What is the most important document in your classroom? While each class is entrenched within different pedagogies, contexts, identities, and spaces, I am assuming that most teachers would say that their syllabus is the most important document. I would. But for all the importance I place on my syllabus, I have only just began to question the delivery and design of the material document itself. Did my syllabus communicate the pedagogy I aligned with? Or something else? Is a syllabus really useful to students? What do syllabus components tell us about how institutions, departments, teachers, and students should teach/assess/learn?
This site is meant to pull at some of those questions by offering a multimodal review of Linda B. Nilson’s book. I chose this text specifically for a few reasons. Nilson is actively questioning syllabi design in a productive way, highlighting common problems with traditional syllabi, and providing different methods and examples that work toward solutions. Because such a large part of Nilson’s book is centered around the task of communicating complex course objectives visually, I attempted to do the same with the site. Here, you will see an image map infographic that is clickable and will allow you to navigate among specific nodes:
I invite you to explore these nodes and example syllabi in the hopes that you will see, as I’ve come to understand, that the syllabus is a single document with many, different purposes, thus making the design of this document even more complex, important, and difficult.
