teaching

Teaching theory in history (part two of some) – or – In Theory podcast meets Typhoid Mary

Anelise Hanson Shrout

Big theoretical concepts can help us to see the world in new ways.  Big theoretical concepts can help us  see historical events in new ways.  This is especially important for methods classes like the one I am teaching now, since these courses seek to bridge the gap between history as a set of stories that someone else tells, and history as a practice that students themselves can engage in.  We want students to leave these classes loving history as much as when they came in, but we also want to destabilize the idea that there is one, “objective,” “true” narrative to be told about each historical event.  We want them to think about how to select evidence, put that evidence in conversation with other scholars, and offer an interpretative framework for that evidence that nets something beyond arguing that a thing happened in a place and at a time.  Theory helps with that framework.

Undergrad-me would not have believed that current-me would someday be singing the praises of theory.  Luckily, a compatriot of undergrad-me was more prescient than I – Maria Cecire and Noorain Khan are responsible for the In Theory Podcast, which seeks to “raid academia for the the most fascinating and relevant social, cultural, and scientific theories, and use them to help make sense of this beautiful mess of a world we live in.”  It is excellent.  You should listen to it.

I’ve especially enjoyed using In Theory in the classroom.  I’ve generally found teaching theory in history to be one of the more challenging parts of undergraduate pedagogy.  This isn’t because students are incapable of understanding, or even enjoying, theory.  However, I do think that it is difficult to understand the value of theory in the abstract (at least, this was true of me in my theory-adverse undergraduate days).  This course features several weeks on classic theory for history, but this semester I found that pairing the In Theory podcast with a classic in historical scholarship – Judith Walzer Leavitt’s Typhoid Mary – helped to illustrate the ways in which theory can be useful generally, and useful in historical scholarship in particular.

How it worked:

First: I assigned pairs of students different episodes of In Theory.  As they listened, they were asked to identify (1) the theories engaged with in the episode (2) how the podcasters apply those theories to everyday life and (3) other things to which they might apply that theory.

Second: In class, the groups diagrammed their notes on the board, focusing on one particular theoretical concept from the assigned episodes.

Third: Each group presented on their theory of choice, and then each student went around the room and commented on how they might use one of the theoretical concepts outlined in class to further their own research.

Fourth: For the next class, students were assigned chapters from Judith Walzer Leavitt’s Typhoid Mary.   Each chapter takes a different perspective on Mary Mallon (the first silent carrier of typhoid fever, colloquially named “Typhoid Mary,” and imprisoned by the state of New York until her death).

Fifth: Armed with their knowledge of how different theories help us to understand different aspects of the world we live in, students dove into Typhoid Mary and undertook the same kind of diagramming they had done for the In Theory podcast.

Sixth: Each student once again commented on how they might use the theoretical concepts used in Typhoid Mary to further their own research.

By the end of this two class arc, students had two different examples of the application of theory in concrete ways.  Next time I teach this class I am going to have a more defined section on theory, and probably build in an additional class and assignment that recapitulates the different theories the students have been exposed to.  Nevertheless, I think the concrete application of theory evinced in the In Theory podcast and in Typhoid Mary really helped to clarify theory for students.

Teaching theory in history (part one of some)

Anelise Hanson Shrout

I’ve recently had conversations with several colleagues about teaching theory in history.  As a discipline, we’re not as obviously theory heavy as some of our compatriots in the social sciences, and much of the theory we use is grounded, or embedded in assumptions we make about sources, voices and narrative.  Given the importance, but relative invisibility of theory in history writing (and given that students – especially new majors in historical methods classes – are likely to be a little allergic to heavily theorized writing anyway) I’ve been trying to figure out how to teach students how to identify and make us of theoretical frameworks for history.

This question has been bugging me for the past year or so.  It first became apparent in a class on the intertwined histories of gender and technology, and I also see it in my current undergrad historical methods and Atlantic history classes.  This is not, I think, merely a consequence of mulling more on theory than I used to.  By design, none of these courses clear narrative path.  Gender and Technology took on several themes during the semester, often circling back to the same time, but a very different place or perception.  Atlantic history is arranged roughly chronologically, but approaches the Atlantic from a series of different spaces, and via different peoples, so we are often jumping in space and time.  Historical methods is loosely organized around the theme of American disasters, but we also skip around temporally, and often head down methodological or historiographical culs-de-sac before returning to the topical meat of the course. This shred lack of a singular storyline meant that theory was all the more important – it was the thing that could get the courses to hang together.

