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Residential College faculty member Darcy Brandel discusses her use of the social annotation tool Hypothesis to build community, foster authentic student engagement, and create collaborative and brave dialogue that goes beyond the classroom.
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced Residential College faculty member Darcy Brandel to teach her discussion-based First Year Writing Seminar fully online, she knew she needed something to help facilitate her students’ engagement with the difficult critical theory in the course. She turned to Hypothesis, a social annotation tool that allowed the class to consider and reflect upon their readings for the course collaboratively, in advance of their group discussion sessions. Explore the resources below to learn more about how the tool proved so successful at building community and deepening student engagement that she continues to utilize it since her return to in-person teaching.
A primary learning objective of the course is to cultivate practices of inquiry and empathy that engage rigorously with a range of perspectives and work toward the creation of complex, analytic, well-supported arguments that matter in the world. Because students took up their exploration of the course material collaboratively through social annotation, we were able to share the vulnerability and risk involved in grappling with difficult texts, a process that often occurs in initial isolation. The diverse ways we read and questioned differently, along with the range of strategies we utilized as we navigated challenging philosophical material, became visible to all of us, like a communally designed toolkit we were able to draw on throughout the course.
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