Some More Thoughts on Student Writing

Last December, I wrote up some of my observations on undergraduate writing tendencies based on a stack of student papers from the fall 2011 semester. Having just graded over 150, 3 page introductory level student papers, I figured that I should update the list to reflect some of my new observations and to reinforce the validity of some of my older comments.

1. Capitalization. This remains among the most baffling trend in undergraduate writing. Over the past three or four years, I’ve seen a sustained decline in the use of proper punctuation. Students regularly forget to capitalize people’s names, proper places, and (perhaps less surprisingly) institutions. Some have suggested that this is the rise of “text message English” (or text message english) in which almost no words are capitalized. The argument against that, however, is the concomitant rise of random capitalization. In the most recent group of papers, I’ve seen the word History, Economy, and Politics capitalized. It’s baffling.

2. Fonts. Recently, I’ve started to notice that many papers turned into my feature different fonts in the same text. Sometimes it’s as inconspicuous as a different font in the footnotes or in a clearly “cut and paste” block quote. In other cases, the font will change mid sentence or paragraph. As our word processors become capable of doing more and more formatting and layout-oriented work, they increasingly burden the simple task of presenting text with distracting options that ironically produce a less appealing final product especially for inexperienced users. 

3. The Semicolon. Semicolons continue to be the bane of this generations’ writing. I have banned them in both my introductory and mid-level course, but they continue to make unwelcome appearances in both places. Students not only use them incorrectly (usually to link a complete sentence with a sentence fragment), but even when they do use them correctly they typically produce monstrous, wordily, and complex sentences that obscure meaning.

4. Contractions. I have banned the use of contractions in formal writing in all my classes. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Students are inexorably drawn to contracted words. I even explained that one could set one’s word processor to automatically change contractions into their non-contracted words, but they still appear throughout papers. 

5. In regards. This phrase is a new one to me, but it has appeared in numerous undergraduate papers this semester. It might be related to the tendency to use strangely anachronistic words and British-isms like amongst, whilst, and towards.  In 120 some papers, I counted “in regards” used 43 times in 28 papers.

I realize that language and styles of typography are ever changing, but sometimes I wish they’d change just a little more slowly and systematically in my students’ work.

Scale Up Grant Proposal Final(ish) Draft

This past month I’ve worked on and off on a proposal to use the University of North Dakota’s new Scale-Up classroom.

Since it has been my top priority for the last, say, 48 hours, I thought I might make my proposal available to the good readers of my blog.

I quite like my proposal although I do see it as a bit unfocused. As per usual, I tried to do everything simultaneously rather than any one thing well. I did enjoy citing Bob Marley in the rather more political conclusion.

I am sure there are typographical errors.

Enjoy:

View this document on Scribd

 

 

Teaching Thursday: MOOCs and Collaborative Writing

There has been a ton of buzz lately about Udacity. Udacity is a company developed by Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig  two other robicists, David Stavins and Mike Sokolsky. They offer Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) on various topics related to robotics and technology to literarily tens of thousands of students per course.  This company grew out of Thrun’s and another Stanford professor, Peter Novig’s, courses in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford which they opened to the world as MOOCs. Here’s an article in Wired about it and here’s an article in the New York Times.

As I have noted before, I find this ideas amazingly cool. I even proposed a similar program focusing on humanities classes here at the University of North Dakota. My theory was that classes in the humanities – particularly history – already have a strong following among students who find the topics and stories particularly appealing. After all, we all know the well-worn story about how a series of podcasts on Byzantium attracted worldwide attention. A few meetings with our technology folks convinced me that these courses could be opened to the world without undue strain on our technical resources. Finally, I knew there was a real interest and tradition of outreach on our campus that would eventually allow a program like this to expand. Unfortunately, as happens to so many ideas, my proposal never made it through the university administration.