I wanted an assignment that allowed students to make connections from class to class, which emphasized theoretical framings, demonstrated the value of theories as organizing frameworks, and which wouldn’t rely on me lecturing at students.*

I’ve come up with something that I call “theory exercise.”  Each class uses a different variation on the same theme:

First: students review their notes and memories and write down one or two important framing concepts from the previous class.  Earlier in the semester these can be a bit vague, but I make sure that we identify important ideas in reading discussion, so that they can (hopefully) just go back to notes.

Second: some students come up to the board and write one important framing concept.  The only rules are (1) no duplicates and (2) you can amend what someone else writes

Third: the remaining students come up to the board and write down one topic from earlier in the semester, or from the reading for that day’s class that connects with those big ideas.  The same rules apply as in the second phase.

The final product
The final product

As a result of all of this whiteboard writing, we have a map of the main points of the previous class, and a visual representation of connections throughout the course.

This works with individual students working on their own, pairs of students, or even groups that have to consult and come up with one big idea or one connection.  I’ve been experimenting recently with randomly assigning students to big idea or connection and with allowing it to be more of a free for all.

I’ve learned a few things:

  • In classes where I’ve been using this exercise since the beginning of the semester, weekly reading responses do a much better job making links between a given reading and themes from earlier in the semester.  In making those links, students also invoke theoretical frameworks.  Some of these are more explicit than others, but the very act of linking disparate examples requires a theoretical underpinning.
  • In classes that don’t have a clear narrative (and this is probably true of most upper level classes) this exercise also helps students to make their own meaning out of the material covered, and to remember material from earlier in the semester.
  • On exams that ask students to identify and demonstrate the utility of theoretical frameworks, the classes that have been doing this kind of work do better than the classes that haven’t.
  • Having this material written on the board is a great way to mark the start of class with activity, rather than my recap; it also models note-taking strategies for students who aren’t familiar with documenting their participation in discussion based classes.

*I developed this assignment after many talks with Caroline Weist, pedagogue extraordinaire.

Safe Spaces in the Life of the Mind

Anelise Hanson Shrout

The University of Chicago recently sent a letter to incoming students which has made me – for the first time – embarrassed to be affiliated with my undergraduate institution.

Image from the Chicago Maroon twitter feed. https://twitter.com/ChicagoMaroon

This letter (as Kevin Gannon has noted) seems to be equal parts pedagogical statement and public posture.  It certainly needs to be understood in terms of evolving debates about college campuses, academic politics and student life.

I, however, want to address it from the perspective of both an alumna of the college and as a professor.

The call for “civility and mutual respect” in this letter is a heartening one, as is the reminder that “freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harass or threaten others.”  (This, by the way, sounds like what most academics mean when they talk about safe spaces) A space in which “members of our community [are expected] to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion and even disagreement” and to constructively manage ideas that “may challenge you and even cause discomfort” resonates with what I expected when I first stepped into U(C) classrooms some many years ago.

But I balk at what follows – first because the author of the letter seems not to have fully interrogated what “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” mean, in practice, in college classrooms; and second because rejecting student protests and trigger warnings works to undermine what Dean Ellison says is a priority: “building a campus that welcomes people of all backgrounds” and which supports students’ “freedom to espouse and explore a wide range of ideas.”

In my experience, and as described by faculty from different institutions, trigger warnings are not about “cancel[ing] speakers because their topics might prove controversial.”   Neither are they intended to allow students to “retreat form ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”  In the practice I have seen, trigger warnings are a way for faculty to help students manage their reactions to material without disrupting the intellectual community of the class, and without derailing students’ own academic progress.

