From Practice to Praxis

by Mary Thompson, Anne-Marie Lanctot, Faculty Lecturers
and Luisa Ciofani, Course Coordinator
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec

From January to April 2007 we had the privilege of team teaching a Women’s Reproductive Health course to 71 undergraduate, multidisciplinary students. We saw this as a great opportunity to apply Dialogue Education (DE) principles over a set period of time to the same group and explore its impact on learning. This article looks at our beginning attempts to incorporate the DE principles of sequencing, sound relationships, engagement and praxis into the course design. It analyzes what we feel we did well and identifies what we hope to change the next time around. We have also posed three questions in this article inviting you to share ideas and/or similar experiences, and to suggest strategies to maximize DE’s potential to make this course a more meaningful and useful educational experience within this university setting.

The Women’s Reproductive Health course has historically had been taught by a team of nurses with membership shifting over time. The course coordinator, Anne-Marie Lanctot, has taught the course for 5 years, Luisa Ciofani was teaching for the second year, and Mary Thompson was new.  The course, given over 12 weeks, was broken down into weekly 3-hour segments each with a 15-minute break, which meant we had approximately 29 hours of available teaching time.

In reviewing their 2005-2006 course experience Anne-Marie and Luisa identified four main concerns: course readings were not well incorporated into the classes, making it difficult to know if students were doing them; they both had demanding full-time jobs on top of this course and wanted to design assignments that would reduce marking demands; they felt previously used in-class activities (guest speakers, films, debates) had succeeded in providing vehicles for interaction, but had been somewhat monotonous and they wanted to incorporate learning activities that would be fun and learner-centered; and, they wanted to develop a more systematic way of monitoring students perceptions of the course throughout the term rather getting most of the feedback at the end.

Designing for engagement and praxis
Feeling it would be overwhelming to completely adopt a new DE inspired model for the course, we opted to make 3 smaller changes that would enable us to better evaluate the application of Dialogue Education (DE) principles to address specific aspects. The first was to apply the principle of sequencing by revising course objectives and regrouping content into three thematic sub-groups, each relating to the macro objectives.  The second was to emphasize the principle of sound relationships through incorporating a Learning Needs and Resources Assessment (LRNA), an in-class survey, systematic check backs with students during the term, and a final evaluation. The third change was to modify the four course assignments (reflective field notes, community resource activity, term paper, and final exam) to encourage engagement and praxis and link them more specifically to macro course objectives.

Sequencing our course objectives
Like many university courses, this course was content-heavy partly due to the wide subject area and partly due to tradition. As a group, we identified essential content and sifted out expendable items and/or content we were not sure where to place. This somewhat sensitive process was made more democratic by consistently asking ourselves what knowledge and skills we wanted students to take with them by the end of the term.

Learning Needs and Resources Assessment sent out November 2006 Thank you all for signing up for the Women's Reproductive Course. We hope it will be a useful learning experience for you all. Our goal for this course is that by the end of it you will have: Developed your knowledge base about women's reproductive health Analyzed how power, poverty, and politics influence women's access to health services and resources Evaluated your understanding of how your lifestyle choices impact on your health In wanting to make this a meaningful learning experience for all of us, we are asking you to please complete our mini survey below. Your responses will inform our course design for the 13 weeks we will be together.

As the course unfolded we saw gaps in the work we had done on the objectives. Those gaps have been very instructive in helping us design for the next year. Areas we need to improve in include: revising the macro objectives to be more specific, redesigning the weekly course objectives to ensure they strongly feed into the macro objectives and are achievement-based, and creating sequential learning tasks throughout the term that reinforce content learned in previous classes.

Question #1:
What has been your best experience of integrating sequencying and reinforcement into course designs at the university level?

The impact of sound relationships on content:Hi, thanks for the email. I really like how you are taking the time to learn about the students' interests and how you can structure the course around them.

- Student response to LNRA

A key determinant to decisions we made about reducing and/or condensing content in this course was what we had learned about students through the LNRA and the in-class survey handed out the first day of class. Information gleaned from both helped us to structure classes so students could better exercise their role as resources. The LNRA both set the tone for the course by conveying to students that their input was important and helped us decide about sequencing of content and the distribution of teaching time for each topic. The in-class survey showed us where we could condense our content (i.e. knowing that over 50% of the class could name 5 or more contraceptive methods meant we could spend less time on the description of methods and focus more perceptions).The final evaluation is also proving to be an extremely useful guide for assessing the impact of DE on students’ perceptions of their learning and for providing ideas about further adjustments we can make to content for the next year.I felt very comfortable asking questions of the instructors. I feel they valued my education, prepared well for the lecture, and respected my input...

