Curriculum Mapping with Jennifer M. Harrison and Vickie Rey Williams

Most of the time here on Intentional Teaching, I focus on choices that individual instructors can make to enhance their courses and their teaching within those courses. However, years of consulting with faculty and other instructors has taught me that there are some teaching problems that can't be solved at the individual course level. Often we run into barriers to improvement that require us to move outside the course and consider systemic issues, campus resources, or curricular challenges.

It's that latter piece that we address in this week's episode of the Intentional Teaching podcast. And by "we", I mean Jennifer M. Harrison and Vickie Rey Williams, authors of the 2023 book A Guide to Curriculum Mapping: Creating a Collaborative, Transformative, and Learner-Centered Curriculum. Jennifer is the associate director for assessment at the Faculty Development Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), and Vickie is a senior lecturer in education at UMBC.

In their book and in our conversation, they share the ways that a curriculum map can take the learning design principles we often use at the course level and apply them to the design of an entire program. The goal is to make the program more learner-centered by mapping learning outcomes against both curricular and co-curricular learning opportunities. That, in turn, can help convince all kinds of stakeholders, from students to parents to politicians, of the value colleges and universities place on teaching and learning.

Perhaps my favorite part of the interview was hearing about ways to proactively include co-curricular learning in a major or other academic program. I've heard of individual courses making co-curricular connections (like the one I share about in this week's Patreon-only bonus clip), but not whole programs. Jennifer and Vickie discuss options for solving curricular problems by reaching out to campus partners who operate in the co-curricular space.

​You can listen to my interview with Jennifer M. Harrison and Vickie Rey Williams (or read the transcript) here, or just search for "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app.

Jamboard Update

In last week's newsletter, I asked readers to let me know about their favorite collaborative digital whiteboard tools since Google Jamboard, my current favorite, is going away later this year. I had three potential tools (FigJam, Lucidspark, and Miro) on my list to investigate since they have tools for importing materials from Jamboard. Y'all came through and gave me more tools to check out! Added to my list are tldraw, Freeform, and Canva. Here are some initial thoughts on these options:

• The tool tldraw is new to me, but I like what I'm seeing so far. It's interface is similar to Jamboard's, and it has sticky notes, one of my favorite Jamboard features. I set up a test page in tldraw that you're free to jump in and try out. I'm really curious how many concurrent users tldraw can support.
• Freeform showed up on my iPhone sometime back during an iOS update. It's a free tool from Apple for collaborative whiteboard activity, but it's only available on Apple devices, so that's a bit of a drawback for general education use.
• I use Canva regularly for podcast episode covers and other small graphic design projects, and I know some folks love it for designing presentation slides. I hadn't thought it for collaborations with students, however.

Readers also recommended I consider ways to use Google Slides as a Jamboard alternative, as well as Zoom's built-in whiteboard. I'll keep noodling around with these tools this summer and let you all know what I settle on.

Birdwatching and Well-Being

I've managed to follow a set of accounts on Bluesky (my Twitter replacement) so that about 25% of the posts I see there are about birds and birdwatching. I think this is a healthy way to use social media. And it resulted in me learning about a new study this week titled "Birdwatching Linked to Increased Psychological Well-Being on College Campuses" by M. Nils Peterson and colleagues, recently published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

The study involved over a hundred campus volunteers, mostly students, who were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The first group was asked to go birdwatching along a particular campus greenway for at least 30 minutes each week for five weeks. The second group was asked to go on a nature walk on that greenway (with no instructions about birding) for at least 30 minutes each week for five weeks. The third group was asked to go about their normal activities for five weeks. After the five-week period, participants were then assigned randomly to one of the two groups they hadn't experienced for another five-week period.

Participants were surveyed about their subjective well-being and psychological distress before the first five-week period, in between the two five-week periods, and at the end of the second five-week period. The results? The research suggests that "birdwatching positively impacts well-being on a college campus, and it does so both compared to a control receiving no treatment, and compared to a group receiving a more generic nature exposure treatment." This is consistent with past research on birdwatching, the researchers note, but that research wasn't conducted with college students.

I was pretty thrilled to see this study. I feel like birdwatching has been good for my well being, and I wonder if this study will motivate more colleges and universities to offer some kind of birdwatching program for their students. Does your campus have anything like that?

Thanks for reading!

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