For example, I teach on the history of disaster.  We read about terrible, heartbreaking things.  It does no one in my class – neither me nor the students – any good to not anticipate the possibility that some students might react strongly to (for example) discussions of the death of orphan children during the Galveston Hurricane.  Flagging scenes of infanticide (a trigger warning) in our readings likewise has no cost – it simply alerts students who may have strong reactions to a particular topic that they might want to take extra steps to prepare for class that day.*   These might include drafting a discussion question in advance, finding a time to do reading that might be trauma-inducing when they will not be in public, or even simply practicing scripts to get through the class period.  Rather than undercutting intellectual discourse or protecting students from uncomfortable material, trigger warnings as practiced by me and by many faculty seek to ensure that a student can fully prepare – in what ever way they need – t participate in class.

Dean Ellison similarly seems to be mistaken about the common use and history of “safe space.”  While it is laudable that the U(C) “welcomes people of all backgrounds” and encourages “diversity of opinion and background,” American higher education is historically constructed, and has – historically – been friendlier and more accommodating to certain groups more than others.  For one excellent example of this history, see Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy detailing the racial history of American education (while I have the utmost respect for Dean Boyer – the dean of the college when I was an undergrad – I can’t help but think that Wilder’s would certainly be a book that incoming first years would benefit from reading).  This history means that, in practice, colleges and university have been – and continue to be – safer spaces for some students than for others. Those for whom the college is already safe – many of them students who are not otherwise marginalized – do not need to petition for safe spaces on campus.  For them it already is one.

To reject the idea of safe spaces or to pre-empt any protest in response to a scheduled U(C) speaker is to say – again in practice – that the University of Chicago has no interest in attending to the needs of students who do not already feel safe.  These might include (and this is based on my experiences both as a student and now as a faculty member) students of color, first generation college students, LGBTQA students, undocumented students, students who grew up in poverty, students with learning differences, students with illnesses, students with disabilities.  Making higher education more welcoming to these students sometimes means re-imagining what campus civility looks like.  It means, rather than telling students that protests are unwelcome and silencing, interrogating why those students thought that protest was the best way to speak to the administration.  It involves treating protest as a tool of debate rather than as a fait accompli**.   It involves listening to students who ask for a heads up about potentially traumatic material.  None of this silences academic discourse.  Rather, it makes academic discourse a space in which more and more diverse students can participate.

As practiced*** most frequently, trigger warnings allow for classes to be flexible enough to accommodate students whose experiences of trauma and crisis are different from our (the faculty’s) own.  Discussions of how to make more safe spaces on campus are a way to expand campus culture to include people who historically were excluded from it.  Neither of these models is detrimental to undergraduate education.  Neither undermines the life of the mind.  It shocks and saddens me that a place which prides itself on intellectual rigor for all students would take such a stance.

*They might also choose to skip class, but I have seen no evidence that talking about possibly traumatizing material makes a student any more likely to skip a class than any other of the usual reasons college students have. Incidentally, this is why I do not have an excused absence policy in my classes – students can choose to be absent from a fixed number of class meetings without penalty, and I am not put in a position of adjudicating a good reason for missing my class.

**I want to think about this a bit more about this, but discussions of student protests of speakers tend to assume that having a protest means that the speaker will not come.  This has not been my experience of student protests, and is a perspective which, I think, dangerously misrepresents the institutional power that students, faculty and university deans have respectively.  When we talk about student protests, I think we miss the ways in which institutions and (in the case of Rice, invited speakers) have the power to react to protest.  Many times, institutions and speakers decide that a talk will go on.  When I was a U(C) undergrad, Fareed Zakaria came to speak.  Some students walked out in the middle of the talk.  Some called for the talk to be cancelled.  Both of these actions prompted robust and sustained discussion, and allowed for discussion about the place that Zakaria’s ideas had on the U(C) campus.  Calling for the cancellation of the talk was part of that discussion, not an attempt to silence it.

*** I have a shirt from my time as an undergraduate which reads “that’s all very well in practice, but how does it work in theory.”  I still love that shirt, but I think that the current U(C) administration might – in this case – benefit from thinking a little more about pedagogical practice, and less about theoretical posturing.

Streamlined Grading with Linked Documents

Anelise Hanson Shrout

First comes the start of the semester; then comes grading; then comes the inevitable
wondering about how to make grading less of a chore. I realized a few years ago that
much of my dislike of grading came not from an aversion to reading student work, or
even to writing comments. Rather, for me, it came from navigating the systems that
meant that I was spending more time collecting, archiving and returning student projects
than I was on giving thoughtful feedback.

