Inside class'room' learning

By Duke University

December 1^st, 2021

As the semester draws to a close and we approach the two-year mark of the COVID-19 pandemic, we take a close look at how learning and classroom environments adapted to the pandemic. Even as students returned this semester to in-person learning, many of the lessons from 18 months of remote learning continued to shape the classroom experience. Faculty and students together used the pandemic to reimagine the traditional classroom.

One thing didn’t change this year: Safety came first. Professors had to envision new learning methods, those that drew on the intimacies of a shared environment but allowed for interactions amid masking, distance and testing.

It’s a Bug's World: How to Communicate Research

Sarah Parsons, an entomologist and lecturing fellow of the Thompson Writing Program, leads a Writing 101 class, “It’s a Bug’s World,” on a field trip to forage for insects in an old Durham baseball field near Central Campus. Parsons, who is studying how urban environments affect insects, is gathering data about the variety of insects at the site to help inform the Duke Campus Farm, which will be taking over the property in the near future. Parsons’ class focuses on helping students dissect scientific journal articles about insects and communicating research to a variety of audiences, including scientific peers and policy makers.

Water Resource Engineering

The waterworks at the American Tobacco Complex have everything students in the Civil & Environmental Engineering 463L class need to study the dynamics of water flows through man-made systems including channels, reservoirs and pipes. Taught by Pratt School Professor Gabriel Katul and David Schaad, the class provides students hands-on instruction in groundwater hydrology, open channel water flow, probability and statistics in water resources and other issues in the study of water resources.

Sampling Rainforest ecology by Drone

Engineering students work in teams on a semester-long project together to identify hundreds of rainforest species, as part of the XPRIZE Rainforest competition, during their Ocean Engineering course, taught by Prof. Martin Brooke in the Foundry. Many of the teams are working with drones on a specific task: drop a sound recorder onto a tree branch, collect insects, waterproof the drone, etc. One team is working with a “mother drone” that will carry all the “baby drones”.

All the World's a Stage – and the Chapel Steps

Faulkner Fox, lecturing fellow of English, leads her class, “Introduction to Playwriting: Plays that Change the World,” on the Chapel steps during a beautiful Fall evening. Students performed a scene from a play that one of their classmates wrote.

Hands On The Brain

Leonard White, Associate Professor in Neurology, takes students inside the human brain in the lab portion of his class, NEUROSCI 380L: The Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain. Winner of several teaching awards, White holds the lab in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences’ “Cube,” which one student said is the only place “where I can hold a brain in my hands.”

"Golem" in The Bryan Center Shaefer Theater

Students run through a dress rehearsal for the Theatre Studies Mainstage production of "Golem" at Bryan Center Sheafer Theater. "Golem" was produced in accordance with the COVID compliance standards required by the Actors’ Equity Association and Duke University. Seating and stage were intimate, but both the audience and production team were masked up for the duration of the performance. The five actors were unmasked while on stage, but each was tested and confirmed negative prior to each performance.

BioMedical Engineering in Teer Building Wet Lab

Students quantify, purify and perform dialysis on protein samples during a BME wet lab course in the Teer Building, under the guidance of Senior Laboratory Administrator Maggie Gatongi.