Ever looked at the course catalog and wished you could just take a class focused on a fantasy book series, comic strip or card game? Even better, have you wished you could just make a class you’d love?
The Experimental College at Tufts is a unique opportunity where undergraduate students can be taught by ‘not-faculty.’ For most classes, these visiting lecturers are alumni, other members of the Tufts community or even people with specific niches or careers. However, a handful of classes, typically geared toward first-years, are designed and taught by upperclassmen at Tufts. For these peer leaders, the ExCollege classes are spaces of expression and learning.
ExCollege course topics are known for being interdisciplinary, distinctive and frequently the subject of the instructor’s passion project. For junior Nate Smith, his love for the “Lord of the Rings” franchise led to him selecting J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium for his course “The Lord of the Rings: History, Language, Culture, and Impact.”
Smith explained how, aside from being a popular novel among academics, what interests him the most is the aspect of mythical retelling the story builds on from the history of the world.
“‘Lord of the Rings’ is a later addition to [what is] basically a mythical retelling of the history of the world,” Smith said. “There’s Atlantis and a bunch of races, like elves, that make the history of the world before recorded civilization something interesting. Of course it’s a fantasy, but I still think it’s worth being taught.”
Peer leader courses help create unique spaces for first-years to socialize and adjust to Tufts. Smith explained that the seminars allow for a “low-pressure environment in which they can talk to peers and talk to an instructor who is really their peer.”
A perhaps subtler intention of peer leader courses is to ease first-years into academic skills they might not have mastered in high school and help them overcome certain academic fears.
“I think a lot of people really hate math, and I want to show people how fun it can be, senior Madison Verner said. “That’s a big reason why I wanted to teach an ExCollege class. I was specifically going to teach a math class no matter what.”
Verner’s ExCollege class focuses on the card game bridge as a way to learn about probability and statistics.
“[With] a lot of math, the issue people have is that they feel like this isn’t relatable, this isn’t real, this isn’t useful,” she said. “So I think making it useful will make it feel less intimidating, and then also I think doing it slowly helps.”
Academic reading and writing are often challenging for first-year students, as their first exposure to this type of writing often comes in the form of high-stakes, lengthy papers on complex topics. Junior Hannah Carter, who teaches “Thinking Like a Kid: Philosophy of Calvin and Hobbes,” relates this to her own experience.
“[When] I’d come into college, I’d only written two pages. That was the most I’d ever written in my life,” Carter said. “Coming into college, I was assigned a 15-page paper — I had no clue where to begin. [We wanted to] build those skills of how to write a little bit longer [of] a paper [and] how to start thinking about that, looking at it without just repeating yourself.”
Junior Gavin Federizo, Carter’s co-instructor, believes the ExCollege peer teacher carves out a great space to learn these skills in a collaborative environment.
“A lot of questions that students will ask [are], ‘Hey, how do I take notes? If I’m doing the reading, am I supposed to take annotations for every single line?’ And it’s a skill that they’re going to learn together because they’re studying and working together,” he said.
The duo’s course combines their expertise in child studies and philosophy to analyze related concepts via the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” introducing students to a variety of academic materials and subjects.
All ExCollege courses start at the same place: the initial application where students explain why they want to teach an ExCollege course and provide a basic syllabus. Discussions, interactions and academic freedom are common themes seen and encouraged in ExCollege courses. For instance, Federizo and Carter built their lesson plans to allow students to vote on topics.
“We have weeks on our schedule where I’ve put the topic up to a vote because philosophical discussion does not exactly need to have a ringleader,” Federizo said.
He explained that while he could assign readings and discussion prompts, the most effective engagement is often unplanned.
“[It] tends to be things that they’ve seen, whether it’s on social media or in their own books, that they want to talk about in a philosophical context,” Federizo noted.
Due to their passion for these classes, the hardest part for instructors tends to be not what to add, but what to exclude.
“[The ExCollege team] told me that I had too much material, so I had to basically make it so that there was more time to teach bridge,” Verner reflected. “The biggest thing is getting other people’s input of, ‘Hey, if you saw this material, would this be too much? Would this be too little?’ And I think that was really helpful because, obviously, I’m biased.”
The peer leaders have found their students to be incredibly engaged with the material. “[Talking to the students] is so much fun,” Smith said. “I love to present things to them. I love to hear what they talk about in the discussions, I love to listen to what they have to say in the ‘getting-to-know-you’ stuff, and I like to just blather on myself about the subject or just in general.”
In addition, engaging with peer leaders creates a different point of access to understand Tufts better. “Every year you get a syllabus … [with] all these resources, and your professors hand that to you, but they have never used these resources. Whereas we’re students, we can talk about our experiences with the StAAR Center or with the [Center for Awareness, Resources and Education] office and make them accessible,” Carter noted.
For anyone aspiring to teach an ExCollege class one day, our instructors have advice for you. “You need to enjoy the writing,” Smith said. “Writing out the questions that [the ExCollege team] asks you first, writing out the course overview [and] all of the essays. You should enjoy every step of it. You should be a little obsessed.”
Verner agreed that instructors need to be extremely engaged with the material. “You are going to be spending 100 hours making your course and then teaching the course and then editing it and creating homework and materials and presentations, and it’s a lot. I had a great time. I do it during my free time because that’s my fun thing. But if it isn’t your fun thing, you don’t get paid,” Verner said.
Federizo also pointed out that the application process should be authentic for an instructor, rather than simply appeasing the ExCollege team. “When you’re applying for an ExCollege course, all you give in is a syllabus and a description of your course, [and] a few pages about yourself. All three of those things should be a mirror into you as a student because as students we learn so much about how we want to be taught,” he said.
