Lisa Disch has received the second annual Metrick Family Creativity and Collaboration in Curriculum Award. This award goes to a faculty member who has developed or redeveloped an undergraduate course in the Department of Political Science that promotes respectful dialogue, collaboration, and encourages discussion of different perspectives on issues.
Here's what the committee had to say about Lisa's work:
We are pleased to announce that Lisa Disch is this year’s winner of the Metrick Family Creativity and Collaboration in Curriculum Award for her course POLSCI 406 “Democratic Theory.” This is a 75-person upper-level course which wrestles with the question of how democracy works. We were impressed by the many ways in which students are pushed to engage in respectful dialogue, collaboration, and discussion of different perspectives on key concepts in democratic theory and on a range of current issues. Rather than rely only on readings drawn from the western canon, the class uses an active learning approach, including an innovative jury exercise in which the classroom becomes a "laboratory for democratic experimentation.” The two exercises—one on the Great Lakes Water Compact decision to divert water to Waukesha, WI and one on the Flint water crisis—turns each student into a citizen juror in which they research and debate the democratic tensions and controversies at the heart of these conflicts.
Lisa Disch is a professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. She specializes in contemporary continental political thought, paying particular attention to feminist theory, political ecology, and theories of democracy in both the US and France.
