(Thanks to Amanda Meeks at Northern Arizona University for sharing her insight into her development of an avatar-based method for promoting empathy in classrooms and for allowing their use in other learning spaces, including clinical settings.)

This session was part of an undergraduate, critical thinking and global perspectives course. The course is offered by various disciplines on campus. This instance focused on global challenges (The Seven Revolutions developed by csis.org). For the session the students applied two frameworks to data: authority is constructed and contextual and scholarship as conversation. Students learned about a data life cycle concept with emphasis on evaluation.

This lesson was developed for HIS484 (Topics in the History of Gender and
Sexuality/Pride in the time of HIV/AIDS) in the Spring of 2018. The students’ final assignment
culminated in a multimedia or digital research project on a topic of their choosing and heavily
relied on primary source and visual materials. This lesson focuses on how students, as content
curators and analysts, can engage in deeper analysis and contextualization of the sources they
present through their projects. Students collectively analyzed one example from a particular

As part of the research process, students need to learn how to organize and synthesize their sources. This short lecture, followed by a matrix outline given to every student, gives students the opportunity to focus their research question even more and to add their own ideas to the conversation of research within their chosen topic.

In this lesson students view a series of short videos about searching library resources, interspersed with exercises in which they conduct searches on their topics and reflect on what they find and on the research process. (The first two videos and accompanying activities are done outside of class; the third can be done in class.)

This activity/assignment was designed for a first year composition course in collaboration with an English/Writing instructor. It could be used in an information literacy credit course, First Year Experience course, or in another discipline-specific context. The purpose of the lesson is to lay the foundation for students to be able to read scholarly work more effectively and critically.

An introductory lesson to finding and understanding data in social sciences.

Students will participate in a game-based learning scenario based on Net Neutrality. Participants will each assume the role of an individual vested in the issue (Chairman of the FCC, President of the U.S., CEO of telecommunications company, or Supreme Court Justice). They will form alliances, discuss issues, formulate a strategy, and briefly share their viewpoint with the hope of winning the game. The learning experience is student lead.

Students will be exposed to various entry points of a sustainability topic in various formats. They will take notes as they experience those expressions on the Elements of Thought evidenced throughout. This in-class, two-part lesson includes an independent guided activity and a Think-Pair-Share activity for further reflection on source/ claimant evaluation.

Prior to this lesson, instructor will have chosen a topic relevant to their subject area or course content – Possible examples: food deserts, clean water in US, bee colony collapse.

In small groups students give a presentation examining how the popular media reports scientific findings.