One of the recurring concerns with MOOCs is that universities are loath to give students free credits for completing the courses. Students who commit the time and energy to the course, however, want some kind of recognition for their efforts. Recently, Udacity has begun to offer certificates of achievement for completing their courses.

As I worked on a proposal for a History 101 class to run in the UND’s new Scale-Up classroom (here and here), I began to wonder whether one approach to giving students a sense of accomplishment for a MOOC would be a collaborative writing project. If a History 101 course introduced students to the basics of historical methodology, grounded that in some basic writing skills, and provided a solid structure for collaborative writing, would it be possible for students to produce a custom textbook for the class? The book writing process would focus student efforts over the course of the semester and produce something of enduring value to the students in the course.

There are obvious issues to my plan ranging from potential copyright problems to course design and the technical aspects of shepherding students through the writing process. One consequence of the large size of most successful MOOCs is that the instructor tends to present content and provide far less day-to-day feedback to individual students. A course centered on something as methodologically complex as writing a textbook, would require a course design that encouraged students to collaborate in a critical way and provide one another with the kind of consistent feedback that would usually come from an individual faculty member.  With some trial and error, however, I am pretty convinced that it is possible to overcome this hurdle. After all, sites like Wikipedia have managed to self-police their content and provide a rather remarkable degree of consistency, accuracy, and perspective.

The value in collaborative writing is less in the final product and more in the process. Collaborative writing is a great method to expose students to the diversity of perspectives on the past and to encourage the construction of sound historical arguments. A well-managed MOOC that clearly communicated the core ideas of the historical method could serve as an exciting platform for the collective and collaborative production of knowledge.

Teaching Thursday: The Scale-Up Classroom and Docile Minds

Last week, I re-read (perhaps for the 20th or 200th time) sections of M. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Kostis Kourelis recent reflections on Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González’s installation Doing Time / Depth of Surface. This text is most famous for his analysis of the panopticon. The Panopticon in an architecture form most used in prisons in which all inmates were visible from a central guard position, but the inmates could not determine whether they were being watched. For Foucault, the panopticon presented a metaphor for the way in which modern societies sought to normalize their citizens and to produce docile bodies more susceptible to the requirements of capitalism. He saw similarities in the design of the prison, schools, hospitals, and factories.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a short essay on the role of the panopticism in online teaching with my buddy Michael Beltz. In these essays we argued that most online learning systems (e.g. Blackboard) allowed the instructor to have a panoptic view of the students engagement with the course material and assignments. We noted the irony that as the student as individual became less visible because of distance, the student as learner became more visible through their digital trail through the course. Like the panopticon the window onto student learning was one-way. We could see all the students, but they could not see us. Finally, we noted that this arrangement worked well to produce members of an increasingly observed society where workplace efficiency could be managed down the keystroke, our tastes as consumers managed through online bread crumbs left by every transaction or page view, and powerful observers like Google produced for us new identities by continuously mining our emails, calendars, phones, and reading habits.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a proposal to teach and introductory level history class in the Scale-Up classroom. The design principle behind the Scale-Up classroom is that students in large classes are organized to face one another around circular tables in groups rather than the front of the classroom and the professor as in most large, lecture style classes. In effect, the students avert their gaze from the professor and focus it instead on their peers.

This practice parallels recent calls to flip or invert the traditional lecture and make the students more fully engaged in their own learning. In these situations, the faculty member becomes the observer and shaper of the learning processes. By observing and molding the “intermediate processes” or the work of so-called “invisible learning” we gain greater access to student habits of mind.

In the most sophisticated Scale-Up classrooms, students not only work together with one another under the gaze of the professor, they do this in digitally mediated environments. Unlike the online environment where students are disembodied assemblages of keystrokes, page views, and texts, the Scale-Up classroom allows the professor to observe the human production of digitally mediated practices. Observing practices combined with gentle correctives at the level of process rather than outcome, allows the power of the faculty member to extend their power over the classroom and into the intermediate processes of student learning and, ultimately, creativity.

