West Chester University, Challenge Based Learning and Antiracism

 

I am one of four professors that team teach a first year experience course at West Chester University of Pennsylvania (wcupa.edu). The class is a 4 credit offering for our education majors. It's a big class with approximately 150 freshman enrolled every Fall semester. An important focus of the class is anti-racism, and more specifically, how to be an antiracist teacher. One of the two assigned books for the FYE 100 course is Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (https://www.ibramxkendi.com/stampedbook). 

After reading the book in class last Fall we embarked on a Challenge Based Learning project. The class to Challenge Based Learning (CBL), and walked the class though the Taking Action on Racial Equity and Justice Learning Challenge Series—Discussion Guide and Workbook. https://education-static.apple.com/cfc/conversations-discussion-guide.pdf

 

To introduce CBL and the workbook we used of an online collaboration tool called Mural (screenshot below). Trying to wrangle such a large group of students was a big task, but we pulled it off. The class was split into groups of 3-5 students, and they worked through big ideas and guiding questions.

 

In subsequent weeks we took the class to the WCU library to learn about ways to find answers and conduct research using the library resources.

The culminating project was a poster. The student groups used iPads and Keynote to create their posters. We printed them on super sized paper and shared them at a poster session at the end of the semester. Think professional conference style poster session. Even of university president showed up to the poster session and heard first hand from our teacher candidates about their big ideas for being anti-racist. 

Here are two examples of completed posters.  

This Fall we will be doing a similar CBL project, but focusing on community impact. 

https://education-static.apple.com/cfc/community-discussion-guide.pdf

A big thank you to the Apple Education team for creating these awesome workbooks.