Breaching Experiments: Crossing the Boundaries of the Classroom and the Real World
Start Date
8-17-2022 12:00 AM
Description
Instructors seeking to illustrate the everyday relevance of the topics they teach sometimes ask students to conduct "breaching experiments" in the campus or local community. Students are expected to tweak or flout social norms in public and report their own and observers' responses. The archetypal example is facing the rear while riding an elevator. While breaching exercises provide an engaging educational experience, they do come with risks. Issues of privacy, anxiety, physical safety, and reputational damage are all concerns a faculty member must take into consideration. IRB-like protocols should be thought through and followed in an effort to retain the viability of such activities in the future. The risk analysis must encompass a broad range of stakeholders, from the student to the institution to the broader community. In this presentation, we will provide examples of breaching experiments we have used and give participants an opportunity to discuss their own breaching assignments. We will provide instructors a template for designing their own breaching assignments providing guidance for alignment with teaching goals, assignment instructions, evaluating results, and reducing risks.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Breaching Experiments: Crossing the Boundaries of the Classroom and the Real World
Instructors seeking to illustrate the everyday relevance of the topics they teach sometimes ask students to conduct "breaching experiments" in the campus or local community. Students are expected to tweak or flout social norms in public and report their own and observers' responses. The archetypal example is facing the rear while riding an elevator. While breaching exercises provide an engaging educational experience, they do come with risks. Issues of privacy, anxiety, physical safety, and reputational damage are all concerns a faculty member must take into consideration. IRB-like protocols should be thought through and followed in an effort to retain the viability of such activities in the future. The risk analysis must encompass a broad range of stakeholders, from the student to the institution to the broader community. In this presentation, we will provide examples of breaching experiments we have used and give participants an opportunity to discuss their own breaching assignments. We will provide instructors a template for designing their own breaching assignments providing guidance for alignment with teaching goals, assignment instructions, evaluating results, and reducing risks.