Content That Connects

Abstract

“What do you teach?” This is the second question people ask, immediately following “What do you do?” and hearing “I’m a professor”/“I’m a teacher”/“I teach at …” Interestingly, people rarely, if ever, ask “How do you teach?” As discussed in previous chapters, teaching has primarily been associated with the direct transmission of a particular content from teacher to student. Obviously, each educator hopes for students to retain certain content. As we have established in the previous section of this book, the more closely this content is aligned with the pedagogical approaches used—and connected with efforts toward solving relevant, complex problems—the more students will retain and have access to this knowledge beyond the final exam for the course. However, how can we determine which content is most important and relevant for a particular course? In any discipline, there are almost limitless possibilities in terms of choices and arrangement of texts.