Last Days Teaching History 101 in a Scale-Up Classroom (Part XIII)

Last night I had my second to last night of the semester teaching History 101: Western Civilization in the University of North Dakota’s fancy new Scale-Up classroom. The course is deigned around the idea that 18 groups of 9 students will produce a chapter for their own textbook. Over the past three months we have walked the students through the conceptualization, organization, and finally writing of a 5000 word textbook chapter. The groups have, generally, taken the task seriously and worked hard.

The greatest challenge has been to balance course learning goals with issues of classroom management. Some nights, I get the balance right and the students work as focused teams to address particular historical problems. (Other nights, of course, the wheels come off.) Last night was a pretty good night. The students worked for almost two hours on their projects without interruption.

1. Authority and Revision. The final third of the class has focused on peer review and revision of chapters. The first step was a superficial reading by myself and my graduate assistant. We then asked tables to peer review other table’s chapters. We hoped that these two steps of peer review would produce sufficient critique for students to make meaningful and substantive revisions of their chapters. In the end, this process produced mixed results.

In general, students were ambivalent about revising their chapters based on these peer reviews, and instead of taking the peer reviews seriously as points of departure, most chapter lay dormant. This was a problem because many chapters remained poorly organized, riddled with typographical errors, and with only spotty citation (and some egregious incidents of plagiarized text!). Despite these issues, the groups seemed lethargic and at loose ends.

So, over the last few days, I wrote up close to 10,000 words of critique on each chapter and posted them to a wiki with an estimate grade as a prompt to get students to revise their chapters thoroughly. I posted these comments yesterday and the students found then right before class. Needless to say, my specific comments girded by my additional authority made the groups come to live. The tables worked for close to 2 hours straight last night. Their questions for me and Cody (my super competent graduate assistant) were direct, specific, and clear. I am actually excited to see their revised chapters.

2. Student Resistance. Before class last night, I talked to Cody about my theory of student resistance. I’ve explored these topics here, here, here, here, and here. In short, I argue that some ways that an explicit need to resist motivates some student efforts to confound faculty expectations. The increasingly streamlined and “corporate” environment of university life has led to student resistance in myriad of subtle ways. The most obvious of these is a general carelessness toward writing and proofreading. The work necessary to correct niggling proofreading issues is never high and the stakes tend to be relatively low. As a result, it provides a useful environment for students to express their own identity against faculty efforts to prepare them to be cogs in the machine. Like a slave might damage equipment or neglect a daily task, students refuse to follow the rules of capitalization, persist in using contractions in formal writing, and ignore paths of least resistance.

The Scale-Up room seeks in part to undermine this resistance by giving students greater control over their own fate and work rhythms. They have to work together to accomplish tasks and the decentered arrangement of the classroom occludes the faculty presence. I’ve come to think that the genius of the Scale-up room is that it promotes the possibility of faculty observation (à la Foucault’s panopticon) as a way to mitigate student resistance. The carrot is, then, that students have more control of how their production; the stick is that the faculty may always be watching. Some days I feel like Google or Amazon (.com) as I wander the classroom listening to students working and offering helpful (and more or less unprompted) suggestion.

3. End Game. With one class remaining, I have started to reflect on the mechanical, managerial, and pedagogical mistakes that I’ve made this semester. The most obvious one right now is that some of my failed efforts to encourage peer review and open ended revisions led to a few lost weeks. As a result, I am not going to be able to add the level of polish to final product as I had hoped. Some issues will simply have to be left unfinished like organizing the bewildering array of primary and secondary source citation, maps and images, and even formatting issues. The students are really interested in many of these issues, but I feel the obligation to keep them focused on content. Next time I teach the class, I will work to streamline aspects of the class to produce a better final product.

This is the thirteenth installment of my reflections on teaching History 101 in a Scale-Up classroom. Go here for the rest.