Essential Elements

Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) at the University of Texas is the sole on-campus entity dedicated to showcasing the art of Africa and the African Diaspora at UT. As a preeminent cultural asset of Black Studies, it is a center for teaching, learning, and scholarship. As such, AGBS serves as a forum for the creative and critical expression of artists, curators, and historians. AGBS includes two principal galleries—Christian-Green Gallery and Idea Lab.

Please contact Joy Scanlon if you are interested in scheduling a tour of either of Christian-Green Gallery or Idea Lab. Information about AGBS’ current exhibitions can be found at galleriesatut.org/art.

Whether you would like to schedule an introductory class visit, design an in-depth class experience based on a particular exhibition, or if you have an uncommon and innovative idea for collaboration, the staff at the Blanton Museum of Art can work closely with you to build strong and creative connections between your curriculum and original works of art. Download this handout for ideas, examples, and information about Blanton tours. Please allow three weeks advance notice for guided visits, and two business days for self-guided visits. Museum admission is free for current UT students, faculty, and staff. Faculty members may schedule a class visit online.

View an overview of the Blanton’s digital resources for university audiences.

Contact: Rob Plowes

The Brackenridge Field Laboratory (BFL) is an 82-acre biological research site that is part of an almost 400-acre tract of land originally donated to the university in 1910 by George W. Brackenridge, a former University of Texas regent. BFL is noteworthy as an urban biodiversity hotspot within easy reach of main campus. Many high-profile research activities explore relationships between organisms and their environments. BFL is a favorite spot for students to acquire hands-on experiences in ecological and environmental classes, and several Freshman Research Initiatives conduct fieldwork at the site. BFL contains immense biodiversity in its many habitats which include a native bluestem prairie, old pasture land and quarries, Colorado River frontage, fern-studded streambanks, and juniper woodlands. This diversity has produced records of thousands of species including at least 163 species of birds, 20 mammals, 373 species of plants, 68 species of ants, 1200 species of moths and butterflies, and 200 species of native bees. In the 1980’s a mountain lion was even spotted at BFL. Additionally, several species new to science have been discovered here and were named from specimens first collected on the site.

Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

• Request materials, photographs, or information about the collections.

Contact: Kenny Befus, Curator of Gems and Minerals – Jackson School of Geosciences

The Hamman Gem and Mineral Gallery is a brand new resource on campus. Think of it as an art gallery, but one that displays the university’s finest mineral specimens and beautiful gemstones. Currently the gallery is open for visitors from 1 to 4 PM on week days, staffed by a cadre of undergraduate Geoscience majors. We can accommodate scheduled visits at other times as well. The gallery presents educational opportunities for a variety of topics, across many disciplines. Foremost opportunities include the exploration of beauty-color-light in the natural world, order and chemistry, and the ever-growing conflict between society’s need for mineral resources and our responsibility towards our planet and all of its inhabitants. Please contact Kenny Befus to schedule a tour!

Contact: Andrea Gustafson, Head of Instructional Services

The Harry Ransom Center (HRC) will work with you to create an instructional session that meets your goals for your students. Ransom Center educators can teach sessions introducing your students to online research and the role of archives or create a collaborative teaching session with primary sources linked to your syllabus. They can provide you with digital surrogates, design an asynchronous lesson, or teach collaboratively with you. Have questions? Send them an email. Want to request a class session? Complete this form.

The HRC also houses a massive online catalog of digitized material from the Ransom Center’s collections. The content represented here touches all of their major collecting areas and is an easy-to-navigate introduction to the center’s holdings.

Contact: Catherine Whited, Landmarks Education Coordinator

Established in 2008, Landmarks is the public art program of The University of Texas at Austin. Founding director Andrée Bober leads the development of the collection and oversees a vibrant range of programs that support scholarship and learning. Its collection of more than forty modern and contemporary works includes commissions from some of the most admired and promising artists of our time. Believing that art fosters personal growth and human connection, Landmarks strives to provide experiences for all people. By creating opportunities for meaningful engagement with public art, the program reflects the communities it serves and celebrates our differences. Landmarks inspires thought and growth by making great art free and accessible to all.

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum

Contact: Sheila Mehta, Education Specialist

• The LBJ Presidential Library is a center for intellectual activity and community leadership while meeting the challenges of a changing world. Through public programs and exhibitions, the Library provides meaningful context to the vast and sweeping legislation passed during the Johnson Administration and illustrates how those laws impact us today. Displays of historical documents, photographs, videos, and audio recordings increase public awareness of the American experience. Found only at the LBJ Library – hundreds of hours of secret telephone recordings of Johnson conducting the business of his presidency.