I’d tried a number of tools meant to streamline grading, but rather than making things
easier, each seemed to involve an ever-increasing number of steps:
* Course Management Systems: students upload papers, I download them, comment
on them, grade them, upload the graded/commented document, enter grades into a
digital gradebook.
* E-mail submissions: students e-mail me papers, I save them, comment on them,
grade them, enter their grades into a gradebook, calculate other graded
components of the course, send an e-mail back with course component grades as
well as the commented and graded final project.
* Paper submissions: students give me papers, I mark them (with increasingly
cramped handwriting), grade them, handed papers back to students who were in
class the day grading was finished, subsequently fielded e-mails about course
grades and arranged meetings with those who hadn’t been in class to pick up
papers.

Last semester I tried something new. I created a series of linked folders and documents
which allowed for students to easily submit work, and for me to speedily grade papers,
leave comments, and give students ready access to their course work and grades. As a
result, my grading went faster, papers were returned more speedily, and I felt like I was
spending less time uploading, e-mailing and returning work, and more time crafting
actual feedback.

This took some set-up time on the front end, but the result streamlined the acquiring and
returning of papers. I used Dropbox and Excel,
in large part because my institution gave me access to them, but I think that something
similar could be developed using open source tools.

Here’s how it worked:
* At the beginning of the semester I created one folder for the class and saved it to
my personal Dropbox.
* Within that folder, I created one folder for each student.
* Within the class folder, I also created a master grading spreadsheet, which could
track the grading categories (participation, short papers, long papers etc.) for each
student.
* I then linked this master grading spreadsheet to individual spreadsheets for each
student. (All of this can be accomplished in Excel by highlighting a cell in the
individual student sheet, typing “=” and then navigating to the main gradebook
and selecting the matching cell.) Setting these sheets up was the most time-
consuming part of the process, and took about an hour for a fifteen person class.
* Each student’s spreadsheet was saved in that student’s folder, along with word
documents in which I could enter comments about weekly reflection pieces.
* Finally, I shared each folder with the student to whom it belonged.

While this took some time to set up, by the time the semester started it was possible for
students to upload work, and for me to grade papers, take attendance and track
participation without ever having to log into a CMS, and without ever having to send
students e-mails with their grades. When I updated the master spreadsheet, the individual
folders updated as well. Students could check in on their grades and comments whenever
they wanted, and my grading process was condensed to three steps:
i. Students upload papers
ii. I grade and comment
iii. I enter the grades in the master grading spreadsheet.

This, like any other, is not a perfect system. One of the biggest concerns raised by my
colleagues was that students could change the grades in their individual sheets. This
didn’t happen this semester, and even if it did, the ability to track changes in shared
folders would make it pretty easy to catch, but it still presents a possible administrative
hurdle. My system also forced students to learn new tools, on top of those already
required by the college to do similar tasks (for example, Moodle or Blackboard). Finally,
it required some considerable setup time up front, to get each of the student folders and
spreadsheets working properly.

At the end of the semester, I found that I preferred this approach to the grading systems
I’d tried. Students were able to access feedback more quickly. Because everything
happened within students’ individual folders, it was easy to be sure that feedback was
going to the right person, and I never had to worry about accidentally sending the wrong
paper or the wrong grade to the wrong student. While this system didn’t make grading
any more fun, it certainly mitigated against one of my biggest stumbling blocks for
getting grades done on time.

An agentic moment

Anelise Hanson Shrout

This week I assigned Jeff McClurken’s article on Omeka and “productive discomfort.”  I’ve had students read this article before, and while the resulting conversation was interesting, the article has never before resulted in the kind of robust debate about discomfort, barriers and technology that came out of the reading response blog posts for today’s class.

I could summarize, annotate and curate their posts, but (drawing on Andrew Rikard’s recent argument about student agency) I thought it might be better to just leave links here.

