What is the Experimental College? Who teaches here? And why?
The ExCollege is a department at Tufts University that offers innovative undergraduate elective courses. We hire Visiting Lecturers with a range of perspectives and professional experience to teach interdisciplinary and interactive courses, exposing students to topics or ideas that they wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to study at Tufts. Applicants of any background are encouraged to apply to teach a course of their own design.
Our instructors have expertise in their field or discipline and a passion for sharing it with highly motivated undergraduates in a small-group setting that emphasizes active learning. Previous Visiting Lecturers have been attorneys, architects, medical doctors, entrepreneurs, artists, neuroscientists, filmmakers, journalists, and environmentalists. Please see our Courses page for examples of the range ExCollege offerings.
Deadlines: Applications to teach in the Fall semester are due in early January. Applications to teach in the Spring semester are due in mid-August. Apply to be a Visiting Lecturer in Fall 2019.
Opportunities for Graduate students:
Graduate students in doctoral or professional master’s degree programs are welcome to apply to teach as Visiting Lecturers in either the Spring or Fall semester. In the Fall semester only, the Experimental College offers the Robyn Gittleman Graduate Teaching Fellowship as a special opportunity exclusively for Tufts advanced PhD or MFA students. Please see below for details.
Robyn Gittleman Graduate Teaching Fellowship
Tufts PhD and MFA students have a special opportunity to apply for a Robyn Gittleman Graduate Teaching Fellowship. Named for our former director of forty years, the Gittleman Teaching Fellowship encourages advanced Tufts graduate students to gain teaching experience through the Experimental College. Read about past courses and Gittleman Teaching Fellows. Applications are due in early January for the Fall semester. (Link to application forthcoming).
FAQs on ExCollege courses and application requirements
What are ExCollege courses like?
Successful courses engage Tufts undergraduates in an exploration of ideas applicable to the world today. Those that offer critical contexts for thinking about politics, popular culture, world religions, technology, law, communications, social issues, business, healthcare, and ethics have all been well received.
Visiting lecturer courses meet once a week in the evening for two and a half hours. Students are graded and receive 3 semester hour units (SHUs). Note: beginning in the Fall 2018 semester, Tufts will no longer use the "1.0 credit" designation for full-credit courses, and will instead use the credit hour system used by most universities.
Classes are purposely kept small, usually with no more than twenty students. As a result, courses are highly interactive and participatory. They are designed in a way that fosters group discussions and independent learning. Most importantly, we find that undergraduates enroll in ExCollege courses because of a genuine curiosity for a topic or subject matter they otherwise wouldn’t experience in the traditional curriculum.
How do I apply and what's required?
Applications must be submitted via Interfolio:
As part of the application process, you'll need to provide the following:
- a course description
- biographical information
- answers to questions about your approach to teaching
- a thirteen-week syllabus – including readings and assignments
- contact information for two references
We recommend that you check course listings in
Tufts departments related to your topic to make sure your course doesn’t overlap with one already taught at Tufts.
It is very unlikely that your course will be selected if it overlaps significantly with courses already taught at Tufts.
Your application will undergo an extensive review by Tufts faculty and students. The entire process takes just about two months, so please bear with us.
What is the best way to put together a syllabus?
Over the years, we have found that the most successful syllabi are built around a set of key questions rather than a series of blanket statements.
For example, the syllabus for a course called “Food, Culture, and Society” is centered around these questions:
Where does our food come from? How does the study of food help us understand what we call "society," "culture," and "identity"?
Some common pitfalls when developing a syllabus include:
- Subjects that are too esoteric for a diverse undergraduate audience, such as a course on morphological parsing in Quashgar Uyghur
- Courses that are too broad or ambitious in scope, for example, a course on women throughout history
- Alternatively, courses that are too narrowly focused, such as a course on the portrayal of polytheistic religions in "Game of Thrones"
- Courses that are not academically rigorous enough, that is, do not challenge the students academically or intellectually
- Courses that overlap substantially with current course offerings in other Tufts departments
- Syllabi with an overreliance on traditional teaching methods like lecturing, quizzes and final exams. ExCollege courses frequently use interactive methods, group work, and projects instead.
Finally, according to Tufts University guidelines, for every hour spent in class, students should have two hours of work outside
of class. Since your course will meet for 2.5 hours per week, plan to assign about 5 hours of work per week for your students to
complete out of class (e.g. readings and reflection papers).
Watch this short video about applying to teach as a Visiting Lecturer
Visiting Lecturer Applications on Biteable.