With the new digital Racial Geography Tour, take a self-guided exploration across the Forty Acres with African & African Diaspora Studies professor Edmund T. Gordon. Learn how racism, patriarchy, and the militarist nationalism of the New South are embodied in campus architecture and landscaping.

Only virtual tours are available at this time.

Contact: Tim Rogers, Director of Education and Engagement

Texas Performing Arts provides engagement programs that connect UT faculty, students, touring artists, and the greater Central Texas community through a number of collaborations to contextualize the performing arts experience. Events include masterclasses, artist-directed symposia, workshops, post-performance Q&A’s, lectures, brown bag lunches, youth performances, and other events to offer insight on many different levels into skill, technique, and the creative process.

Texas Science & Natural History Museum

Contact: Laura Naski Keffer, Senior Administrative Associate

• Learn more about tour options

UT Campus Telescopes and the Department of Astronomy’s Star Parties

Contact: Lara Eakins, Senior Program Coordinator

• Please contact Lara two weeks prior to a visit, if more than 15 people will be in attendance.

Department of Astronomy’s Star Parties

Visual Arts Center

Contact: Rachael Starbuck

• The Visual Arts Center (VAC) is a 13,000 square-foot gallery situated in the College of Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. Our mission is to provide a platform for artists, curators, and educators to experiment, test ideas, and take risks. Through our exhibitions and public programs, we aim to spark generative conversations about art and contemporary society. We believe art has the potential to unite, inform, and inspire us to take action toward creating a more just world. The VAC is always free and open to the public. You can find more information about the VAC’s exhibitions here.

Please bookmark the Information Literacy Guide, created specifically for Signature Course faculty.

There are three learning outcomes for this component of the Signature Courses:

• Students will be able to evaluate sources of information based on criteria such as creation process, authority, currency, relevance, purpose, and perspective.
• Students will be able to describe a research strategy that includes choosing an appropriate source of information, type of information, and keywords.
• Students will be able to describe the idea that sources of information exist in conversation with each other.

Request a class session (including online sessions) or tailored assignments.

Librarians in the Teaching and Learning Services Department are excited to help incorporate information literacy into your Signature Course. Use the link above to schedule online research skills sessions (synchronous or asynchronous), consult on assignment design, or discuss other ways to incorporate research skills into your class.

Students performed best when given clear written expectations and grading criteria well in advance of the presentation date. We also saw much stronger presentations for courses in which the instructor had set aside class time to teach basic presentation skills to students. We hope you will consider discussing not only what you want students to present but how they should present.

Many faculty members find it helpful for students to evaluate the oral presentations of their peers using a rubric. This helps students listen more closely to each speaker and gives them a better framework to plan their own presentations.

Q&A sessions following individual or group presentations require presenters to think on their feet and to demonstrate more advanced mastery of content. Encouraging or requiring non-presenting students to ask questions of the presenters can increase class participation and engagement with the topics. Q&A sessions pair effectively with use of peer evaluation rubrics.

Some instructors give brief, immediate feedback to presenters, typically highlighting one or two strengths of the presentation and one area for improvement. This can help push students to a higher level of professionalism as they know they will hear feedback in front of their classmates. This approach can also benefit students who have not yet presented by giving them a tangible sense of what is expected.

We see students perform best when given challenging, thoughtful assignments that require creativity and autonomy. The strongest presentations require students to analyze and synthesize information rather than simply summarize.

A few key elements make any writing assignment more likely to elicit good work.

Make Assignments in Writing

Any formal writing assignment should be accompanied by an assignment sheet. Verbal directions may make sense to you but are often hard for students to understand and remember. Creating the assignment sheet also gives you a chance to think through your goals for the assignment, and how you will grade it.

Make expectations and standards clear.

On your assignment sheet, include a description of the criteria you will use to evaluate the final paper. Give your students a sample of the kind of writing you want from them, and discuss it. Several samples, varying in quality, help students distinguish between excellent, poor, and mediocre levels of performance.

Be explicit about the intellectual work required.

Take the time to unpack your own understanding of the tasks you describe in your assignments, and think about where (or if) your students will have done that kind of work previously. When we ask students to “discuss,” “analyze,” “review,” or “research,” we expect them to demonstrate very specific kinds of thinking. But interpretations of these words vary from field to field, from instructor to instructor: what counts as “discussion” in one class may be “just summary” to another instructor.

