GSAS Offers Mini-Courses During January

Forget vacation. Several students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences have kept themselves busy during January by designing and leading their own miniature courses for graduate students in other fields.

A number of the students offering the courses have previously served as teaching fellows or lectured to peers in their field—but for most, the mini-courses constitute a unique opportunity to draft a curriculum and conduct their own classes.

“As grad students, we get more experience grading as TFs. I wanted some teaching experience,” says Bridget A. Alex, a Human Evolutionary Biology graduate student who taught a mini-course on prehistoric history for the inaugural program.

Though Alex has not had experience being a teaching fellow, she says that older graduate students have warned her that TFs largely focus on grading and answering students’ questions about tests and homework. Alex says she found the opportunity to teach a mini-course appealing because it would give her lecture experience.

The Graduate Student Council-sponsored program of mini-courses has provided graduate students an important chance to gain experience teaching a course on their own and  perhaps even further their career goals in academia.

LEARNING BY TEACHING

Though the eight mini-courses each attracted only several consistent students, Graduate Student Council President Benjamin M. Woodring wrote in an e-mailed statement that the Council is planning to continue the program next year because it gives graduate students the opportunity to lead their own classes.

“We want it to be more of a discussion group,” says GSAS Dean for Student Affairs Garth O. McCavana, who added that the “numbers” regarding the class sizes were “not that important.”

The range of mini-courses suggests a broad appeal across disciplines, with subject areas running the gamut from textiles and modern American Jewish culture, to stem cells and experimental approaches to mathematics.

“The wide learning this program promotes is what people ideally want out of Harvard, but usually do not get because they’re overcommitted,” Woodring says.

The GSC mini-courses are part of the larger program January@GSAS, which offers a range of seminars, workshops, and extracurricular activities to graduate students. In January, ski trips to New Hampshire and courses ranging from creative writing workshops to “Massage Therapy 101: Basics of a Back Massage” were offered to graduate students.

Nine GSAS students and one post-doctoral student decided to focus on leading mini-courses in their fields of expertise.

An anonymous alumnus made a donation in the late fall to make these mini-courses possible, according to McCavana. Total funding of $4,000 was distributed to the eight courses, Woodring says, and students who did not receive funding could still teach a mini-course.

While the GSC has worked with GSAS administrators to help structure the mini-course program, faculty and administrators have taken a generally hands-off approach, according to McCavana.

DECEMBER RUSH

Students were asked to submit course ideas to the Graduate Student Selection Committee beginning Dec. 2. Students were apprised of funding decisions on Dec. 19, and they had less than a month to prepare the syllabus and lectures for their mini-courses.

GSAS student Carlos A. Blanco—who taught “Why Resurrection? An Introduction to Belief in the Afterlife in Judaism and Christianity”—says that for each two-hour class, he devoted about five hours of preparation. He says he used materials from his two dissertations in philosophy and theology to design the syllabus.

Despite the large effort necessary to run a mini-course, the teachers say the benefits exceeded the effort. Carl Erickson, who taught “Vistas in Mathematics,” says that he learned new things as he compiled an annotated bibliography and pieced together the syllabus.

Alex, who taught “History Before History: From the Origins of the Earth to the Modern Era,” says about her experience leading a course, “I reread every textbook from undergraduate and graduate school I had and picked out topics that I though were interesting in the last 13.7 billion years of the world’s history.”

—Staff writer Kerry K. Clark can be reached at kclark@fas.harvard.edu.