Welcome back, explorers, to our BCcampus UDL Explorer Challenge Series! Our next challenge is to recruit interest from students to enhance engagement in your classes.
Why Is This Important for UDL?
When CAST (cast.org) talks about recruiting interest, it mentions the importance of connecting the course concepts to our students’ lives. You may hear students say, “So what? Why do I need to know this? When will I use this?” It’s important to try and make information relevant. When students can make a personal connection to a topic, it consolidates the learning.
Our Challenge for You
To complete this challenge, we are asking you to look at the content you teach and create or add one more opportunity for students to bring in their lived experience.
You will find instructions, examples, and helpful resources for how to submit below. We are excited to see what you come with! Happy exploring!
Examples
Here are some examples of activities that recruit interest.
“I ask my students to recall a past dental experience and share ideas on how they can use that experience to help their own patients in practice. This personal connection to the content is powerful in helping them with empathy in their role as a certified dental assistant.”
-Heidi
“When I teach negotiation strategies, I give my students an assignment to provide an example of when they were successful in a negotiation with friends or family. This is a great opportunity for them to bring in their lived experience and connect it to the topic.”
-Venecia
Explore
- UDL Principle: Learn more about the UDL principle for recruiting interest.
- Read: Ways to Make Lessons ‘Relevant’ to Students’ Lives.
- This article highlights how making classroom lessons relevant to students’ lives is the best way to encourage intrinsic motivation to learn.
- Watch: Emotional Engagement in Learning.
- This TEDx Talk focuses on the profound importance of emotional connection in learning and content-retention/mastery.
In my asynchronous courses, I typically start each week (or topic) with a CONNECT activity. For example:
Guided meditation: Take 2 minutes to clear your mind and transition from your ‘everyday’ to this week’s session
Watch: Depression, the secret we share. | Andrew Solomon [26:03 min]
Make connections
How do the ideas in this video connect to other materials (articles, books, videos, etc) in this course? In other courses you’ve taken?
How do the ideas in this video relate to your own life, ideas and experiences?
How do the ideas in this video relate to the larger world – past, present and future?
Share your thoughts with the larger group
Thank you for sharing, we like that you call this a CONNECT activity! Your example really does allow space for students to share as much or as little of their lived experience as they want and also makes connections with the course material at the same time.
My class is Business Communication, so almost every aspect of it can also be applied to any day-to-day communication.
For example, when discussing persuasive communication message strategies, I ask the students to think of situations where they or their family members may have convinced them of something like which movie to see or which restaurant to go to. They analyze what the other person said or did to convince them, then I connect that to the rhetorical triangle (pathos, ethos, logos), and apply it to business communication. Lots of lightbulbs go off during that session as students make the connection between their day-to-day communication patterns and how they can also be applied to business communication!
Thanks for sharing. We really like how you chose an activity that taps into the students’ day-to-day life. This is so powerful when it comes connection the learner to the content.
In language classes, especially at the beginner level, students talk and write about their life. Another way to have them share their lived experience could be a presentation (oral,visual, etc) about a specific aspect of their life.
Thanks for sharing! Asking students to talk and write about their life is definitely a great way to recruit interest. In a language class, the focus shifts to sharing about themselves and not so much the language skill.
In my organic chemistry course, my non-chemistry majors question why they need to learn organic chemistry. One of the running themes and activities through the course is a discussion board. The discussion board offers 2-4 different infographics/images/videos per week that feature every day items or processes that are based on organic chemistry. Students are asked to relate the post to their personal experiences or prior knowledge. They are always shocked to see the chemistry behind performance enhancing drugs, coffee, asparagus, wet dog smell, plastics, and so many more topics. This helps take a dry subject of learning this new scientific language and link it to their personal everyday life. This website has been super helpful in making these links: https://www.compoundchem.com/
I love that idea! Also, that is a fantastic website. Thank you for sharing!
Thank you for sharing. We like the creative ways in which you are making organic chemistry personal. The infographics, videos and images also provide options for students to see content and then recognize it in their everyday lives.
I teach primarily in the social sciences, so it is quite easy to recruit interest by linking the lesson/content to student experiences.
When teaching concepts and theories, I try to provide a variety of examples so that most students can “see” themselves in the concept, or identify how their experiences align with the theory. In my Women & Gender Studies class, I have students complete a number of reflective portfolio activities where they are asked to apply course concepts to their personal experiences. I find that these reflections are particularly transformative and really helps “buy in”. In this class, I also create an open, seminar-like environment where students are free to share personal stories and experiences (to their level of comfort). I think it helps students to hear about their classmates’ experiences as a way of personalizing the content.
Thanks for sharing. We love reflective activities as they allow students to pause, make connections and think about their own learning.
I always try to conect things like bias, evaluationing information and ethical behaviour with instances outside of school. I feel like students get too caught up in this is just school thing and doesn’t count in the real world. So I give them senarios that happen in the real world.
For example, your boss has asked you to look into a new industry they might want to expand into. This a a multi- million dollar project and a possible promotion for you. Where do you find that information? How do you know you have the best information out there?
Thank you for sharing. We completely agree. When the examples are only academic, learners can sometimes think they are not relevant or they have no place in “real life”. Providing examples they might encounter in the future is really important.
Applying the discovery learning approach, I like using a treasure hunt activity during my classes. In a typical way of activities, an instructor asks or gives students questions or tasks what they do. Discovery learning reverses asking students what questions they’d like to ask to find these results. This activity provides a lot of curiosity and participation among students.
To further read what discovery learning is:
1. https://inventionlandeducation.com/discovery-learning-method
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305174476_Discovery_Learning_in_the_Classroom
Thank you for sharing! What a great way to motivate students to learn. Now we are keen to see how we can include this approach in our practice!
I teach in a bit of a flipped/team-based learning classroom. Students are required to watch a 15-minute mini-lecture before class. In class they get into groups to solve some typical textbook like questions to get their mind refreshed about the topic and then we go over a case study related to the topic or a scientific publication. Many of the case studies are set in a conversational tone so it is a bit more like a real-life situation. This doesn’t provide an exact personal experience but does make things more relatable.
Thank you for sharing. The flipped classroom model is one of our favourite ways to have students engage with the content. We also like that the case studies are conversational which makes it much easier for comprehension.
I teach a professional communications class to Occupational and Physical Therapy Assistant students and in the majority of lectures, I am relating communication theories to the lived experiences of my students.
For example, this week we discussed how to have difficult conversations with another person using the DESC response (a tool used to decrease defensiveness in an assertive manner). After reviewing the model and demonstrating the model using role play, we talked about the application of this model to real world examples. I find that it helps to break the ice by discussing an example from my own work as an Occupational Therapist. This helps students to see how the communication theory connects to clinical practice. Then I facilitate a discussion amongst the class to give students an opportunity to share examples from their own lives. For sensitive topics where students may prefer anonymity, I use Mentimeter (word cloud or open ended slides) to allow students to share their responses in written form in a de-identified manner.
Thanks for sharing. We really love that you provide real life examples from your practice. We find that when we give students examples from our lives, even the experiences that show our vulnerability, learners really feel comfortable sharing their own experiences, too.
As part of the assignments of the course, students are asked to write a structured reflective journal on any learning situation occurring during their clinical experience. The main part of the journal is analysis where they are asked to connect the current experience to their previous experiences.
Thanks for sharing! Using reflective journals is a great way to get students to connect their learning with real experiences. It is also low stakes and allows them freedom to go wherever their thoughts take them.