Filling in the forgotten courses

Most undergraduates have no say in their course syllabi. But last fall, Catharine Bellinger ’12 planned the syllabus and found a professor for AMS ST08: Special Topics in Public Education Reform.

AMS ST08, which is taught by Leslie Gerwin, a Wilson School professor and the associate director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs, is the only student-initiated seminar offered this semester. One student-initiated seminar was offered in the fall semester, and none was offered last year, Deputy Dean of the College Peter Quimby said. Quimby, along with the Committee on the Course of Study, reviews and approves proposals for student-initiated seminars.

Bellinger, who is president of Students for Education Reform, said she decided to propose the course when she and other members of the group realized how few courses the University offered on contemporary education reform.

But initiating a course is no small task. Bellinger and other SFER members, including Rena Chen ’11 and Schuyler Softy ’11, spent two months planning the seminar before they submitted the proposal for approval in early December.

While at least 12 students must sign up for a student-initiated seminar before it is approved, Bellinger said she had already gathered signatures from 14 SFER members expressing interest in the course before she started working on the proposal and syllabus.

“We spammed just about every listserv we had access to, but the majority of students had prior involvement in SFER,” she said.

The students then had to find a professor willing to teach the course and had to obtain approval for the faculty appointment.

Bellinger said SFER members sent e-mails to at least 10 different professors, in four departments, without success. “Most professors declined because their teaching schedules were already full, but a few declined based on ideological reasons: They disagreed with our reform agenda,” she said.

Without a professor, the course seemed as if it would be postponed until the 2010-11 school year. But in November, Bellinger learned that Gerwin had experience in the field of education reform and decided to approach her about teaching the seminar.

Quimby said that securing a faculty member to teach a proposed course has been a recurring problem, adding that the low number of student-initiated seminars is not unusual.

“It’s difficult to pull one off,” he said. “Finding something that isn’t covered, and where we have faculty members who are interested in teaching it — there aren’t that many intersections where those things come together.”

Quimby noted that several courses at the University have started out as student-initiated seminars, and Gerwin will now teach AMS ST08 as a regular course.

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With only six weeks to design the course last winter, Gerwin said, “I don’t recall ever working so hard in such a concentrated fashion.”

While simultaneously teaching a course at a law school in New York, Gerwin, who had no prior experience teaching a student-initiated seminar, said she worked around the clock to bring the proposal to fruition.

“I gave up going to an international conference in December, and I actually put aside my research,” she said. “I was in the bowels of libraries looking through the education books."

Bellinger, who also designed her own independent study of education policy when she was a senior in high school, said it took another month to plan the syllabus after the course was approved.

The course is a collaborative effort between Gerwin and the students, who have been involved in determining the course’s direction, selecting readings, developing a list of guest speakers and even editing Gerwin’s syllabus.

“What I have to do is look at what their expectations are and see how I can add value to it,” Gerwin explained.

She added that the course has largely remained true to the original proposal.

“What might change is the approach,” Gerwin said. “Because not everybody is as grounded in the issues as the developers were, I have had requests to have a more historical context.”

“It's hard to know what to expect from a student-initiated seminar,” Bellinger said, citing the lack of sample reading lists and course reviews from previous students. “However, I can definitely say that planning and then taking the course has been a learning experience for us.”

Bellinger added that she and SFER are already in the process of planning another seminar on education journalism.

With the arduous application process involved, Quimby said that proposals for student-initiated seminars are rarely rejected.

“I don’t know that the requirements are any more burdensome than what a student invests in conceptualizing a piece of independent work or constructing a research project thoughtfully — but it’s the kind of work that students don’t normally do,” he explained.

He added that proposals that have been rejected are generally those where the University could not find an appropriate professor.

“In most cases, there is enough substance with the idea that, working together, we can figure out how to make it possible,” he said. “What wouldn’t work is something that fell under what we don’t teach at Princeton, such as agriculture and life sciences.” He cited Queer Theory and Graphic Design, which were initially rejected as student-initiated seminars, as courses that were eventually offered.

Gerwin noted that the course has come close to what she hoped for.

“I tend to set very high expectations and don’t expect to reach them initially, but it’s pretty close,” she said.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the seminar's title, and did not explicitly mention that other SFER members sent e-mails to professors during the course planning process.