By shaping the production of practice (or as Bourdieu would call it habitus) of learning, observation becomes involved in creating the kind of process-oriented, docile minds required for late capitalism where the dynamic and opportunistic economy requires a workforce short on expertise and long on flexibility.

Some More Thoughts on the Term Paper

In January, I made some offhand comments on the recent movement that has hailed the end to the formal research paper for college students. After some banter with Mick Beltz, the editor of Teaching Thursday, we thought that it would be an ideal conversation to have in that space.

To that end, I put together some very brief thoughts:

Since the 19th century, the term paper has stood as a central component of the professional training of historians. Inseparable from the seminar system developed by the first professional historians in Germany, the term paper represented the basic method to train aspiring scholars and closely aligned with the standard delivery methods for new historical knowledge. Grounded in primary sources and situated in relation to secondary literature, the term paper encapsulated the professional standard of the discipline and formed a first step in training students to produce theses, dissertation, scholarly articles, and eventually monographs. As higher education democratized and instruction in history shifted away from explicitly professional goals, historians came to argue that term papers introduced students to a number of transferable skills ranging from clear writing and organization to research skills, precise argumentation, and respect for the work of others.

The digital revolution and the changing landscape of higher education has continued to challenge the value of traditional terms papers with their roots in professional, vocational training of historians.  In my classes, I am shifting to shorter (<1500 word), more structured and focused assignments that have less room for creativity, but also owe less to traditional models for professional training.  I suspect that these shorter more focused assignments have more obvious applications in a wide range of non-academic settings (such as web writing, memo and report writing, and other professional areas of work).

I am also starting to include more “public” types of writing into my class with students having to prepare discussion posts – for example – that can be read by their fellow students. This not only adds a level of peer pressure to the assignment, but also creates an immediate and easily recognizable audience for their work.  One of the most consistent critiques of the traditional term paper is that the audience for this kind of work is ambiguous. Having students write discussion posts for their fellow students clearly defines an audience. I hope to experiment more with this kind of writing in a survey history course that asks students to work as teams to produce a textbook for their peers.

This kind of assignment represents my growing interest in more collective writing assignments that would leverage resources like the Scale-up classroom (where students work in teams linked digitally) or using Wiki type interfaces that allow students to produce synthetic works but still get recognized for their contributions to the final product. These kinds of corporate, public, and focused writing assignments mark a serious departure from the traditional practices of term paper writing and the goals of those assignment.

In short, we are training students at the intersection of changing professional needs and a particularly dynamic (and unsettled) period in the history of writing. New technologies are changing how our students communicate with one another as well as the nature of knowledge production. While there is no doubt that term papers can provide students with a robust skill set for the collection, organization, and analysis of information (a key skill in the so-called “information age”), I am no longer convinced that this is best or the only way to train these students in these skills.

Check out other peoples’ perspectives on this issue over at Teaching Thursday in the coming weeks.

Thinking about Teaching History in a Scale-Up Classroom

I was pretty excited when I received word that the University of North Dakota’s Scale-Up classroom is almost ready and accepting applications for classes in the Spring of 2013. The Scale-Up classroom is designed to foster an “active learning” environment in courses that have large “lecture sized” (100+) enrollments. The students are generally seated around smaller tables in groups of 8 to 10 – almost cafeteria style – and typically have access to computers. The design of the room makes it easier to implement collaborative activities and to promote an “flipped lecture” type environment where students teach one another and remain engaged in problem centered learning.

