{"id":931,"date":"2023-08-31T20:35:50","date_gmt":"2023-08-31T20:35:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/?p=931"},"modified":"2025-06-03T22:05:54","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T22:05:54","slug":"co-designing-a-course-with-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/2023\/08\/31\/co-designing-a-course-with-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Co-designing a Course with Students"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Losing \u2018control\u2019 of a class used to be a source of anxiety for me. (I even wrote about it in a post on this very site in 2021!) In my earliest days as a professor, I sought comfort in having every last detail of a course planned out. A fully-packed syllabus calendar, brimming with discussion topics, readings, and assignments filled me with something akin to professorial peace \u2014 a game plan for the semester, some pre-prepared guidance for us all to rely on. As I\u2019ve slowly embraced aspects of Open Pedagogy these past three or four years, I\u2019ve noticed a gradual but perceptible shift: now I actually prefer<\/em> courses with (carefully built-in) unknowns \u2014 and maybe even some blank spots. A spare syllabus might divide the semester in \u201csix units\u201d, with subjects and materials and even assessments \u201cTBA\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working together with students to co-create a course \u2014 in real time, as the semester unfolds in front of us \u2014 has been a satisfying component of my recent teaching. 2023 marks the third summer that I\u2019ve worked explicitly to develop a course around the Open Pedagogy principles of \u201cco-creating with students\u201d. In the summer of 2021, my \u201cMusic of Texas\u201d course asked students to collaboratively construct a website that cataloged their independent research and creative projects. (The course ran again as an Honors course in Spring 2022, with a new website for a new cohort of students.) In the summer of 2022, I worked on a version of a Connected Core course called \u201cRepresentations of the Criminal\u201d. Rather than build a collaborative portfolio of finished work on a website, I integrated students into an even more fundamental stage of the course design \u2014 they supplied many of the discussion topics and offered topical songs to be analyzed. Eventually we settled into a routine: \u201cMondays are for Prof. Davis to bring in ideas, Wednesdays are for students to bring in ideas.\u201d This division of labor proved to be stimulating and engaging, both for the students and for me as a professor. Refocusing the course on my students\u2019 interests required me to cede \u2018control\u2019 in ways that I hadn\u2019t considered before \u2014 I couldn’t lead a discussion on censorship, say, from a place of absolute authority when I didn’t even know in advance what songs the students would bring in!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This summer, I worked on a new version of a Connected Core course called \u201cAlgorithms and the Arts\u201d. Reflecting on my past courses, I thought consciously about all the advantages of co-creating with students \u2014 even in the fundamental design of the course. I spent the summer reading, researching, and learning about artificial intelligence, gathering ideas and tools for the course. But I refrained from creating a week-by-week breakdown or picking specific readings to assign on specific dates. Instead, I collected about 50 possible readings, put them in a folder called \u201cPossible Readings\u201d, and… stopped. Of course, I\u2019ll draw on this folder as needed, but the principles of co-creation mandated that I didn\u2019t \u2018overplan\u2019 the semester before meeting with the students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the first week of class, I introduced my class to the broad ideas of the course \u2014 \u201cWhat is an algorithm? What is artificial intelligence? What can AI do? What is its relationship to art and creativity?\u201d \u2014 and then I assigned a broadly speculative first discussion post: \u201cWhat are you curious about?\u201d I asked students to write two or three questions about the subject, anything<\/em> that sparked their interest. Reading through these questions together in class gave me tremendous insight into this particular group of students, and it inspired me to propose a loose structure for the rest of the semester: the student questions fell into four broad categories (technical concerns, artistic concerns, legal concerns, and ethical concerns). As we read through the questions together, we assigned a category to each. These four categories \u2014 inspired by the students\u2019 own curiosities \u2014 will now serve as framing devices to our classroom conversation for the rest of the semester. This kind of co-creation, where I step away from the lectern and offer to share even the fundamental design of the course with students, has led me to some exciting and unfamiliar places in the classroom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Losing \u2018control\u2019 of a class used to be a source of anxiety for me. (I even wrote about it in a post on …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":555,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"portfolio_post_id":0,"portfolio_citation":"","portfolio_annotation":"","openlab_post_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":932,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions\/932"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/open-pedagogy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}