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As a teacher of a subject that I adore and cherish, I often find myself scrambling for enough time to cover everything that needs to be covered and still find a clever way to introduce yet another “cool story” that will further convince my students that my field (microbiology) is relevant to everyday life.
No doubt I am not alone in this challenge of finding ways to demonstrate relevancy of what we teach, but not at the complete expense of the time and effort we desperately need to guide our students through challenging, key concepts and ideas.
I wondered if creating relevancy for students would be better achieved if it didn’t start with me, but rather with them. Allowing our students to have more say about assignments is a learner-centered strategy that can be used to promote student ownership and investment in a course and it supports students’ efforts to develop responsibility for their own learning (Lang, 2016 and Weimer, 2014).