To this end, I’ve begun to propose a rather unconventional history course ideally suited for the Scale-Up environment:

The large survey class has changed radically over the last 20 years. The traditional arrangement of the class positions the faculty member as the “sage on the stage” and the students in the audience in order to maximize the number of students exposed to the content in a controlled environment. This organization has gradually given way to more dynamic and interactive arrangements between student and teacher. While the much-maligned jargon of “active learning” has lost favor in recent times, there is no doubt that a greater degree of interaction between faculty and students has become increasingly normalized within pedagogical literature and day-to-day teaching practices of faculty.  At the same time, enrollment pressures, efficiency expectations, and old habits have continued to support the presence of large lecture style classes particularly at the introductory level. Occasional efforts to flip or invert the lecture have met with the typical difficulties: large classes, lecture bowl style seating, and limited space for students to meet, work, share, or write.

In recent years, the rapid expansion of digital technologies has offered ways to overcome the physical limits of the classroom.  Discussion boards, integrated social networking components, and the use of new and multi media delivery systems have expanded the educational environment beyond the physical confines of lecture hall, distended the concept of learning communities, and challenged the tension between groups and individual learners.

Despite the expansion of the digital frontiers and a continuously renewed commitment to “active learning” and “flipped lectures”, traditional textbooks persist as the main way in which students encounter “content”. Traditional textbooks are generally linear, unappealing, and expensive obstacles that many faculty feel as compelled to work around as to justify to their students. Remarkably the history textbook of the 21st century is structurally similar to the textbook of the mid-20th century, even if the content has changed to suit new academic fashions and tastes.

My proposed use of the Scale-Up classroom is to create a History 101: Western Civilization course where the students write their own textbook. This takes its inspiration from recent discussions of inverting the lecture, conceptual literature projects that compose journals or edited books in a fixed span of time,  collaborative spirit behind projects like Wikipedia, and the socially disruptive “DIY” practices associated with the edu-punk movement.

The course itself will be based upon my experiences teaching with both flipped lecture style History 101 class and teaching a similar course online. My flipped lecture classroom met once a week at night and featured 6 break out style groups who would meet weekly prepare responses to discussion questions based on primary sources. In an online version of the class these discussion questions became part of an online discussion board where the students responded both to prepared questions and their fellow student’s posts. Both techniques created an environment where students learned from one another rather than from a set lecture. The groups were generally big enough that better students and responses drove out the worse, and better students tended to model the quality for those less clear on the expectations of the class. At the same time, I have experimented extensively with wikis that allow students to produce collaborative, synthetic collections of weekly notes. I have also gained experience with using Twitter in the class to create social networks for the students that allowed them to forge a sense of community and to communicate in a transparent and immediate way.

 

The main goal of the Scale-Up History 101 Course will be to produce a synthetic History 101 textbook. The class will break into 15, 10 person groups, each responsible for a 5000 word chapter in the textbook. Using online resources, collaborative digital and classroom work spaces, and a restructured history lecture which focuses on methods, key interpretative themes, and techniques for writing history, students will be asked to invert the traditional educational process where students go from learning history from a faculty member, a textbook, and other economically and politically repressive arrangement to producing a textbook in a space where the tools and material of history are available in a far more democratized way than traditional introductory history lectures.

The advantage of the Scale-up classroom is that it will foster an integrated, simultaneous, realtime physical and digital environment that will allow multiple individuals to develop resources collaboratively. Wiki style text interfaces (even if managed through an off-the-shelf product like Google Docs) allow multiple students to edit a single document simultaneously and allow the faculty to track total contributions to a document.

At the same time, students will also have access in a group format to various resources on the web ranging from Google Earth to content sources like Wikipedia, digital primary source texts, digital open access textbooks, and new and multimedia resources.

I have a ways to go yet on this proposal and because of tricky time commitments over the summer, it seems unlikely that I’ll be in the first cohort to use the Scale-Up classroom. It is still really exciting to be part of the process of re-imagining learning space on campus.

 

Three Teaching Thoughts on Lectures and Textbooks

A few things over the past few weeks have inspired me to think a bit more about teaching particularly in my larger survey style classes which I have taught online for the past three years.

