4 Disciplinary content
Reading, discussing, engaging
LEH 250 is structured to support students in 3 areas:
College success skills, Academic skills, Disciplinary skills
These skills are all intertwined, but the course presents them in 2 major sections (or areas) in order to make it more clear and coherent for the students.
College Success
based on the “10 things to know to survive, thrive, and dive into college learning” book
Assessed by the College Skills project
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Deep Dive
Delve into a disciplinary topic based on your course theme and readings
Assessed by the Deep Dive project
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Academic skills
Including reading, writing, and information literacy, support both areas of the course. You can bring these topics in, and present information and lessons on them, wherever it makes the most sense.
College success skills are the internal skills, habits, and mindset attributes that support college learning.
Choosing a theme
You should choose a theme for your section of LEH250 that you think will engage students. It should reflect real-world issues, and connect to the lives of our students, including things that they may be interested in. Consider what subject matter you are an expert in. How can you use that subject knowledge to create an engaging, active class in which students inquire into a topic of their choice? What would you present first as the foundation for their own world?
Themes we have seen in LEH250 include:
- Happiness
- Lehman art
- Music
- Fashion
- Climate change
- Art and activism
A helpful approach to choosing a theme is to write a question that you want the students to answer for themselves by the end of the course. This can help you determine what reading/readings to use.
You might also have a topic area and generate the question with help from the students or you might start with a core reading and then create your question.
All 3 approaches work!
Examples
Bridget has used happiness as a theme in LEH250, and have had a question like “What does it mean to build a happy life?” as the question. This was done with a full book, Plato’s Lemonade Stand by Tom V Morris and, in other versions, with a set of themed readings.
The best themes are ones that are likely to be of interest to students, that they may be able to connect to their own lives, AND that you are excited to share with them. Students pick up on our enthusiasm and excitement and enjoy knowing that we WANT them to enjoy and/or engage with these readings, as well as why we value these readings.
Deciding on a reading or readings
Once you have a theme in mind, you can work on choosing readings. Some faculty choose one long-form reading, like a book. Others choose a set of readings based on their course theme. With either, reading during weeks 6 to 13 should be a primary task and the work that students do (in class and for homework) should relate to the readings.
If you choose 1 long-form reading, it should be long enough that it takes weeks for your class to read and work through that book.
- Aim for a book of 100 pages or more, with the writing being easily understood and familiar to students.
- It is ok to have a longer book (over 250 pages) as long as the reading level of the book is simple, with easy and familiar language, and a conversational or storytelling style.
Feel free to contact Bridget to discuss potential readings and pedagogical approaches.
Our students are capable of reading, but we want to be sensitive to the role of vocabulary and context in reading, as well as to the needs of our multilingual students who may need more time and support.
If you choose a set of thematic readings, you want to make sure that those readings are cohesive and lead to a full understanding of your theme.
- Include reference material that helps you to define or explain the topic.
- Identify readings that show the topic from different viewpoints and perspectives.
- Consider how to build DEPTH in understanding the topic and ensure you have enough readings that go beyond knowing and understanding, and help students to analyze and evaluate the topic.
Types of reading to include in your theme
As you work on your theme before the course begins, and as the course progresses, carefully consider the types of readings that your students are exposed to, and reinforce good reading habits and practices. You’ll want to ensure you have a mix of:
- Common readings such as textbooks, basic articles, books (it’s a good idea to introduce note-taking strategies with these readings).
- Reference material such as encyclopedias, which is a good time to introduce citation formats.
- Popular readings like newspapers and websites, which will introduce the critical evaluation of sources, including how to determine if a source is reliable and valid.
- Academic and scholarly sources that require close, slow, and deep reading strategies.
If you are using a long reading, like a book, you may need to keep the number of additional sources you include shorter as it is easy to overwhelm students with too many readings. If you are using a set of thematic readings, you can use these categories to help you distribute the types of reading for coverage of reading types, as well as content.
Remember, you are using the theme and reading(s) to help your students understand the world around them while building liberal arts skills such as reading, critical thinking, reasoning, citizenship, and ethical decision-making and behavior.
Deep Dive
The design of the disciplinary portion of the course is up to you. However, we ask that you have the students do some kind of culminating project. The project could take a variety of forms with which you are comfortable.
The goals for students are
- Use general sources to understand a topic.
- Work to identify a question of interest.
- Strategize to find sources to answer the question.
- Create 3 pieces of original work based on your Deep Dive.
We have developed two OER publications to support students for their deep dive.
Research Guide
- It all starts with curiosity
- Information has changed everything
- Good work requires good sources
- Being honest and authentic matters
- You can learn about a topic with a deep dive
- You need strategies to read effectively
- Research means different things in different contexts
- Research is a systematic process
- Writing about research has many (formal) formats
- There are many ways to present what you know
Deep Dive Handbook
A workbook for managing the deep dive.
The students can use this handbook to work through the final project step by step.
The Deep Dive guide
The Deep Dive Guide is a booklet that walks students through the deep-dive process step by step. It is not a replacement for instruction but provides students with notes that they can refer to after class. This is especially important as much of the deep-dive process will be done individually, and the guide can be reread as needed.
What sources should students use?
In the Deep Dive project, students should use:
- 4 general web sources
- 2 or 3 reference materials (encyclopedia entries from the Lehman Library or web sources)
- 2 news sources
- 1 scholarly source (journal articles from the Lehman Library)
- 1 trade or professional source
You can modify this based on your class and topics, but please require at least 10 sources. The numbers above are suggestions; you may decide to change these based on your class needs and focus topic. For example, for some topics, it may make more sense to have more news sources and less of a different type of source.
The library is available to support students in searching and identifying resources for their deep dive. You may want to setup a meeting with the library to work with your students on library searching, keyword strategies, and other related topics.
✓A note from Bridget: I have my students use Gale Ebooks for the library-based encyclopedia articles as it is a good, general reference database. I have my students use One Search or Academic Search Complete for the journal article.
About the annotated bibliography
An annotated bibliography is a bibliography (list of sources) with additional notes. For the Deep Dive project, the annotated bibliography enables you to see the article they are using and their process for choosing it.
An annotated bibliography has the following areas:
| Citation entry (we recommend APA style)
Summary paragraph that discusses the type of source and it what it contains.. Evaluation and connection paragraph that discusses details from the source and how it connects to the deep drive project. |
There are many resources online that can be helpful; see the Deep Dive Guide for suggestions.
The tutoring center is available to support students if they need assistance in creating their annotated bibliography.
About the recorded presentation
The recorded presentation records the student’s understanding and synthesis of information in the deep dive. Since the course does not have time for 24 (or more) students to present live, having the students record their presentations gives you a chance to review each one and have students share with each other.
The presentation must feature the student’s voice and visuals that keep the audience’s attention. We prefer to have the student’s image as well. Many students choose to build a slide deck for this purpose; however, some students have had more creative ideas and recorded themselves conducting discussions, walking around, or showing video clips and images with music. As the instructor, you can determine what would be acceptable for your class.
Videos should be between 5 and 8 minutes long. Videos this size are quite large, which is too large for our learning management system. Students should upload the videos to a platform that can handle the video size, such as OneDrive, Google Drive, or YouTube.
An example of a slide deck supporting a Deep Dive project (this is written in student-facing language):
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