Dr. Rose Molina, Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology and Director of the Medical Language Program at Harvard Medical School (HMS), is a scholar-activist with a passion for applying language and immigration status as critical lenses for understanding and eliminating inequities in maternal health. While HMS has a long history of medical language trainings, many were dependent on student leadership rather than supported by the administrative infrastructure required for sustainability and growth. In 2018, HMS established a formal Medical Language Program as part of the Office of Scholarly Engagement with the goal of building a multilingual physician workforce to advance health equity. The program includes Intermediate and Advanced Medical Spanish, Intermediate Medical Mandarin, and Intermediate Medical Portuguese taught by HMS faculty. Pilot courses in Intermediate Medical French and Beginner Medical American Sign Language courses were held in Fall 2022. The Program also runs an Intensive Medical Spanish course in September and October each year for students who have completed their clerkships. Course offerings are tailored each year to the language needs of incoming students.  

Musa Syeed, Briggs Copeland Lecturer on English, teaches screenwriting in the Creative Writing Program. Students are introduced to documentary and hybrid filmmaking in his course, Get Real: The Art of Community-Based Film. While learning about the technical and ethical considerations of creating a short narrative film or documentary, they also are challenged to effectively engage with their community in an intentional, responsible way that addresses issues of authorship and social impact. The Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship helps with curriculum design and also funding support (for example, providing gift cards for community participants or funding a TA).

Tsedal Neeley, Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research, first experimented with simulations in the classroom as a doctoral student. She crafted vignettes and scenarios on paper aimed at developing empathy, cross-cultural awareness, and behavioral change and presented them to students. As she continued her research on fostering collaboration between distributed team members from different cultures and with different language abilities, Neeley sought to develop a virtual teaching tool that could simulate these dynamics for students and provide an opportunity to gain insight into the cognitive and emotional challenges that arise for members and managers of global teams. She developed an online Global Collaboration Simulation, The Tip of the Iceberg, in which students are randomly assigned roles of native or non-native English speakers at a fictional organization. In the fifteen-minute simulation, the program constrains students’ actions to mimic communication patterns of real teams and provide firsthand experience of how communication challenges can interfere with work goals. The simulation has been used in courses at Harvard Business School and by thousands of people worldwide since its launch. 

Luke Miratrix, Associate Professor and Co-Faculty Director of the PhD in Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaches graduate level statistics and data science courses, including Introduction to Statistical Computing and Data Science in Education and Multilevel and Longitudinal Models. In these courses, Miratrix tasks students with creating individualized participation plans. Early in the semester, each student submits a short essay about their goals for how they intend to engage with the course. Halfway through the term, students write a brief reflection evaluating progress on their goals and making adjustments as desired. At the end of the semester, students complete a one- or two-paragraph self-assessment and assign themselves a participation grade. This grade is reviewed by the teaching team, potentially adjusted, and constitutes the bulk of the full participation grade for the course.  

Flavia Peréa, Lecturer in Sociology (FAS) and Director of the Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship, teaches Pursuing Truth and Justice: Principles and Methods of Equity Through Inquiry. This course aims to be “an example of what equity and inclusion can look like in the curriculum” both through the topics covered—for example, liberatory research methods, oppression, and structural injustice— and by supporting students “to be able to think about messy things, put out hard questions, and really wrangle with ‘what does it even mean for me as a student at Harvard to be doing this work’?”  

Aisha Yousafzai, Associate Professor of Global Health, launched the Early Childhood Development: Global Strategies for Implementation HarvardX course in 2021. This self-paced, asynchronous course is designed for practitioners of public health to learn about program and policy development and has enrolled over 31,000 students. Yousafzai has taught a range of course formats during her time at Harvard: residential, hybrid, online, and now an asynchronous HarvardX course. Each course type “requires its own thought process about the right pedagogy,” but Yousafzai believes that careful consideration of the various strategies available for each course and what works has enriched the learning environment across her courses. 

Janet Gyatso, Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies, teaches seminars on Buddhist and Tibetan intellectual history and literature at Harvard Divinity School and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Gyatso aims to “cultivate an experimental and convivial atmosphere in the classroom” that encourages students to draw connections between the past and present, interrogate a diverse set of primary sources, and create a community that allows students to feel comfortable taking intellectual risks and asking questions. This is particularly important in her field, which is often unfamiliar and engages with historical contexts that may seem distant from contemporary issues. Gyatso inspires her students to draw connections between the literature, philosophy, religion, and arts of the past and contemporary conversations on topics ranging from identity to gender to climate. By encouraging students to ask questions and find links between past and present, Gyatso is able to help them find an entryway into otherwise unfamiliar topics.

