SPN 362: Spanish American Cultural History II
The original assignment given to students required them to hand in a paragraph every week regarding the reading assignment. This was designed to cumulatively increase their critical thinking skills, in that they would move from paraphrasing the argument in the text, to posing questions about the author’s context, to researching the social, historical, political context, to engaging with the broader socio-cultural themes at the end through a group presentation. Students received a rubric with guidelines for reading critically.

Through her work in the ACT project, Dr. Hegarty made several changes to the assignment that she will implement the next time she teaches the course. Rather than having students write weekly paragraphs and give final presentations, students will be responsible for leading the class once during the semester. Dr. Hegarty will first model what she expects of them and will also give them guidelines for how to ask good discussion questions, how to contextualize, etc. Dr. Hegarty will be there to guide the discussion as well, but the idea would be that she and the student would be co-teaching. "I think this is better than assigning group presentations because it necessitates dialogue with me and with their fellow students, rather than being just a presentation of facts and information."

As the result of the ACT project, Dr. Hegarty also altered her expectations for students' critical thinking skills at the 300-level: instead of focusing on contextualizing the author, Dr. Hegarty intends to focus on teaching students to contextualize information--historically, politically and socially. “I think this is more relevant given the variety of media we look at in a cultural history class.” As well, students enjoyed practicing this skill, even though it was difficult for them, but they were genuinely thankful at the end that they had “learned something.”