1. Lectures return? Recently several articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education have hinted that the traditional lecture format might not be as useless as people have generally thought. In fact, a short article about Michael Wesch, long the poster-child for Teaching 2.0, has spent some quality time with a faculty mentor, Christopher Sorenson, who is “decidedly old-school in his approach”. Wesch apparently had become concerned that some of his high-tech teaching tactics were not as universally applicable as he hoped and decided to try to understand better why some things work for his students and his classes, but not elsewhere. He comes to the conclusion that empathy between teacher and student is far more important than even the most robust set of teaching practices.

I reached similar conclusions over the past several years, but articulated empathy as trust (see here and here). Students have to trust the teacher to lead them. I am working toward an idea that one of the key steps to building trust is for teachers to recognize student resistance (in all forms) as an authentic, legitimate response. By recognizing and legitimizing student resistance, we can begin to address its root causes, undermine its consequences, and generate space for a productive metadialogue concerning the value of learning.

2. Flipping? In another recent article, the Chronicle discusses the practice of “flipping” the lecture classroom. This seems to involve breaking large classes into groups and letting the students in these groups work out problems, analyze texts, and even articulate interpretations.

I did this for years in my large (100+) Western Civilization class that met in a traditional lecture bowl. I taught the class for 2 1/2 hours at night and regularly broke the students into groups so that they could wrestle with a text. Then I circulated with my graduate teaching assistant and engaged the groups of students as they tangled with the text and worked to address (or create!) a research question.

I really liked the chaotic atmosphere that this kind of classroom environment created. The better students embraced the opportunity to chat with the professor, and I had a chance to get the attention of some marginally engaged students and pull them into the class.

Other students, however, resented the chaotic environment, resisted group work by sitting sullenly in silence or ignored the assignments, or just stopped coming to class (or, better still, left class when the students re-arranged themselves into groups). At first, this bothered me, but as I grew to expect it, I began to (begrudgingly) accept this behavior and see it as an honest critique of my methods.

In partial response to this, I began to make it possible for students to engage material more fully without having to spend time in the flipped lecture. To do this I created a set of podcasts which allowed students to listen to my lectures on their own time, I cut back on the amount of flipped time in the classroom, and focused a bit more specifically on the methods of writing and interpreting historical documents.  It was at that point that I moved the entire class online, so I was not able to get a clear idea of whether this shift would produce better results, but it did help me reflect on how creating a modular, flexible body of easily recombined course material could provide the foundation for a more dynamic and responsive class.

3. The modular textbook.  Recently I was asked to review an almost completed manuscript for a new textbook. As part of this review, I was asked what new trends I saw emerging in teaching survey classes and the survey textbook market. I suggested that the textbook of the future will be a radically modular affair with short sections (1000 words max) linked together by interrelated themes and arguments and complemented with interactive maps (I prefer Google Earth kml files), primary sources (preferably openly available), timelines, and images.

The era of the long textbook – expensive, daunting, and too rigid for the dynamic and diverse methods in the history classroom – is nearing its end. I am working on a Western Civilization textbook right now built from my Western Civilization podcasts and customized for my course.  I have to find ways to make it modular and dynamic.

It’ll be free.

Presenting My Path to Tenure

I’ve been asked to be on a panel that will meet with a large group of new faculty members to discuss what we did to get tenure or how we managed the challenges of being a new faculty member or how we balanced life and work. Since, I am not entirely sure what will help new faculty members or what exactly the organizers of this panel expect from me, I thought I would offer some rather generic advice that summarizes what I did to try to ensure that I would get tenure. (Understanding, of course, that this may be different from the reasons why I actually got tenure.)

I’ll offer five points:

1. Work Hard. Be the first one in the office and the last one out every day. I think my father (who was not an academic) gave me this advice. I try to get into the office by 6 am and leave around 6 pm. I have generally found that the hours from 6 am to 9 am and from 3 pm to 6 pm to be the most distraction free and productive. By making sure that I have at least 6 hours a day that are reasonably free from teaching, students, colleagues, meetings, and other distractions, I give myself the space I need to be a good colleague, teacher, and university citizen.

