Throughout my university career, I have heard myself saying several times “I wish I knew about that” so it was no surprise to me when I heard myself say this statement again in reference to Student Directed Seminars.
Like I did, you may be thinking what is that? The Student Directed Seminar program provides upper-year undergraduate students the opportunity to coordinate and lead a small 3-credit seminar on a topic not currently offered at UBC. Sounds interesting right?
On this week’s episode, Tristan and I explore the ins and outs of facilitating and even being a participant of a Student Directed Seminar. We speak with Gemma, a current SDS facilitator, to understand the inner workings of participating in a Student Directed Seminar. Gemma’s course is about a topic she’s been passionate about since she was a little girl: Disney films. In an academic context, Gemma created a course about how Disney films have influenced society in terms of gender, race, sexuality and much more. It’s really quite fascinating!
Before speaking with Gemma, I had the misconception that a SDS might be comparable to a “GPA booster” mostly because it deviates from the style of a traditional lecture or course. I also thought that because a student was facilitating it, who could also be a friend, I’ll be able to get easy marks. But after our podcast, it’s quite clear that participating in and facilitating a SDS requires strong skills in organization and active engagement throughout the course. Moreover, your papers and presentations are peer-graded by all your classmates.
We’ve all taken a course that requires some participation marks, maybe using passive interaction like an i-clicker, but a SDS is rather different to the point where every student doesn’t just have to participate but also facilitate at least one class during the semester. This includes gathering appropriate and engaging sources and articles on the chosen topic, creating engaging questions that spark discussion and facilitating the discussion with your peers. This brought up the question of what kind of skills a student considering partaking in a SDS should have before taking or facilitating a SDS. Skills like organization, time management, public speaking, writing and others are very important in being a participant and facilitator (we have student toolkits about acquiring these skills!). This is not to say that if you feel you are lacking a few that you should automatically discard the possibility of participating in a SDS.
Gemma’s advice to students who would like to try out a SDS course is to be open-minded about the active learning style and you should also be interested in the topic of the course so as to fully enjoy and learn from the discussions that occur.
What stuck out the most to me about partaking in or facilitating a SDS is the skills that it builds while you learn about a topic that isn’t traditionally offered by the university. As I mentioned before, there are a wealth of skills you can acquire just by participating which you can use in the future in your personal, academic and professional life.
With that in mind, we think it’s worth it to check out some more information on Student Directed Seminars because you never know, you could be the one to facilitate a really interesting course about zombies or something. For more info on SDS, check out the UBC Student Services web page.
Subscribe on iTunes to listen to previous podcasts.
