”—transparency, “planned not planning,” and aligning pedagogy and evaluation—that they explored in their yearlong partnership.

III. Learning to Teach and Teaching to Learn: Insights from a Year-long Partnership into Teachers’ and Students’ Perspectives and Practices, in which Erin Schoneveld, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, and Julinana Montinola, Bryn Mawr College Class of 2016, offer a series of insights about student perspectives, teaching, and learning that they gained through their yearlong partnership.

IV. Student-Faculty Collaboration in the Russian-language Classroom, in which Mariana Irby, Bryn Mawr College Class of 2015, and Irina Walsh, Lecturer in the Russian Department at Bryn Mawr College, describe the two different phases of their collaboration: an initial focus on classroom practice and on revising the syllabus for the course to reflect their discussions and a subsequent focus on the development and refinement of a syllabus for a Russia-centered humanities course Walsh would be teaching in English in the fall of 2015.

V. Dynamic Discussion and Informed Improvements: Student-led Revision of First-Semester Organic Chemistry, in which Louise K. Charkoudian, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Haverford College, Anna C. Bitners, Noah B. Bloch, and Saadia Nawal, all Haverford College Class of 2016, detail the ways in which they engaged in a thorough review of Charkoudian’s first-semester organic chemistry course’s content, assignments, and methods of assessment.