After dedicating much of the last decade to championing and advancing obesity research and knowledge transfer efforts in Canada, Dr. Diane Finegood (Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology) returned to the classroom at SFU for the Winter 2010 semester to teach KIN 417 – Obesity, Adipocyte Function, and Weight Management, an innovative, fourth-year obesity course.
Planning and teaching KIN 417 was a team effort. Dr. Finegood, her research associate Carrie Matteson, and co-instructor Penny Deck chose to design creative, media-rich, writing-intensive learning activities rather than conventional assigned readings, lectures, and exams. Aided by staff from the Learning and Instructional Development Centre (LIDC), they designed assignments that invited students to confront their assumptions and preconceptions about obesity. For example, students explored what “healthy” means by blogging about images of healthy behaviour they found online or took in their community, and they deepened their understanding of obesity research by writing a wiki about themes and variables represented in the Foresight Obesity Systems Map.
Students spent five weeks analyzing and blogging about images of healthy behavior. In preparation for the activity, Finegood and Deck worked with LIDC staff to design sample posts, instructions and training activities to help students find images and use the SFU WordPress blog platform. Finegood and Deck offered weekly feedback to students individually and to the class as a whole to highlight themes and to encourage students to practice writing evidence-based arguments.
Over the five weeks, Finegood challenged participants to move beyond their initial preconceptions about what healthy living means:
Initially, I think they questioned the value of the exercise, until I pushed them to think outside their traditional box that healthy was just about being active and eating right. When I threatened to ban pictures of people being active, they had to explore the outer reaches of the obesity system map and start to think and write about the impact of policy or pregnancy and breast feeding. I think the process of coming up with something new each week got them thinking in new ways rather than just trying to acquire a bunch of information they are likely to forget after the course ended.
For many students, the posts prompted valuable, critical dialogue. Tommy Merth, a Master’s student in Kinesiology who participated in the course, found the exercised helped him and others to think more critically about arguments and evidence:
commenting was valuable as blog posts often raised questions which were usually addressed by several other students. This mix of learning through reading other blog posts and through research done while replying to posts with supporting evidence forced student to think critically about what they were reading and look at other evidence that may agree or disagree with the original post.
In recognition of the focus on writing KIN 417, Finegood is applying to make KIN 417 a W course, and she plans to teach the course again in Winter 2011. She offers the following advice to instructors interested in experimenting with image analysis activities and blogging in their courses:
This exercise worked well because the students had to repeat it 5 times over the course of 5 weeks and because they received feedback on each contribution. The keen students worked hard to insure they were coming up with something novel each week.
If you would like to learn more about KIN 417, please contact Diane Finegood.
If you would like help designing blog- and wiki-based learning activities for your course, please contact David Rubeli or Jason Toal at the Teaching and Learning Centre.
How are you challenging your students to address their preconceptions about the subjects you teach? How has writing and reading other students’ blogs enhanced your learning experience at SFU?