Evergreen Content: how colleges can make curriculum and assignments long lasting

My childhood friend burned her coursework at the end of each school year. 🔥

“Why keep it? I learned everything I needed to know,” she said, shrugging her shoulders as we watched her math notebook crinkled in flames.

She had a point. Most curriculum dies at the end of class. Yet learning is infinite.

As a college instructor, I began asking, “What if curriculum did last forever?” Like an evergreen tree that was never burned. Something that as you grew, the homework and curriculum could grow and stay with you as a tool.

This comes in two forms: Evergreen Resources and Evergreen Impact.

🌲 Students turn back to Evergreen Resources / Curriculum for consultation throughout their career. For example - if you are learning about user interviews, you can return to that curriculum every time you want to brush up your skills. When you become a manager, check out those resources. Universities curate these resources like pedagogical taste-makers. They can updates the curriculum to incorporate emerging practices and resources.

🌲 Student work can also have an Evergreen Impact. College students put literally millions of collective hours into work. This work is forgotten after the term. The impact of work can extend beyond the semester. This is done through (1) impacting an organization or community and (2) being a tool for reflection.

(1) For example, while at University of Michigan I had a writing and graphic design class create a cookbook with a Detroit community gardening organization. The writing class interviewed the gardeners, wrote profiles about each one and got a recipe. The graphic design class illustrated and published the pieces into a cookbook. The gardeners sold the book at the local farmers market and said that the piece brought them a stronger sense of identity, purpose, unity.

At Make School, our advanced seniors take part in an Industry Collaboration Project. Student teams build prototypes for actual organizations. We’ve built for non-profits, fast-growing startups, university professors, government agencies and more.

The benefits also bounced back to the students. Students worked harder on assignment knowing it would be used by real people.

(2) Be a tool for reflection - homework can have students reflect on what they want to be, how they want to act in situations and how they want to learn and grow with a topic. Like revisiting an old journal entry, students can reflect back on their writings to see how much they have grown and changed. They can update their piece year after year to incorporate their evolving views.

Both of these also help to extend classroom learning into lifelong learning.

So that when your school year ends,

You’ll take a good stare at your coursework…

And

Favor the file cabinet 🗃

Over the bon-fire 🔥