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.