Love in Peril

“That Belongs in a Museum”… or an Omeka Exhibit

Preservation through Representation

The Digital Difference

Classroom RPGs

shrouta

As we near the Thanksgiving break, and as my students get increasingly stressed about final papers and exams, I’ve tried to lighten up (mostly Thursday) classes with role playing exercises.  It can be a bit of a gamble, since they rely so much on the students really committing to personifying historical characters, but so far it’s been quite a bit of fun – even if one of my students did call me on the worksheet I gave them as prep being quite close to a D&D character creation sheet!  In the U.S. survey, I used this prompt:

Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, James K. Polk, John Quincy Adams and David Wilmot find themselves snatched out of time and deposited in a bar.  They get to talking about whether it was a good thing to annex Mexico and California.  What do they say?

For 4:00 on a Thursday, my students embraced the roll playing more than I’d expected.  Aspersions were cast against Polk and Wilmot, and Calhoun’s perspective was even delivered in accent.  It’s sometimes hard in larger classes to get group work right – sometimes the groups are too big for everyone to participate fully, and if they’re too small we spend a lot of time at the end letting each one speak – but I’m feeling pretty good about this flavor of activity, even if it does lead to some jokes about dark elves, charisma points and magic missiles.

(Live(ish))blogging the survey

shrouta

First, a long digression:

I got to sit down with reps from Gale today for about five hours to talk about all of the tools they have for teaching.  Among some other fun things, we were able to test drive Artemis, which will eventually aggregate some? many? of Gale’s primary sources (or, what Gale markets as primary sources – a lot of things that aren’t sold as primary sources, like literary criticism, could still be useful in 20th century U.S. history classrooms, for instance), and what they’re calling “term clusters,” which is basically an interactive pie graph that shows the frequency of words that abut your search term.  It looks like it will be a pretty useful and robust search engine once everything is integrated, though like any archive it’s limited by what Gale’s editors acquire, how they subject index what they have, and (particular to digital archives) how well it’s been OCRed.

We were challenged to think about how we’d use Gale resources in the classroom, and there was a lot of talk about how having a not-infinite-but-still-pretty-vast universe of possible primary sources would challenge students to think more creatively about their topics, and how the analytic tools like term cluster will help students identify trends that they might not otherwise have seen.

Two thoughts:

1) Sometimes an infinite, or seemingly infinite universe can be a great thing.  When a student is working on a year-long senior thesis, having millions of pages of documents to draw from could be really productive.  But, there’s also something to be said for well curated small collections of primary sources, especially for introductory courses, where students aren’t sure how to even approach analyzing a primary source, let alone picking one about which they can make an argument that will sustain them throughout the paper writing process.

2) I’m always struck by the ways in which online databases or search engines try to replicate the functionality of a physical library.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told that looking in the metadata for a book’s subject, and then looking for the subject headings that immediately follow and precede the one you’re interested in is like browsing the shelves at a library.  I’ve heard similar things about the serindip-o-matic tool, as a way to replicate the lucky happenstance of coming across an unforeseen or mis-filed document in a brick and mortar archive.  I love the serindop-o-matic, and I’ve been doing the proximity subject searches since college, so I’m not saying that these are bad tools or workflows, but I wonder about how effective it is to try to replicate the research experience of a library online.  On the other hand, we know how to research in libraries and archives, and it doesn’t seem so wise to reinvent the research wheel if we don’t have to – but browsing by proximate subject heading, or looking for high frequencies of words that cluster around any given search term will never the same as browsing the stacks.  Finding a document through serindip-o-matic (which I love, by the way – I think that it’s a fantastic tool, and I’m not sure that it’s makers would characterize it as replicating the eureka in the archive experience, I’ve just seen it described that way) will never be the same as coming across a mis-filed pouch of heroin, say – or perhaps more likely, an archivist who knows you’ve been pulling stuff on one subject getting you something related that you hadn’t thought to ask for.

At any rate, I’m not sure if, or how I’m going to be using Gale’s, or anyone else’s online databases for teaching in the future.  For this imminent semester, I’ve settled on the Major Problems in American History reader, because I really like the interpretive essays, and find the transcription and gobbeting of documents by experts in the field, of say, colonial American history, to be far superior to anything I might do on my own, even drawing from a near-infinite corpus.

But as to the point of this post, I’ve been thinking that it might be a useful exercise in my own pedagogical development, and possibly a useful contribution to the conversation started on the Junto blog last week about teaching the survey, to periodically check in about this, my first time teaching U.S. to 1877 on my own.  Consider this the first post of that project, and if I’m really systematic perhaps I’ll go the digital document reader route next semester and compare notes.