Tell students about their audience.

Students often have trouble gauging the appropriate tone for different kinds of academic writing. They have no concrete understanding of the audience they are writing for, and assume the instructor, who will grade their papers, is the only reader they need to worry about. Unlike a typical audience, however, the instructor usually knows more about the topic than the student. Who would actually be informed by the student’s writing? Who has a stake in the issue?

Treat formal writing assignments as a process, and build their writing and re-writing into your course schedule. Here are two possible schedule for integrating writing projects: one for a small-section Signature Course (UGS 302), and one for a larger, lecture-format course (UGS 303).

UGS 302 Sample Schedule

Weeks 1-2

Assignments & Activities

Informal, in-class writing, and/or short (1-2 page) reflective or responsive assignments (reading responses, summaries, reactions to lectures, etc.).

Optional Activities

Students may be given an overview of all the writing projects for the semester.

Week 3

Assignments & Activities

First writing project: 3-5 pages, representing students’ first serious efforts at engaging with the main course concepts. 

Provide an assignment sheet with all necessary details, and introduce the criteria you will use to grade the project.

Optional Activities

Discuss the grading criteria in class, and examine model responses to the assignment.

Week 4

Assignments & Activities

Students turn in a proposal, outline, thesis statement or other “focusing” assignment for first writing project. 

Instructor provides brief directional feedback (cautions, suggestions, encouragement) and returns to students by the next class period.

Optional Activities

Spend five or ten minutes of class time pointing out common problems—either content-related, logical, or mechanical.

Week 5

Assignments & Activities

Students turn in draft of first assignment for instructor feedback. Students read one another’s papers and offer constructive criticism.

Week 6

Assignments & Activities

Instructor returns drafts, with comments, for revision.

Week 7

Assignments & Activities

Final drafts due; second writing project assigned. The second assignment might be longer, require more complex thinking, or cover multiple course concepts. It may ask students to incorporate ideas or sections from their first project.

Week 8

Assignments & Activities

“Focusing” assignment for second project due, if required. If used, instructor returns by the next class period.

Week 9

Assignments & Activities

Drafts of second assignment due. Instructor feedback and peer review as for project one. Drafts returned for revision within the week.

Week 10

Assignments & Activities

Final draft of second project due. Third project assigned (longer than the first or second, and requiring more synthesis, independent research, or analysis).

Week 11

Optional Activities

Discussion of or feedback on focusing assignment for third project, if used (you can have students work together on their thesis statements, for example).

Weeks 12-13

Optional Activities

If students are working independently, it is a good idea to schedule in some “checkpoints”— have them informally describe where they are in their research and writing, give them a chance to talk about problems or questions, and so on.

Week 14

Assignments & Activities

Drafts of final project due; peer review and instructor feedback provided. Drafts are returned for revision within the week.

Week 15

Assignments & Activities

Last-minute opportunities for asking questions, editing and proofreading.

Last Class Day

Assignments & Activities

Final projects due. Students discuss or write a short in-class reflection about the class and their writing projects.

UGS 303 Sample Schedule

In a large-section UGS 303, build short writing assignments into your everyday class structure, with one or two slightly longer projects.

Weekly Assignments

• Each Monday: Turn in your “I Still Don’t Know . . .” paragraph, in which you ask questions about parts of the reading you don’t understand.
• Each Wednesday: Spend last five minutes of class writing a three-sentence summary of the day’s lecture. Turn in before leaving.
• Each Friday: Submit three short-answer questions and answers, for possible inclusion in next week’s quiz.

Week 2

Assignments & Activities

Read rough drafts of your thesis-building paper in your discussion section.

Week 3

Assignments & Activities

Thesis-building essays due.

Week 14

Assignments & Activities

Post opening paragraph of your Disciplinary Dialogue on the class Blackboard forum, and comment on the work of at least three fellow students.

Week 15

Assignments & Activities

Disciplinary Dialogue due.

Looking at someone else’s work gives students a sharper eye for nuance, potential misreadings, and mechanical flaws. It also helps them see their own writing through others’ eyes. Students in Signature Courses must have an opportunity to read one another’s work and offer constructive criticism. Most first-year students won’t produce brilliant criticism, but they can learn a great deal from seeing how their peers approach the same writing problems they tackle.