- Student evaluation

Promoting principles of engagement and praxis:
The course had four assignments: reflective field notes (pre-class assignments related to the week’s theme); a community resource activity; the term paper; and, the final exam. We modified the first two assignments using the DE Principles of Engagement and Praxis in order to increase their potential to stimulate dialogue and to be a vehicle to communicate content. Field notes were redesigned to ask students to reflect on the subject being taught that week (anchor); respond to questions about that week’s readings (add); and apply that knowledge to a question/problem (apply). We modified the field notes by reducing the number of assignments from 10 (required in the previous year) to 5. We linked them more closely to the readings and to the specific weekly topic they were due. This enabled us to integrate content and reinforce it by trying to achieve greater coherency between the course objectives, weekly topics, the readings and assignments.

In general, students had positive comments about the reflective field notes, but in the final course evaluation, Field notes and small assignments are wonderful ways of concretizing the material... The emphasis on agency, particularly in the field notes, really brought the subject matter home and started many discussions in my family.

- Student evaluation students only rated them 8 out of 12 (1 being the highest) when asked to prioritize the 12 learning modalities used throughout the course with respect to usefulness to their learning. We were confused by this result, particularly since as instructors we felt the notes contained valuable insights into the experience and knowledge students brought to class and provided us with an understanding of how well students were grasping the material. These evaluation results triggered memories of Jane Vella’s opening remarks at the 2nd Dialogue Education Institute in fall 2006 when she said, “if it is not working then something is wrong with us, not them". Applying this perspective prompts us to ask: How could we better design field notes to maximize their potential for student learning? What possibilities are there for field notes to integrate content, therefore freeing up class teaching time? How could we best structure field notes to better develop critical thinking about the weekly topic and readings?

 

 

 

Field Note Assignment #1 List 5 perceptions you had of menstruation growing up. For each one, distinguish which came from your own family perceptions about menstruation and which ones came from society. Circle the -perception you no longer believe in and explain what caused your perception to change. Based on the Chrisler and Caplan article name 1 historical, cultural, political, or economic force that has lead to the social construction of premenstrual syndrome and give an example of how it impacted on the positioning of women in our society. Based on the reading construct a 1 paragraph response to each of these statements: The inclusion of Premenstrual Dysphonic Disorder (PMDD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders advances our understanding of women’s health because….. The inclusion of Premenstrual Dysphonic Disorder (PMDD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders impedes our understanding of women’s health because...

Question #2:
What change would you make to this field note if it was your course?

The course pack description of the Community Resource Activity reads: As a result of this assignment students will have increased their awareness of women’s reproductive health services in Montreal and evaluated the impact of power, poverty and politics on those services. For this assignment self-selected groups of 2-3 students visited a Montreal women’s health service (chosen from a pre-determined list) and reported back to the class. Out of a class of 71 this meant we had 20 group presentations, averaging between 20-30 minutes with questions, amounting to approximately 8-10 hours of a total 29 hours of teaching time over the term. The presentations were spread over 7 classes with each class having at least 1 and up to 3 presentations Student presentations made what we were talking about in class more tangible... I learned a lot about Montreal and women's health doing this assignment and listening to other groups.

- Student evaluationlinked to the weekly class topics. In the class evaluation students rated presentations the 3rd most useful of the 12 learning modalities employed. Interestingly, student comments on the final evaluation were very consistent in that they could see the value of the presentations to their learning, but felt they absorbed too much class time and that there was “little time left for instructor presentations…this hurt the class content”. This indicated to us that we had somehow set up this assignment so that students perceived the presentations as separate from the class content.

The key questions we are asking ourselves in relation to this are: Did we create a learning task or did we create an assignment? How could we better sequence the presentations in a 3-hour class? What is the potential to design this activity so that student presentations could more clearly link to essential course content? For example, could we ask the group presenting on university health services in the Contraception class to report on the behavioral skills required for effective contraceptive use? Could we ask them to list the characteristics of a successful contraceptive user? How could we structure the assignment to include content that could be given by them as opposed by the instructors?

Question #3:
What has been your experience of designing student presentations so they cover some of the course content?

As instructors, this course has been a great learning experience and we currently identifying what we know worked well, what the best way would be to incorporate student suggestions and feedback, and how to shape content to best equip students to confidently make decisions that will keep them healthier. This experience taught us that coherent sequencing, sound relationships, engagement and praxis are central tenets of meaningful participation and useful learning. I look forward to engaging with you further on this subject and having you help us transform our practice as university educators into praxis.

I was never stressed out about learning details (something all too prevalent in many classes) and this allowed me to really enjoy and ultimately learn much more than expected about broad concepts/issues/practice, etc.… It has really empowered me beyond what I had imagined.

-Student evaluation

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