Education Commons^™

Is It Time To Teach Traditional Undergrads As Adult Learners?, Steve Holtrop, Eric Forseth

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Students vote with their tuition dollars, and over half may now be classified as adult learners. Focusing on the learner's needs and behaviors means integrating relevant life and work experiences into our courses and addressing all students' need for respect, practical applications, and varied learning tasks.

Augustine’S De Musica In The 21st Century Music Classroom, John Macinnis

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Augustine’s De musica is all that remains of his ambitious plan to write a cycle of works describing each of the liberal arts in terms of Christian faith and is actually unfinished; whereas the six books extant today primarily examine rhythm, Augustine intended to write about melody also. The sixth book of De musica was better known in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages than the first five, and it takes up philosophical questions of aesthetics related to the proportionate ordering discernable throughout creation. After a brief introduction summarizing De musica’s content and its importance in subsequent Christian writings, my …

Business To Academia: Taking Lean From Pella Corporation To Dordt College, Dale Zevenbergen

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Presentation from the Second Annual Siouxland Lean Consortium Conference held in Sioux City, Iowa, January 13, 2015,

Using Design Hierarchy In A Linear Circuits Class To Illustrate The Scientific Method As A Human Invention, Douglas Deboer

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There are various ways to classify academic studies. One might make a “two cultures” division, separating academic studies into the humanities and sciences. Or one might have three divisions: humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Or one might choose to classify academic studies along the lines of traditional academic disciplines such as theology, law, art, music, economics, social studies, languages, political studies, history, psychology, biology, physics, chemistry, math, etc. In our era of global commerce, where does engineering fit in these types of classification? What should engineers study? In a 2008 presidential debate, candidate Barack Obama said that, “Ensuring that …

Support And Ideas For Economic Education, Ed Starkenburg, Erica Vonk

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Presentation covers opportunities to engage K-12th grade students in hands-on financial and economic materials that meet Iowa's content requirements. Also introduces the Dordt College Center for Economic Education and the services available and free resources available to teachers.

Augustinian Approach To Holistic Christian Pedagogy, Adam Schultz, Neal Deroo

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Presenters explain how in their CORE philosophy class they seek to demonstrate that their students' real life-spiritual life distinction is symptomatic of a dualism endemic to contemporary Christianity (section 1), and that their reading of Augustine's Confessions can provide a unified and holistic corrective to it (section 2) and that doing so helps students see a more radical vision of Christian faithfulness, one that calls for a holistic, life-wide response to the work of Christ that will not allow for an easy distinction between ‘spiritual’ life and everyday life (section 3).

Arts Of War: Reconsidering Conflict Through Interdisciplinary Artistic Collaboration, John Macinnis

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CORE 160: Introduction to the Arts is required as part of the core curriculum at Dordt College and is team taught every semester by four professors who each address a different art form: Music, Theatre, Film, and Visual Art. Semesters are divided in half, and students select two art forms for special attention. Additionally, all students meet in two mass sections in which the team of professors address topics spanning all the arts. These mass sections are an opportunity to demonstrate for students that interdisciplinary collaboration around a given topic often produces remarkable insight.

Last year, in recognition of the …

New Leviathan: How I Implemented The Aas’S Periodicals Database In My Traditional American Literature Survey Class, And Lived To Tell The Tale, Joshua Matthews

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This past summer, our small college’s library purchased a permanent subscription to the American Antiquarian Society’s new Historical Periodicals Collection (series 1-5). In northwest Iowa, where there is no such database for hundreds of miles, this purchase is a research boon for local scholars. The catch, though? I needed to implement the database thoroughly in the college’s only early American literature class, a traditional survey spanning 1492 to 1865. Beyond all of the topics, authors, and agendas that could be covered—and the typical dilemma between coverage and depth in a survey class—now I needed to incorporate the teaching of periodical …

Learning Upper Level Molecular Biology Using The Yeast Two-Hybrid (Y2h) System, Brandon Wubben, Kim Buyert, Sam De Nooy, Nick Wilson, Tony N. Jelsma, Robbin Eppinga

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A challenge with upper level biology labs is that experiments cannot normally be done in a 3-hour window. It can also be a challenge to stay motivated when doing labs with predetermined outcomes. Third, a “one size fits all” laboratory can be boring for those of us with previous experience. Finally, having to share a small lab space with many classmates simultaneously makes working efficiently difficult. An unexpectedly large enrollment in our molecular biology lab course provided our professor with an opportunity to use a class project to address the above concerns. One of our professors has a collection of …

Defining The Phenomenon Of Teaching Christianly At A Christian College: A Study Conducted At Dordt College, Barb Hoekstra

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Despite the high value that Christian colleges place on teaching, there is scant literature on teaching christianly in higher education. Pedagogy that promotes Christian beliefs resides in the K-12 literature. Using the work of Van Brummelen (1988) and Van Dyk (2000) originally developed for teaching christianly at the K-12 level, a conceptual framework was developed. This study investigated what it means to teach christianly at a small Christian college. A qualitative, phenomenological approach was used to explore teachers’ perceptions and beliefs about teaching christianly in higher education. A criterion sampling strategy was used in selecting 10 participants who had the …

General Education: Why Do We Need It, And Where Did It Come From?, Calvin Jongsma

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General education is one of those things that everyone knows how to fix but no one is able to do anything about. Woodrow Wilson’s comment about changing the college curriculum, made while he was president of Princeton University, is particularly apt of general education: reforming it “is as difficult as moving a graveyard.” Committees can study the issue for ages and make numerous erudite reports, but when all is said and done, more is said than done. Many reforms meet the standard voiced by Groucho Marx: “there is less here than meets the eye.” It is far easier to resist …