2. Teaching. I have followed three strategies in my teaching life. (1) I took on courses that other faculty members did not want to teach (e.g. Graduate Historiography). We call these courses “service classes”. Teaching these courses provided a disincentive for my colleagues to challenge my teaching too rigorously. After all, if they didn’t like how I taught classes that no one wanted to teach, they could teach them. (2) The teaching reviews for service courses tend to be skewed a bit lower. This meant that I had a ready-made and widely accepted excuse for average teaching reviews. And finally, (3) I teach the same courses every semester. This has made prep time far more manageable and given me a chance to develop my courses without interruption.

3. Service. I also have three rules for service. I am temperamentally unsuited for committee work. (1) So I focused my service work on individual projects. For example, I wrote our Departmental History for the 125th-a-versary of the University. I created and managed a teaching blog for our Office of Instructional Development. I transitioned our department’s webpage to a new content management system. I often take on departmental writing tasks. When I do have to be on a committee, (2) I try to serve on committee that I have created myself or that my friends have created or serve on. I find friends are far more patient with me and I have more passion for committee work if it is doing something that I find important (i.e. our Working Group in Digital and New Media Lab (here and here) or creating a microphilanthropy program for the College of Arts and Sciences or brining speakers for the Cyprus Research Fund).  Finally, (3) if I do have to serve on a committee that is not filled with friends or created at my initiative, I try to serve on committees where there are only a few faculty members. I find that administrators and staff on campus have a far greater respect for one another’s time and are better capable of running an efficient meeting. Moreover, on these committees, my job has largely been to represent the faculty rather than to perform actual faculty governance. My experience is that committee work is at its worst when faculty fee compelled to perform governance.

4. Scholarship. Most of my energies go into teaching, but scholarship remains an important part of being a university faculty member. To that end, I always try to keep four projects going to ensure that I have something underway at all times. (1) I have an almost completed project, and this is whence publications come (e.g. those related to the Corinthia.) (2) I have an ongoing project, and this tends to produce conference papers and publicity (e.g. PKAP). (3) I have a future project that is just getting underway, and this produces grants (e.g. my work at Polis-Chrysochou). Finally, (4) I have a crazy project that might be a bad idea or is outside of my specific area of expertise (e.g. Punk Archaeology or Dream Archaeology or Work Camps in western North Dakota). This is where invited lectures come from.

5. It takes a village. My final point about my path to tenure is that I did not do it on my own. It took good colleagues in my department, in the college, and across the U.S. to help me negotiate my path to tenure. People allowed for my idiosyncratic behaviors, were patient with my failures and shortcomings, and were attentive to whatever successes that I had.

To cultivate good colleagues, I found it very useful to ignore one of the most common pieces of advice that I see popping up now-and-again on the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Instead of learning how to say “NO”, I spent far more time figuring out way to always say “yes” when colleagues asked me to help on campus or in the community.

The main reason for this is that saying “no” to helping builds no social capital. In fact, I can’t think of any time when I admired or thought better of someone for saying “no” to me when I asked them for help. (And I never feel better when they tell me that they are very busy. Obviously, I asked for help because I was very busy. The only people who aren’t busy on campus are people no one asks for help, and there is usually a good and obvious reason for that.)

When people asked me for help, it was largely because they needed help.  By saying “yes”, I developed the social capital to ask others to help me when I needed help. It takes a community to bring a junior faculty member to tenure. Central to having community support is the development of a robust network of reciprocal obligations. Saying “yes” builds this network and ensures support when the inevitable crises occur.  In effect, it builds a community.

Teaching Thursday: Reflecting on Teaching

One of the key arguments against assigning term papers to undergraduate students is that they have a very limited audience. This argument assumes, of course, that most post-collegiate writing has a significant audience, but anyone with time in academia (or business) knows that many of the things that we write are never read at all.

