Author: Stephen Patchin

A signature component of Michigan Tech’s new Essential Education Program will be the Essential Education Experience. These experiences are meant to help prepare our students for an ever-changing, dynamic, and diverse world. This active, hands-on experience is expected to expand interaction with the greater society (beyond self) and allow for connections among general education courses.

Civic Engagement is defined as experiences where students identify issues of public concern, seeking to understand patterns, outcomes of actions, and/or complexity. There experiences will increase their social awareness, global understandings, or cultural competencies through experiential learning. The first RFP’s have been awarded to develop these new Essential Education Experience (E3) courses. They are listed with title and description, with links to broader descriptions in the Michigan Tech Essential Education Blog. The Essential Education Leadership Team is grateful for our innovative academic teams in leading the development of these signature courses.

“Reading the Forest” as an Essential Education Experience Course by Tara Bal (CFRES)

Reading the Forest is an international ecologically-focused travel course emphasizing observational learning.  Students study forest ecology topics and various natural disturbance and human-derived impacts that shape the forests around us. Connecting to the natural world and place-based learning influences the way we make observations and think deeper about how the past and current activities make the forested landscapes around us. To discern the story of a forested landscape, it is similar to learning forensics, clues we can use to “read” the landscape and recognize evidence.  Students will explore multiple forest types, museums, nature festivals, and reflect on cultural values of northern forests with guided writing. This course will be offered as a part of a faculty-led Sweden Study Abroad program. This will be an immersive program based in the Swedish forest, consisting of 3 classes taught by 3 faculty. Overall in the program, students will investigate environmental and social issues; study ecological thinking, environmental art, and community engagement, and learn from local/global eco-community projects. Through different lenses, each course will incorporate the theme of the interdependency between humans and the natural world, to address issues of sustainability, resilience, and community engagement, and to provide in-depth interdisciplinary field experience.

Exploring Language Acquisition and Language Teaching by Estela Mira Barreda (HU)

Exploring Language Acquisition and Language Teaching is a course designed to engage students in real world experiences of acquiring and teaching a second language. Throughout the course, students will learn about communicative approaches to language acquisition and teaching. This experiential course will provide novel pedagogical opportunities by emphasizing the application of their knowledge in real world classroom settings – learning, reflecting, and engaging through teaching. The core of the class focuses on the hands-on experience of guiding middle school students through the exploration of basic Spanish in a student-centered environment. Through this immersive teaching opportunity, MTU students will apply communicative approaches to facilitating the acquisition of a second language. Teaching in middle school will provide them with a real-world context to practice the language acquired in class by considering audience, context, and content. Importantly, applying their learning to teaching will also provide an experience that challenges the limits of turning theory into practice, which we will explore together through critical reflection activities. By applying the theoretical knowledge they gain about the communicative approach to teaching in a middle school classroom, students will be prompted to interrogate their assumptions, biases, and ideas about how to effectively teach a second language. 

Community and Social Problems Essential Education Experience by Susanna Peters (SS)

This course offers students the opportunity to take on a team project in partnership with a non-profit, civic or social change organization to comprehend and tackle a challenge that group is facing. Faculty will be the liaison with the organization to ensure there is a meaningful/impactful project for students. The experience is envisioned to be flexible enough to embrace work done by a broad range of NGOs and local or state organizations. Examples include: legal services for a state sponsored non-profit, development of educational materials focused on the elderly and other victims of predatory online/phone based scams, researching and drafting a plan to find affordable local housing for clients of a non-profit running domestic violence shelter, and grant writing and outreach for nature conservancies and land trusts, grant writing and community surveying for arts organizations, and assistance for local courts to communicate the availability of its online help site. Overall, the projects will change, but all will ensure students develop practical skills and community knowledge. In addition, the course will focus on understanding the mission, revenue generation, communication strategies, and service challenges facing these organizations through in-class speakers and on-site field trips.

History of Hockey Essential Education Experience by Mark Rouleau (SS) and Laura Rouleau (SS)

The History of Hockey Essential Education Experience course will cover US-Canada relations and their history through the lens of the sport of ice hockey. The course will be interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on teaching students how to integrate the analytical and methodological techniques of history, comparative politics, and international relations. Students will apply these techniques to develop the culminating assignment of the course through archival research, local community engagement, and case study research methods to produce a documentary or written report outlining their research findings. The course will be taught primarily in-person and on-campus but will have a one-week intensive study away component where students will visit historic sites and conduct archival research. Experiential learning activities will include visits to the local “birthplace of hockey” sites, the MTU archives, the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, and the competing “birthplace of hockey” sites in Montreal. The course will begin in-person in a traditional semester format and then progressively transition into an intensive study away to Canada during Thanksgiving Break or Spring Break. This study-away experience will be designed to leverage the pre-established motivation of students who would be more willing to learn essential education content that aligns with a topic they are already intellectually curious about.