Kaighin McColl, Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and of Environmental Science and Engineering, is a hydrologist who extended his General Education course, Water and the Environment, beyond the science to include artistic representations of the impact that water has had on human life across time. After connecting with the Harvard Art Museums (HAM) at the Bok Center’s August 2019 Course Design Institute, McColl began collaborating with curators in 2020 to broaden the course, make it more engaging to a general audience, and challenge students to view the concepts learned in class in a different domain. He notes that he’s “a complete rookie when it comes to art,” but that HAM curators have been “very enthusiastic and helpful” figuring out ways to integrate the Museums’ collections into his course.

Matt Andrews, Edward S. Mason Senior Lecturer in International Development at Harvard Kennedy School, is the faculty director of the Building State Capability program in the Center for International Development at Harvard and trains students in Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) for solving complex policy and management problems alongside his co-instructor, Salimah Samji. PDIA is a step-by-step approach – developed over years of applied action research - that helps students break down a problem into its root causes, identify entry points, search for possible solutions, take action, reflect upon what has been learned, adapt, and then act again. It is “a dynamic process with tight feedback loops that allows students to build their own solution to a problem.”  This approach is most effective, Andrews believes, when “learning happens in groups.” 

Candace Bertotti, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, teaches The Arts of Communication, a class focusing on public speaking. To help students overcome their fear of speaking in front of others, Candace incorporates virtual reality (VR) into her classroom. Students put on VR goggles and are instantly transported to the front of a large virtual crowd awaiting their speech. Students experience a range of audiences and audience reactions. It's realistic—and feels safe.... Read more about Tapping the power of virtual reality to enhance public speaking

Salil Vadhan, Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics & Lead PI on Harvard’s Privacy Tools Project, teaches COMPSCI 120: Introduction to Algorithms and their Limitations, a new introductory course in theoretical computer science “aimed at giving students the power of using mathematical abstraction and rigorous proof to understand computation with confidence.” Many computer science students are “builders” who enjoy the creative aspect of the field, yet their mathematical backgrounds are often quite diverse; to some, mathematical theory is unfamiliar. In redesigning the undergraduate computer science curriculum, it was a priority to make this “new language, reasoning, and way of thinking” accessible to students early in the program.... Read more about Leveraging asymmetry in student's prior knowledge through peer learning exercises

Martin Bechthold, the Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology at the Harvard School of Design, and Mary Tolikas, Chief Innovation Officer at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Visiting Lecturer on Engineering Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, work together to teach Independent Engineering Design Project I & II, a small, seminar-size course for second-year students in the Master in Design Engineering program. Students spend the academic year designing prototype solutions to real-world problems about which they are passionate. Throughout the two semesters, students work towards understanding the complexity and dynamics underlying the problem and, by collaborating with relevant stakeholders, they explore visionary solutions and iterate on prototypes that would best address their challenge. Analyzing and quantifying potential impact is central to solution development. Early in the course, students are placed in self-selected “affinity groups,” based on shared interests. Students use these groups throughout the term to bounce ideas from and relay feedback. They also receive regular feedback from faculty advisors throughout each stage as they continue to evolve their project.

Taiwo Ehineni, Preceptor of African Languages, emphasizes the importance of “cultural frames” in language learning, or the ecologies in which the language is developed and used. “When students come to take my language class, it is an opportunity to introduce them to Nigeria.” One way this is accomplished is by using songs and music, which express culturally resonant ideas through creative uses of language. Ehineni teaches Yoruba as well as West African Pidgin. Class begins with students singing a song in Yoruba together while Ehineni plays the drums. Then they generate a vocabulary list based on the song they sang together, examine the grammatical use of the word in the lyrics, and look up the meaning.... Read more about Developing cultural and linguistic competencies through music

David Atherton, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, taught Creativity, a general education course which explores the nature of creativity and the role it plays in our lives, remotely in spring 2021. The course was originally designed before the COVID-19 pandemic and was proposed in response to undergraduate students’ desire for more creative expression, spaces for reflection, and connections to their personal lives in the classroom. “Once the pandemic hit, the goals felt more critical than ever.” Atherton and a team of teaching fellows collaborated with the Bok Center to design the course, grounding it around four core questions. Every week, students were given a creative assignment coupled with an analytic reflection about how their creation connected to the course readings. The course’s capstone project invited students to apply the course themes and create something that would impact someone in their lives, beyond the context of the course. Students included a final reflective essay that explained their project goals.