If you haven’t yet read Part 1, please do so now.
In this post, I aim to examine how the History course professor, my colleague, and now very good friend, Dr. Alexandra Guerson, and I collaborated more specifically, with regard to how our assignments connect to each other, as well as the affordances we have from working together than alone. Alexandra also discusses this here about her assignments.
Connecting explicitly to the content course
Another consideration in building my assignment was how to connect this to the History course beyond simply scaffolding how to read texts for the most meaning. We do not use the same texts as the History course anymore because we found that the types of sources used there were not wholly appropriate for language learning purposes (some are very long; others are written very long ago, etc.) and we did not want to encroach much into History content as the place to discuss historical concepts with most accuracy is inside the History course itself with its instructors.
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Part 1: Setting up assignments
On several occasions on this blog, I’ve been discussing the nature, execution, and impact of collaboration between people in the ELT environment. In the next three posts (Parts A, B, C), I’ll be focusing on the benefits and results of an ongoing collaboration of assignments between two courses in my program at the University of Toronto that all my EAP students take:
| Description | Course 1 | Course 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Course | IFP100Y1Y – Themes in World History | IFP020Y1Y – Critical Reading & Writing |
| Description | a first-year credit course | a non-credit EAP course |
| Curriculum designer | Dr. Alexandra Guerson | moi |
In a true sense of collaboration, Alexandra and I will both be writing three linked posts on the different aspects of this collaboration: foundational, collaborative, and results. Aside from having worked together over the last seven years, this series derives from a talk we gave at BALEAP last April entitled “Interactivity between a first-year content course and EAP course assignment for skill transferability“. In today’s post, we situate the collaboration in terms of the foundational aspects of our program and how our two courses align with each other, with an example assignment in my course that scaffolds skills in hers. You can skip over to her post here if you like.
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Cross-disciplinary collaboration, pt. 3
If you haven’t read Part 1 (setting up assignments together) or Part 2 (explicit connections between disciplines), please do so now.
In this last post of the series, I will discuss the results of this collaboration of assignments with our first-year History professor. In particular, I will address the following:
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