Peer feedback can convince a student to take an instructor’s comments more seriously. If, for example, two or three peers agree with the instructor that an explanation is unclear, the student is less able to rationalize criticism as coming from “a really picky professor.”

Methods

The following have all been used successfully in Signature Courses.

• Two or more students exchange drafts, take the papers home, and write reviews—ideally in response to a set of questions you provide.
• Using an overhead projector, analyze an anonymous student paper as a class or have each student take a turn.
• Students respond substantively to one another’s work in online forums. Professor Jerry Bump’s students use Blackboard’s Discussion Board to share and comment on papers.

Consistent Evaluative Criteria

Whatever method of peer review you choose, ask students to think about the grading criteria as they respond to peers’ writing. Don’t have students evaluate papers with one set of criteria, while you use another set to grade them

FERPA Concerns

Peer review does not violate FERPA for students. UT’s Legal Affairs Office states that peer teaching is explicitly allowed under FERPA. The Supreme Court has held that even peer grading is allowed under FERPA protections.

Peer Review in Action

See how Pat Davis, Professor in the College of Pharmacy, uses peer review in his Signature Course.

Students’ writing improves dramatically when they revise in response to feedback from their instructor. In Signature Courses, students must revise at least one major project in response to feedback from the instructor or TA. Students in all Signature Courses should have a chance to revisit at least one written project after receiving feedback. Here are some ways to simplify the process.

Prioritize

Don’t comment on every problem or error: this overwhelms the student. Instead, pick two or three major issues to address, and give the student direct suggestions on what to do next to improve the draft. Professor John Bean suggests a hierarchy:

1. Does the draft follow the basic requirements of the assignment?
2. Does the thesis have substance? Freshmen especially are used to writing “all about” reports that summarize instead of analyzing.
3. What is the quality of the argument? Is it logical?
4. Does the large-scale organization make sense? Are there important questions left unaddressed, or do parts of the draft seem off-topic?
5. Are the paragraphs unified and coherent?
6. What patterns of error exist on the local level—word choice, grammar problems, inappropriate tone, etc.?

Make Expectations Clear

Always include specific grading criteria when you assign writing. Discuss the criteria before students begin the assignment, and refer back to these discussions when you need to point students in the right direction.

Style guidelines can also establish your expectations for student writing. 

Resources

• William Strunk’s original The Elements of Style (later revised by E.B. White)
• Texas A&M’s Writing Center offers twelve guidelines for grammar, punctuation, style, and usage
• The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s editing checklist covers most of the same common errors as the TAMU guide, but organized a little differently
• George Orwell’s six questions and six rules for writers

Minimize Error Marking

Do not edit or correct student error. Do address it in your grading criteria. “Minimal marking” (as described by Richard Haswell) will help students take responsibility for finding and correcting their own errors—something research has shown they are better at than you might suspect.

Discuss In Person

Face-to-face meetings to discuss drafts are more efficient than written feedback: you can tell right away if the student understands your comments.

Consolidate Your Efforts

If you find that many students make the same type of error, spend five minutes in class (or with a small group) discussing how to correct the problem.

Consult

The University Writing Center (UWC) provides one-on-one consultations and other services to support your students. 

Grades should reflect both the quality of students ideas and the mechanical competence of their writing. Model rubrics can help you formulate your grading criteria.

Develop Criteria

Well-thought-out grading criteria make assessing writing much easier. When students know the criteria ahead of time, they find it easier to write. We strongly encourage all Signature Course instructors to share their expectations for written work with students from the very beginning of the class.

Your goals for each assignment should guide you in developing grading criteria. Use language that reflects your strengths and the way you grade. If you don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of grammar errors, judge a paper’s “coherence and readability” rather than “number of sentence boundary errors.”

Grading criteria can be simple or complex. They can analyze discrete elements of performance, or describe general traits that define papers in a given grade range. Analytical and holistic elements can be combined in a single set of grading criteria. Use the arrangement that best fits the way you think as you are grading and makes the most sense in terms of the particular assignment you are creating.

Use Criteria

Share your criteria with students and use them at every stage of the writing process. When your students read and discuss one another’s work, the grading criteria should be kept in mind. When you assign final grades, it is helpful to students if you refer to specific categories in your grading criteria. For this reason, many instructors organize their criteria into grade sheets or rubrics.

Use a Checklist

Use criteria to draw up a short checklist that you can refer to when commenting on drafts of papers. This helps you and the student focus on revision that will improve the paper by more closely meeting the criteria.