Community Archaeology of Energy by Timothy Scarlett (SS)

This E3 course will build upon experience with students in the PUSH research project, who engage with planning for the adaptive reuse of abandoned mines in post-mining communities. Students in the course will work with municipal leaders or heritage organizations, helping residents studying the local development and evolution of energy infrastructure, in support of their community’s efforts to imagine more just, sustainable, and equitable possible futures through the energy transition. Working with local residents (initially from post-mining communities), students will use archaeological and historical methods to study the origins and evolution of energy infrastructure, marrying archival, historical, and oral-historical research with field surveys of material culture and landscape remains. They will map the differential legacies of costs and benefits of energy production, transmission, and consumption This course could be paired with an Enterprise Team or a Senior Design project that also supports community collaboration, where those are more focused on designing future infrastructure. Students could enroll in both classes, allowing them to study the energy past and the energy future of a community. This class could be expanded to consider other types of planning needs for communities considering how post-industrial sites or landscapes (brownfields) can be repurposed to provide energy services as part of the energy transition. 

Guided Learning for Digital Newcomers by Kay Tislar (CLS) and Charles Wallace (CS)

Since 2011, the Breaking Digital Barriers group has offered one-on-one tutoring in digital

competencies to our local community, through the BASIC (Building Adult Skills in Computing)

program.  They have learned that an effective learning program for digital competencies cannot simply focus on rote, step-by-step instruction. Interface designs change; operating systems are updated and upgraded; apps and services come and go. Accordingly, this program seeks a deeper type of learning for our digital newcomers. The BASIC program focuses on the higher order skills that are essential for keeping up with the rapid pace of technological change and transferring knowledge from task to task or system to system. This experiential learning course will raise student awareness of the challenges facing digital newcomers, and it will empower them to assist newcomers through the BASIC program. The course will include a discussion-based lecture section, covering topics in gerontechnology and learning theory, and a practicum section, where students will work with digital newcomers in the local community, using the BASIC process to guide them to greater competence and confidence. The practicum section will include a reflection session, where students will share their tutoring experiences and use them to refine their own personal tutoring strategies. 

Public Policy Lab at Michigan Tech by Adam Wellstead (SS)

Worldwide, there has been the proliferation of policy innovation labs (PILs), which serve as an organizational setting where searches for policy solutions are developed within scientific laboratory‐like structures. PILs provide physical spaces for creative interaction and knowledge exchange to improve public services through innovative tools and design solutions to policy issues. Central to PILs is stakeholder engagement in the co-design or co-production of policies. An increasing number of PLIs are housed in non-profit organizations and universities. The “Public Policy Lab at Michigan Tech” Essential Education Experience course will be a “learning lab” that involves high student and stakeholder engagement. The “Public Policy Lab at Michigan Tech” course will promote immersive project-based and experiential learning. In doing so, it will  address problem-solving by relying on design-thinking methods; applying experimental approaches and scientific methodologies (quantitative and qualitative) to test and measure the effectiveness of public policies and programs; and adopting a user-centered approach that recognizes the expertise of stakeholders, incorporates key actors, and encourages target populations to participate in processes. The class will function as a PIL addressing a tangible policy issue. Over its duration, the instructor will take on the role of lab director and the students as lab team members. 

The Documentary Experience by Erin Smith (HU)

This essential experience course will provide students with the opportunity to learn about and experience the complexities of telling “true” stories through a combination of study, practice, critical reflection, and participation in the annual 41 North Film Festival (41northfilmfest.org). Over the past nine years, the festival has brought over 200 contemporary films (primarily documentary) to Michigan Tech, as well as notable guests. Schools and departments that have participated over the years include biology, chemistry, chemical engineering, the college of computing, FRES, social sciences, the health research institute, mathematics, geology, humanities, physics, visual and performing arts, and the Great Lakes Research Center and the Health Research Institute, as well as Michigan Tech staff and others working with Michigan Tech in various capacities from industry to public agencies.

Students will spend the first nine weeks learning about approaches to documentary storytelling, while creating micro-documentary projects that explore communities and places on campus that are both familiar and unfamiliar. The work in the first half the semester will be designed to prepare them for a fuller, more engaged experience of the film festival in week 10, where they will be required to attend much of the festival, as well as participate in special sessions with invited film makers and guests. In the final weeks of the semester, we will tackle some of the most complex questions that surround documentary work, especially in the age of generative AI. Students will reflect on the festival experience and produce a final video essay or podcast that centers on questions of what it means to represent something “truthfully.”

An updated RFP to develop Essential Education Experience courses will be released later this summer. Any questions regarding the process and opportunities, please contact Steve Patchin, Project Manager for Essential Education Implementation at shpatchi@mtu.edu.