NARA does online gaming

shrouta

I’m a little late to the game with this, but I was really happy to find that in 2012, the US National Archives moved into the online gaming world and into the itunes store, with apps like DocsTeach (online here). DocsTeach is, on the face of it, a fantastic idea.  It centers the idea that a considerable part of historical learning comes through the analysis of primary sources, and seems to try to build activities that would be accessible to students with different learning styles.  Many of the activities are tactile, insofar as you’re asked to move documents around, though some are more well-developed than others. For the activity on suffrage, for example the task is to arrange documents in the order in which they were produced – a fine way to teach reading skills, but not so much specific to women’s suffrage in America.

Lewis and Clark screenshot. This is featured prominently on the itunesU site for the app, and seems to be one of the better-realized activities.

The Lewis & Clark expedition activity, on the other hand, requires a little more critical thinking, as well as some sounder pedagogy.  Given a map of the United States and a bunch of documents, students are told:

“In 1803 the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France.  President Jackson sent co-captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore west of the Mississippi River in 1804.  Their route west is shown in green.  Although this territory was unknown to some, to others it was very familiar.

Examine the documents related to the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition.  Determine where different groups were involved and use the hints to place the documents on the X’s on the map.”

The documents include Lewis’s speech to the Otto Indians (August, 1804), “List of Indian Presents Purchased by Meriwether Lewis in Preparation for the Expedition to the West” (1803), and the “Proclamation to the People of New Orleans” announcing the Louisiana Purchase.  Having placed the documents on the map, students are asked to make a list of all of the powers at play in the region, and come to class prepared to share with classmates.  Though some of the language in the app, especially in the instructions elides native agency (things happen to, or are given to Indians – there’s no sense that Indians were active players in this at all), and only hints at the extent to which the United States was a young, untried, and anxious nation, it’s not a bad game overall. I’m happy that the National Archives is thinking pedagogically, and that there’s an initiative to digitize documents that students might not otherwise ever be able to see.

 

Pedagogy, performance and the MOOC

shrouta

Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) is a term that’s always struck me as a little tongue-in-cheek, aiming for hyperbole before we’ve even figured out the best ways to use them.  I also think that the term is useful because it’s fun to say – I’m taking a MOOC at the moment on strategies for information visualization, and simply being able to say “IVMOOC” on a daily basis has made the process that much more fun.  I suppose somewhere on the internet there’s always a flurry of discussion around things like digital pedagogy, but that flurry has been intersecting with my life quite a lot of late – most recently in Thomas Friedman’s piece today about the ways in which MOOCs produce celebrity professors.

I think that Friedman is right that MOOCs are more or less here to stay, and that while schools, professors and students are still figuring out how they can work best/better, the MOOC revolution has come.  Where I ran into trouble was this paragraph:

We demand that plumbers and kindergarten teachers be certified to do what they do, but there is no requirement that college professors know how to teach. No more. The world of MOOCs is creating a competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or face an online competitor.

The somewhat flip suggestion that people with advanced degrees who teach in colleges haven’t been “certified to do what they do” seems a little straw-mannish to me.  At least on paper, many terminal degree programs, from DFAs to PHDs include some measure of pedagogical training – or at least the possibility of pedagogical training for those who think they might want to go into teaching.  In many places, though, this training is “hands on” – through positions as graders, TAs or course instructors.  We’re meant to learn on our feet gradually (at my institution, at least), first by figuring out how to fairly grade undergraduate essays, then in the relatively structured environment of the recitation section, and finally in classrooms of our own.  So the training is there.  Friedman is right, however, that many institutions don’t give the kind of directed pedagogical training that we get with regards to our research. (This isn’t true in all places, and I’d venture a guess that most PhD programs have some mechanism for pedagogical training, even if it’s not formally built into the curriculum).  Those of us who want more vis-a-vis pedagogy are  free to find it, but we mostly learn by watching and doing, and then go out and do, to be watched, by a whole new generation of students.

