At the heart of her course, Sociology of the Environment (SOC/ENSS 244), Amanda McMillan Lequieu, PhD, assigns students a multi-stage case study and guides them through a process that exposes them to the skills needed to analyze research and use that information to make a persuasive case for a potential policy measure.
“The project’s goal is to teach students how to evaluate existing research and produce a compelling, data-based policy argument,” said McMillan Lequieu, an environmental sociologist in the College of Arts and Sciences (CoAS).
To enable students to produce high-quality, data-based final papers, she breaks this quarter-long assignment into three skill-teaching stages. First, students are guided through library and online research to help generate a paper topic and formulate an outline. McMillan Lequieu then provides personalized feedback to each student, directing them toward additional empirical sources.
This prepares students for step two, which is a five-minute speed presentation before small groups of their peers. The final step is writing the final paper.
A novel teaching approach, these speed presentations were inspired by PechaKucha, a Japanese method of telling a story in 20 slides with the presenter taking 20 seconds to explain each slide. To help students prepare, McMillan Lequieu models such a presentation in class, guiding them from title slide all the way to theory and conclusion.
Students, divided into small groups during their own presentations, provide each other feedback that is later incorporated to revise final papers.
The speed presentations have been embraced by students, who indicated in course evaluations that they found them fun and engaging. One student, initially skeptical, said they “actually loved” them and found them “really interesting and useful.”
“Students find preparing and presenting these short talks transformative for their projects, as the processes of sifting through research and communicating evidence to their peers demands careful attention to data interpretation and argumentation,” McMillan Lequieu said. “The speed presentations have been so successful; I've integrated them into almost all of my other classes. Students have thrived in this case study project model.”
This process allows students to develop mastery by acquiring component skills of research and data analysis, practicing integration, and applying what they have learned.
In 2023, McMillan Lequieu was among four Drexel faculty recognized for implementing outstanding innovations in teaching and learning with the inaugural Provost Award for Pedagogical Innovation. “Pedagogical innovation refers to the development of new ways of teaching, delivering curricula, interdisciplinary methods, or interfacing with the community or the workforce to create and implement novel courses and learning experiences,” as articulated in the award description.
McMillan Lequieu is the recipient of two prior teaching awards: the Office of Faculty Advancement’s Rothwarf Award and the CoAS Teaching Excellence Award.
In addition to integrating speed presentations into her courses, McMillan Lequieu also brings in guest speakers who Zoom into the classroom from Canada to California. These speakers provide students with a unique opportunity to interact with researchers whose work they’re reading and have helped to facilitate lively in-class discussions.
In this interview, McMillan Lequieu shares insights about her novel approaches to teaching, why she advocates for brave spaces in the classroom, and a new course she developed that was adapted from a forthcoming book she authored “Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rustbelt.”
Is there one word that serves as the defining principle of your teaching philosophy?
Engagement. I thank my students at the end of each term for being engaged. It's important student engagement matches faculty engagement for students to learn. From the design of the course itself all the way to in-class activities, the discussions and assignments define what I think good pedagogy means in social sciences. It’s engagement on all of these different fronts.
Can you provide more detail about the speed presentations and why they are effective?
Students present their topic to each other in short, focused presentations that are five minutes long and have five slides. I break them into small groups based on commonalities in their subject area, which is great for so many reasons, but it gets them out of their in-class friend groups and provides fresh eyes and fresh ears for their ideas. It is a low stakes way for students to practice talking about a topic to people genuinely interested and to receive peer feedback. I provide a peer review rubric so students can practice the skill of constructively providing criticism.
How has Zoom served as a tool during the speed presentations?
While all of my classes are in-person, we use Zoom during the presentations to put students into breakout rooms. That has been fantastic, and the students really like it. They feel like they're in a small room together, having a nice conversation with a group of peers. This has resulted in a better social dynamic than if we were in one big classroom in small groups doing the same activity.
In addition to critical thinking, you also incorporate building communication skills into the course. Why?
Without excellent written and oral communication skills, students’ most important ideas will never see the light of day. In every class, my lectures are interspersed with multiple opportunities for students to develop communication skills — from low-stakes, in-class freewriting and discussion prompts to small group ‘teach-ins’ where students flip the classroom and teach their peers key concepts from our common texts, to scaffolded writing projects that incorporate peer-to-peer feedback. Research on best practices in teaching demonstrates these kinds of communication-forward practices are highly effective in building student confidence and reiterating new learning.
What type of feedback have you received?
Students have thrived and embraced the approach, and it has been well-received in my field beyond the scope of my classroom at Drexel. In 2020, University of California Press invited me to write and publish a pedagogically focused blog post about this on their public-facing website. Colleagues at other institutions, ranging from Cornell University to University of Taipei, have asked me to meet with them to workshop how to integrate a similar project model into their courses. My professional association, the American Sociological Association, invited me to write about this project in the Fall 2020 Issue of the Environmental Sociology Section Newsletter.
How have you used guest speakers to enhance your courses?
In my qualitative methods class, almost every week I bring in a scholar who's done research using interviews or ethnography. We will read a part of that research, discuss it and then interview the scholar via Zoom about what it’s like for them to do this research. That's just such a gift to students for their learning and engagement. I bring in people in person as well, but that we can get folks who are from California or New York City is a huge benefit for student learning and engagement. In my environmental sociology class, I've been able to work with an environmental sociologist in Canada on an interactive climate change simulation project and we Zoom into their classroom. In another example, I brought in a researcher who regularly attends the United Nations’ climate change meetings as an observer.
How have students benefited from bringing in those speakers?
Engaging with outside researchers, either by Zooming people in or bringing guest speakers into the classroom, has really encouraged conversation and inquiry in my students and increased student engagement. I have students interested in pursuing careers in environment, sustainability or social work, and when they hear from these guest speakers and researchers, they start to see what that work might look like. It's been a powerful experience for my students to practice some of those critical thinking and engagement skills we've been learning.
You advocate for brave spaces in your classroom. How does that differ from safe spaces?
The world is a complex, challenging place and because the world is the subject of study for social sciences, we need to come up with productive ways to engage in challenging conversations. This is why sociology and social sciences are so important. They teach us how to be good citizens and to think critically and carefully about very complicated social issues that have multiple sides. I want my students to treat our classroom as a brave space, a place to practice going just a step beyond a comfort zone. It's not an opposition to safety but coming from a place of discomfort. Discomfort is where we grow.
Tell me about the new course you developed for the next academic year.
The course is an example of how my teaching comes directly out of my research. My master’s is in rural sociology, and I will teach Drexel's first-ever course focused on rural places. Sociology of the Countryside (SOC339) will expose students to some of the challenges that rural areas face from post-industrialization such as poverty and unemployment.