For example, each year, I write a reflective, self-evaluation of my teaching for my annual report. I assume that no one reads it.

I include it here so that at least a few people will see it:

Teaching Self Evaluation

Teaching was my top priority in Spring 2011 and Fall 2011. Over these two semesters, I taught 8 classes, co-advised on one completed M.A. thesis and advised another. The heavier teaching load allowed me to focus more time on teaching by forcing me to spend less time on research and service. In particular, this time with a heavier teaching load made me become more efficient in my course preparation and grading. Additional courses also gave me a chance to experiment with new forms of teaching including a language class and two digital history practica which could enter my rotation on a more regular basis at some point in the future.

Both the language class and practica involved one-on-one work with students as they worked to develop the skills necessary to negotiate unfamiliar texts. Theodore Mommsen famously advised historians to study languages and law. Perhaps in our increasingly digital age, historians should be encouraged to understand digital tools and (of course) languages. I discovered that I needed to develop a more robust skill set both in terms of pedagogy and in terms of technical knowledge to coax even senior graduate students through the complex world of digital content development.  My own trial and error method for learning software or web-based applications did not transfer successfully to students far more tentative in their approach to technology. Moreover, my own high-flexible approach to research projects, which tends to emphasize highly punctuated, but continual development through breaking large projects into many small tasks, found very little purchase among the students. As a result, both digital history practica did not accomplish successfully their larger goals. Future digital history courses will need to be more highly structured and more directed toward getting the students broadly familiar with digital tools and the range of digital technologies at play in both popular culture and in historical research.  

Conversely, I was far more successful encouraging Latin students to take a more trial and error approach to translating in Latin 202. I found that teaching Latin gave me invaluable experience in a classroom environment where a range of abilities and aptitudes manifest. Some students required hands on attention to internalize basic instructions, others only learn by doing, and others still can take abstract concepts and apply them in the real world with a minimum of guidance. While I knew this in a conceptual way, I am not sure whether I had a chance to see it play out in as dynamic way as I did in teaching a language. 

In the Spring of 2012, I plan to bring some of the lessons that I have learned teaching Latin and digital history to play in my History 240: The Historians Craft course. While the course has largely remained unchanged since I made a major revision in 2010, I will add conferences to my course this semester. The conference will involve a one-on-one meeting with each student to discuss the research proposal that they develop over the second half of the class. The idea is that some students will struggle to grasp the techniques and principles of research that I introduce over the course of the semester without some required face-to-face time. While I will not require it in the Spring, I will make bonus points available and strongly recommend it in class. If it is successful, I will make conferences a regular part of the course in the Fall 2012. 

I made a significant change to my History 502: Graduate Historiography course in the Spring of 2011. I eliminated two of the traditional writing assignments – a comparative, critical book review and a longer historiographic essay. The addition of the new History 501: Research Methods course, which was designed to reinforce many of the basic graduate research and writing skills, made these rather routine papers less necessary in History 502. In their place, I moved to a weekly journal which then became the basis for a longer, reflective research paper. This paper asks the students to use their weekly reflections as a source for an reflexive study of their own engagement with various modes of historical thinking. In other words, I am asking the students to recreate a though experiment postulated by R.G. Collingwood who argued that when he re-read his own writing he was rethinking his past thoughts and thus producing history. The reflexive assignment in History 502 not only reinforces the ideas introduced by Collingwood on the writing of history, but also asks the students to reflect on their own learning experience. To use the lingo of the day, this is a form of “closing the loop”.   

