#CLASSOUTSIDETHEBOX Professors in the English department at Harding took their students outside of the classroom to enhance learning, a teaching method they called "Class Outside the Box." Dr. Russell Keck, assistant professor of English, said he heard about the idea as a graduate student and decided to put it to use in his own classroom. Keck said studying the texts in a way that was not stale and standard encouraged his students to engage in different ways of learning. "We've done different things and so have other professors," Keck said. "It's making film clips or videos in the classroom. I know that several other professors incorporate doing an outside project and bringing it in and showing it. It's just engaging with the text." Dr. Charles Bane, assistant professor of English, also utilized this concept to teach William Blake's poems "Songs of Innocence and Experience" in his world literature classes. "All of the poems about innocence are about being outside with nature and remembering what it was like to be a child," Bane said. "If you sit in a classroom with 45 students looking at a book and reading about that, it makes much more sense to go outside into nature. Be a part of it and experience it rather than it just being a textbook trapped inside the four walls of a classroom." Administrative assistant and senior Jennifer Lowe said one professor created a list of commonly confused B 2 .\CA DE ~l I CS By Alex 1-'VingnJVe words for her to look up and present to the class as an interactive, unorthodox project. "It wasn't so serious," Lowe said. "It was lighthearted, and you still learned from it. Things like that, that are different from just sitting, reading and lecturing, stand out in your mind and help you to remember (the material)." The English department also utilized social media to promote the teaching style and recruit potential English majors and minors. Professors encouraged students to post on their personal accounts anytime a class did something out ofthe ordinary with #ClassOutsideTheBox. Bane said taking ;5tudents outside simply to play like kids again allowed them to relieve stress and
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