I’d also venture that what Friedman is talking about is as much about presentation as it is about good pedagogy.  Understanding how to tailor a syllabus to a class full of students with very different learning styles is, I think, a sign of a good teacher, but that probably doesn’t translate particularly well to the filmed MOOC environment.  On the other hand, people who are professional performers know that it can take an awful lot of work to learn how to project charisma, confidence and character on stage or film.  Whether we like it or not, students consuming MOOC material seem as likely to react positively to that as they do to the actual content of the course.  This isn’t to say that I think that all academics need acting lessons, but only that things are a little more complicated than what Friedman is calling for in that paragraph.

Dream course

shrouta

Despite the stress, one of the perks of being on the market is that I get to spend entire days sitting around and thinking about dream classes – not dream students, or dream institutions – but the classes I’d teach if I had all the leeway and resources in the world.  It’s tremendous fun, and means that I occasionally stumble across brilliant and compelling work I’d not previously had a chance to explore.  Today, that was Jill Lepore’s piece in the JAH on biography and microhistory.  If you have institutional access, read it.  It’s great.

I came to this by way of thinking about how to design a class that centered the historical challenges of reconstructing historical actors’ experiences – and particularly those of people who aren’t likely to have left a strong mark on the historical record. (An aside: at the Against Recovery conference hosted by NYU a few weeks ago, a number of people called for scholars of race, slavery and the enslaved to move beyond the language of “recovery” for accessing the historical experiences of the enslaved, the freed, and free people of color – it was a fascinating conference all around, but I especially loved how we were pushed to think about how the very words we use to describe historical practice privilege some narratives over others)  My ideal version of this class combines Kathleen Conzen’s course at the U(C) on American immigration history, for which the final project asked us to use census records to track an immigrant family living in Chicago at some point in the past;  Martha Hodes’s class at NYU on “Reconstructing Lives” which focuses on the craft of writing a history centered on one particular person – and the craft of historical writing more broadly. (Her “Four Episodes in Re-Creating a Life” beautifully illustrates the challenges inherent in this), and Nicholas Wolfe ‘s, also at NYU, which uses the 1860 census as a common data set and teaches old-school social history statistical analysis.  I’m also captivated by the work that the folks at Zooniverse are doing in citizen science, though the New York Public did something similar in the humanities with its menu transcription project.

In an ideal world, I’d love to construct a class around a data set (say, for example, the Charleston donors I mapped yesterday) and ask each student to write a microhistory of one of them.  Some are easier than others, though the ones that are most prominent might have a larger collection of extent personal papers, which is great for research, but perhaps stressful for already taxed undergraduates.  We’d begin with tracking their donors through various censuses – probably using something like Ancestry.com – before branching out into other kinds of archival material.  Once the students had built up biographical sketches of their donors, we’d move on to the social/cultural work that microhistory can do so well – using these people to tell us more about the world of antebellum South Carolina? Reading cultures in the antebellum South? Relationships between social status and philanthropic giving?  I’d love to end the class – maybe the last third of the term – with a collaborative project, in which students come back together to write a history of their cohort, focusing on whatever has popped out for them as the important historical question that their donors’ lives help illuminate.  I imagine that several iterations of a class like this would produce an archive of its own – a series of biographies, micrhohistories and essays that describe the data more completely than I’d ever hope to do on my own, and which students would be able to cite as examples of their public work as they move on from my class.  In the most perfect of worlds, I’d be able to find a data set that is populated by people local to wherever I’m teaching, which would (hopefully) encourage students to get themselves to local archives, maybe speak to descendents, or even explore the lived environments of the people they’re researching.

As much as this would be a blast to teach (it’s archival!  it’s historical methodology! it’s local history!) I also worry about deploying students in service of what, ultimately, are research goals that could help me out quite a bit.  I like the idea of finding a population of people who share some attribute, beyond their physical location (though if the geographical confines were small enough, it might be interesting to also make this a class about community history) and I have this massive, 6,000+ data set of famine donors that I’m itching to work on, but I’m concerned about exploiting student labor in service of my own project.  On the other hand, some of the papers that have come out of the citizen science work cite everyone who helped out with the project online, and science labs do this kind of thing all the time, and give students first or second authorship on the papers that come out of the research.

Off to write a dream syllabus.