A close look at four student prompts and examples from each—the Travel Account Essay, Voices of the Street Essay, Analyzing Street Photographs, and Teaching Unit—indicated students had more positive than negative results in this course. The first paper, the Travel Account Essay, required students to use a primary document, an attempt to highlight the problems of cross-disciplinary work. It was not as successful as I hoped, but still very constructive. The Voices of the Street Essay was a pleasant surprise as students came up with very creative responses to a tough research question dealing with daily life in the past. Analyzing Street Photography required students to do comparative analysis, one of the main goals of the course. I thought their work was well done.
The cumulative unit required the students to create a teaching unit based on “The Global City.” I made three revisions to the prompt after the semester started, and I believe those changes added to the success of the student work. Instead of creating a final paper based on semester readings, the students had to create a teaching unit that would be applicable to their specific discipline. It required students to review the semester's intellectual work and transpose that into materials that freshmen and sophomores could access.
Student evaluations also added to my knowledge about the impact of the course. I created an evaluation form that asked questions specific to the course units, and I believe that--including paraphrased student comments from those evaluations--provides a good balance to my observations.
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