At Pratt I have been an active participant in the development and assessment of curriculum at a variety of levels. Below I outline most of this work.
Creating New Teaching Tools:
Thanks to Pratt’s support of Graduate Research Assistants, I have been able to work collaboratively with three Pratt graduate students to produce teaching tools that I both use in my own classroom and make available via the web for anyone to utilize. You can find these three projects here:
Development of New Courses:
Since joining the Pratt faculty in 2007, I have designed eight new courses in response to student interest and general curricular need. These courses, which cover a great variety of evolutionary and ecological content, address student needs from the introductory to advanced levels. I am proud of the many connections that my courses are designed to make between scientific ideas and concepts and the creative and scholarly work our students do in their majors. I am constantly revising my course curriculum in response to student work in class and on assignments and tests, so all of my courses have changed significantly over the years. I also make extensive use of course evaluations and other forms of student feedback to refine my courses.
Membership in Curriculum Committees:
I was the founder of our department’s current Curriculum Review Committee (CRC), coordinator of this important emerging body before becoming its first formal chairperson. As the first leader of our CRC I oversaw the transition to a new and more meaningful course numbering system and laid the procedural groundwork for a formal process to review proposed new courses. I have also reviewed many course proposals, providing feedback to faculty on how to make their course syllabi both compliant with institutional standards and valuable to their end-users, the students. Beyond our departmental CRC, I have also served on the CRC for the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
General Education and Accreditation:
In the end, curriculum should serve the higher goals that an institution sets for educating its students. As a member of Pratt Institute’s Department of Mathematics and Science in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, that means providing a significant portion of our student’s general education. As a member of our school’s General Education Committee, I helped begin the conversation about how to set overall goals for our general education curriculum and assess how well we have met those goals. I also became more familiar with the accreditation process vis-a-vis curriculum through my work as co-chair of our 2009-2010 Middle States Coordinating Committee.