CAMBRIDGE, MASS. – Inviting students to come to class in drag. Assigning a six- to eight-page paper about their sexual coming of age. Asking them to create a Wikipedia entry as their final project.

That’s what’s happening these days at Harvard College, as professors move beyond the old-fashioned diet of papers and exams and embrace some less traditional ways of teaching their material. Advocates say the innovative techniques help students learn, while critics like the Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield dismiss them as symptoms of “Mickey Mouse” pedagogy.

Recently, a Harvard teaching fellow, Jen Hui Bon Hoa, sent an e-mail to her students in English 193: Introduction to 20th-Century Literary Theory, informing them that the next day’s lesson would be a “performativity show and tell.” Discussion would center around a set of texts on gender theory, and Ms. Hui Bon Hoa wanted everyone to dress for the occasion. She wanted them to come in drag.

The course, taught by a 33-year-old assistant professor, Leland de la Durantaye, had been covering essentialism and identity. Required reading included Judith Butler’s “Gender Troubles,” Monique Wittig’s “One Is Not Born a Woman,” and Barbara Johnson’s “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd.” Ms. Hui Bon Hoa, a first-year graduate student, wanted to give students a chance to see these theoretical texts in action – to illustrate the idea that “identities are constructed all the time.”

According to Ms. Hui Bon Hoa, a third of the class – about 10 of the 30 or so enrolled – participated in the exercise. She said she thought more of her students would show up in drag, but “people brought things in that were part of their personality.”

A sophomore, Irena Wang, came sporting the coffee-shop apron she usually wears to work. Meanwhile, a junior, Shannon Maele, left his work clothes at home, deciding instead to go with a wacky leisure suit. “I wore an eye patch and bell-bottoms,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I occasionally go out to parties dressed that way.”

Mr. Maele stressed that the point of the class exercise was to show how irrelevant attire is to one’s identity. “The argument of the theorists we were reading was that certain aspects of identity are constituted primarily by an unanalyzed system of repetition.”

For her part, Ms. Hui Bon Hoa wore baggy pants that “hearkened back to a much more kind of hip-hop counterculture persona,” she said. As it happens, she got the idea for the “performativity” workshop from the Problem of Dissent in Post-War Europe, a course taught by Stephen Hastings-King that she took at Stanford about eight years ago.

Students in English 193 will get still another chance to express themselves later this month. Ms. Hui Bon Hoa said she and Mr. de la Durantaye decided to shelve the final exam about two weeks ago, stretched the final paper assignment to 12 pages, and asked everyone in the class to post a new entry to Wikipedia related to literary theory. Ms. Hui Bon Hoa said the project will allow students to “engage in a dialogue with a larger community, to maybe empower them, to let them write as authorities, to write for the benefit of a larger audience.”

Not everyone shares her optimism. John Zmirak, who edited a guide for college-bound conservatives for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, said he has no fundamental objection to creative projects or the principle of learning by doing, but assignments need to be “substantive and real.”

“There’s something perverse about students dressing in drag,” he said, “but there’s something perverse about learning gender theory, too.”

Mr. Mansfield, the author of the recent book “Manliness” and arguably the most outspoken conservative professor at Harvard, said of the course, “It is unserious.” He said “a decline in faculty morale” is responsible for classes like English 193. Professors “no longer maintain high standards of academic excellence that Harvard used to have,” he said, “and rather take pride in finding ways of avoiding them.”

For the last assignment of the year in English 101: The History and Structure of the English Language, for example, students had to learn to speak and read a form of Creole called Jamaican Patois. And students in Literature and Arts C-40: Chinese Literati were asked to keep “ledgers of merit and demerit,” essentially a daily log of their good and bad deeds.

The assignment, according to a teaching fellow, Alexander Akin, was supposed to be a simulation of the life of a 16th-century Chinese scholar in pursuit of sagehood. Mr. Akin said in an e-mail that the daily log showed students how much harder it is to be a “truly good person … once we have to start deducting points for our shortcomings.”

In Psychology 1504: Positive Psychology, the most popular class at Harvard, with more than 800 enrolled, students were asked to write a short paper in the form of “a letter expressing your gratitude to a person whom you appreciate – to someone you haven’t thanked enough.” Other assignments this semester included a meditation on “the most wonderful experience or experiences in your life” and a reflection on “how fortunate you have been to get to where you are now.” One of the weekly sections in Psych 1504 regularly involves yoga.

“It sounds like a course in self-esteem which is designed, overtly, to make you feel good about yourself,” Mr. Mansfield said. “Students should be made uncomfortable, I believe, so that they have an incentive to study. It makes them see that life is full of problems.”

Mr. Mansfield also took issue with another popular psychology class, Human Sexuality, which requires a 10-page paper in which students recount the history of their personal sexual development.

“It’s a class in immodesty,” Mr. Mansfield said. “As if it’s a good thing to expose yourself. It’ll turn you into a boring person for the rest of your life, always talking about yourself and explaining incidents in your life as if they deserved the attention of the gods.”