Abstract
Team teaching, reading, writing, discussions, and immersion community learning are explored. Every student in the Xavier University Honors Program is required to take Honors 300: Connections course. Honors 300 is taught with a different focus each semester, chosen by two co-instructors who have agreed on a topic of shared interest. Kathy Tehrani (BIO) and James Wood (PHIL) offered “Slow Food” in the Fall of 2019. This course is the single required component of the six-honors course curriculum for University Scholars students at Xavier University. We divided our topics into sustainable agriculture, philosophy and ethics of food and eating, and what to eat and why. The challenge was to include an interdisciplinary content that combined readings from a variety of academic fields. Our goal was that students observe and discuss food issues from these sources and be able to analyze both past historical perspectives and future solutions to present problems. On our Fall Break, students traveled to Detroit for a three-day volunteer immersion experience at Campus Kitchen where they better understood urban food issues by delving into the solutions developed by the residents. Immersion learning is an academically based community project experience that focuses on issues of social injustices and their systematic challenges. Team teaching is another unique experience both for the professors and the students. In this case one professor was from the Department of Philosophy and one from Department of Biology. Students could see on a weekly basis how colleagues from very different professional backgrounds approached the same material.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
Food Production and Sustainability
KEYWORDS
Classroom Model, Honors Class Model
