Semester's End

Right before the beginning of this semester, I made a series of changes to the syllabus of one of my classes after attending a seminar on teaching civil discourse. Since the class focused on Israel, the Palestinians, and the politics of the Middle East, it seemed a good contender for a class where we should be up front about how we study contentious topics. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

I’ve spent the past week making major changes to my course syllabus, bringing in new readings and exercises that will help to build a stronger community in the classroom so that we can have the kinds of difficult conversations that often remain below the surface.

I wasn’t sure what would happen—and, in particular whether the students would go for it—but a lot of people who heard about or read about what I was planning to do were very interested. I was asked a lot of questions about my class over the past few months and now I think I’m ready to do some reflecting on how it went.

The first thing to say is that it was a clear success. The time that we spent getting to know one another and the emphasis we placed on really listening to one another had an obvious impact, as did the number of extra credit opportunities that were available to students and that they chose to do. This wasn’t some sort of unique or special group of students—though they were, as a group, quite good—but they interacted with one another very differently from the students in my other class this semester, where I did not change the syllabus to add any civil discourse and community-building work. In my “Israel and the Middle East” class, students were always talking (loudly) with one another before class and a big group of them routinely went to lunch together after class. In the other class, which focused on contemporary political philosophy, I would regularly walk into the classroom to find the students sitting silently, in the dark, staring at their computers, tablets, or phones. I made clear to both classes that there were a number of opportunities for extra credit over the course of the semester—a conference on heroic behavior on campus, several visiting scholars on different topics, a panel discussion with visitors from the Middle East—but students from one class chose to regularly attend while students from the other class didn’t.

In short, the class in which I consciously devoted time to learning about one another and to how we would be deliberate in our talking and listening quickly developed the feel of a real community. The students cared about one another, wanted to spend more time together, and thus acted in ways that made those feelings clear. It was so obvious right from the beginning that I immediately began making plans to expand on this community-building work in my class next semester.

I should also note to final things:

First, the tone of the class didn’t play a role in the way that students did their work or the grades they received. I think it’s important to make note of this because the results of my little experiment could’ve been the result of a particularly exceptional group of students or I could have bribed them with an easier workload or a promise of good grades. In this class, the students were good—as I mentioned above—but they were very much the normal group of students that I’ve come to expect in my classroom each semester. Some of them are incredibly high-achieving and some of them are right in the middle and some of them are doing what they need to do in order to get the minimum grade for the course to count toward their major. The fact that they felt a deeper sense of camaraderie in the classroom didn’t mean they turned all of their assignments in on time or had a perfect attendance record. While many of them chose to attend the additional lectures outside of class, which were billed as extra credit opportunities in addition to community-building exercises, a significant chunk of them neglected to actually turn in the required one paragraph response in order to get the extra credit. In this class, as in my other class, many students didn’t do the assigned daily reading assignments and a few completely stopped attending—a problem that has been much more common post-pandemic—and suffered grade penalties as a result. And, just as always happens these days, students ran into serious academic integrity problems as a result of unauthorized usage of artificial intelligence tools. In other words, the changes I made to the syllabus improved the course in one obvious and measurable way, but didn’t seem to affect the way students engaged with the workload of the class.

Secondly, the students themselves recognized that they were a part of something different and they talked about it regularly amongst themselves and to me. I don’t have the course evaluations back yet—maybe later this week?—but I suspect it will be noted by a majority of them in the feedback that they wrote. Several students commented, in the last week of the class, about feeling sad that the class was ending and the five students who signed up to take my class next semester attempted to recruit their classmates to join them. The students were assigned weekly reading responses throughout the semester and a few of them commented on the course as part of their final responses. Here are just a handful of messages I received:

“I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this class these past few months; it’s been my favorite challenge, so thank you.”

“In all, this class has taught myself and my classmates how to have hard conversations and open ourselves to new ideas.”

“I wanted to start by saying that I have deeply enjoyed this class and feel like I am leaving knowing so much more than I thought I would in college classes. This was my favorite class of the semester, and I've loved having you as a professor! I feel like a lot of college courses are just blown through and never brought up again by students, but this one actually taught me something. It taught me quite a lot actually, and I want to thank you for that.”

“Your class has been my favorite I have taken at UNL thus far, and I just wanted to say thank you for the way you taught this class. Being able to have open and honest conversations with one another, even if we disagree with each other, is something that this class fostered…. I’ll miss this class so much!”

“I was so sad to have this be our final week of classes. There have been two other classes in my college career that have given off similar energy that this one does - my Intro to Religious Studies course I took my first semester of school and…Race, Ethnicity, and Politics class which only had 9 students. I was trying to analyze what aspects of these courses all spoke to me, and I think I came down to the fact that in these classes, students’ voices matter. These three courses were structured not to teach at the students, but to also learn from those who take the class.”

All in all, I learned a lot about result of this experiment and I’m excited to expand on it in my next class — a new one called “The Politics of Antisemitism” that I’ll be teaching for the first time starting in just a few weeks. I’m also quite curious what the reaction will be to this post, given the amount of attention I received from the first post about this class back in August, and I’m especially interested to see what sorts of questions people will leave for all of us to consider here in the comments!