My History 101: Western Civilization course has not seen many changes over the course of the 2011 academic year. Most of the changes have been minor tweaks to the delivery and continued work to clarify the structure of the course. While this class has not produced a systematic and reliable body of student evaluations, the outcomes of graded assessments continue to improve suggesting that minor adjustments to how I communicate my expectations and requirements.  I am working now with the Office of Disability Services to prepare an edited transcript of each of my podcast lecture. These will form a textbook for the class. From the Fall of 2010 on, I committed to teaching more as an important step to teaching better. Experience teaching Latin and starting the development of a digital history course gave me experiences that were transferable to my History 240 course which is one of the anchors in my rotation. Over the past 5 years, I have gradually made my History 502 more experimental and driven by reflexive methods that involve a meta-cognitive closing of the loop as an important part of the graded assessment. Finally, my online 101 class has continued to evolve based on feedback provided by a careful reading of graded assessment. 

Teaching Graduate Historiography: A Final Syllabus Redux

Every Spring for the past 6 years, I’ve taught the graduate historiography seminar at the University of North Dakota. The course is required for all of our history graduate students (M.A., D.A. or Ph.D.) and, for reasons a bit elusive to me, generally dreaded. Every year, I tweak the syllabus a bit as much to keep my own sanity as to improve the course.

For whatever reason, my first post on this class is one of the most viewed posts on my blog.

So here is the 2012 updated version:

Week 1:  Introduction: What is History?

Part 1: Introduction to Historiography

Week 2: Introduction to Historiography 1
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History. Oxford 1946.

Week 3: An Introduction to Historiography 2
E. Breisach. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern. 3rd edition. Chicago 2007. 1-261.

Week 4: Introduction to Historiography 3
E. Breisach. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern. 3rd edition. Chicago 2007. 261-430.

Part 2: Critical Issues in 20th Century Historiography

Week 5: History and Memory
P. Connerton, How Societies Remember. Cambridge 1989. 
P. Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire” Representations 26 (1989), 7-24. 
K. L. Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in the Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (2000), 127-150.

Week 6: History and Marx
E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967), 56-97.
E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971), 76-136.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. New York 1966. Introduction.
A. Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, short excerpts.

Week 7: The Nation 
B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. London 1991.
S. Gourgouris, Dream Nation: enlightenment, colonization, and the institution of modern Greece. Stanford 1996. excerpts.
E. J. Palti, “The Nation as a Problem: Historians and the ‘National Question’,” History and Theory 40 (2001), 1324-346.

Week 8: Annales School
F. Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible. Trans. by S. Reynolds Philadelphia 1979.
E. LeRoy Ladurie, “Motionless History,” Social Science History 1 (1977), 115-136.

Week 9: Foucault
M. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A.M.S. Smith. New York 1972.
M. Foucault, The Foucault Reader. Ed. P. Rabinow. 169-238.

Week 10: Microhistory, Anthropology, and Cultural History
M Shalins, Islands of History. Chicago 1987.
C. Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays.  (New York 2000), 412-454.
L. Glickman, “The ‘Cultural Turn’,” in American History Now. eds. E. Foner and L. McGirr. Philadelphia. 221-241.

Week 11: History and Literature
D. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham 2004.
H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination of Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore 1973. Excerpts.

Week 12: Women and Gender
Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. Philadelphia 2007.
J. Scott, “Gender a Useful Category for Analysis,” AHR 91 (1986), 1053-1075.

Week 13: History, Space, and Place
D. Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge 1995.
J. Guldi, The Spatial Turn.
M. Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power” in The Foucault Reader. Ed. P. Rabinow, 239-256.

Week 14: Postcolonialism
H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. New York 1994). Excerpt.
G. Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak” in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London 1988. 
D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (Princeton 2000). Excerpts.
E. Said, Orientalism. New York 1979. Introduction.
K. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty. (Penn 2008), excerpts.

Week 15: Digital History
Various Authors, JAH Interchange, “The Promise of Digital History,” JAH 95 (2008) 
K. Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. (New York 2011)
Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty, Writing History in the Digital Age. (forthcoming):

Week 16: Teaching History
S. Weinberg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts.  (Philadelphia 2001).
Review The History Teacher 2000-2010