Past Feature Stories

Follow Dr. Lauran Kerr-Heraly On Her Teaching Journey in "Altering Course"

Nov 7, 2022

Follow along with History Professor and WHI Innovation Fellow, Dr. Lauran Kerr-Heraly as she reflects on her evolving teaching practice, innovations in education, and her travels around the world. For the past two years, Dr. Kerr-Heraly has been sharing her thoughts in her online blog "Altered Course".

Since last year, she has been documenting her experiences using one of the West Houston Institute's two "experimental classrooms"–spaces that combine unique furniture and technology as well as a layout that decenters the classroom away from the instructor at the front of the room and the students in rowed seating. Instead, students and faculty organically arrange themselves in the room according to activity.

Other topics explored are Dr. Kerr-Heraly's Innovation Fellows project, an instructional escape room which she had the opportunity to fully develop out in residence at WHI during the 2021-22 academic year, and her thoughts on her participation in "Back to the Foodture", an interdisciplinary learning project where faculty from Biology, History, Culinary, and English assigned students projects related to the same topic of food and its connections across disciplines.

Read for yourself at https://www.alteringcourse.com/.