Teaching Thursday: Thinking about Two Classes

I have three teaching projects that I’m spending a little of my very limited bandwidth fussing with this summer.

The first is a mild and largely technical revision of my History 240 class. This course, affectionately known as The Historians Crap (Historians’ Craft), is one of a pair of required courses for all history majors and the only required course for our minors. The course largely focuses on methodological and historiographical questions. 

Over the past few years, I’ve broken it into three sections. The first second deals with the history and methods associated with the discipline of history and I’ve been using Sara Maza’s book Thinking about History (2017). It’s a nice book for a lot of reasons. It’s hard enough to challenge students, but also straightforward enough to provide a kind of scaffolding for how we think about history today. In the past, I’ve assigned one chapter a week, but this year, I think I’m going to trim it back to the first 5 chapters which address the “History of Whom,” “The History of Where”, “The History of What”, and “How is History Produced.” By cutting out the final two chapters (which are relatively weaker than the first four), it gives me more space to focus on the second and third part of the class.

The main thing that I need to do to modify this part of the class is to convert my additional readings that are PDFs into a format that is more accessible under my institution’s new accessibility guidelines. I’ve blogged about that here.

The final two parts of the class will focus on developing a prospectus for a longer research paper (that might be part of a capstone assignment) and spending time in the Special Collections learning how archives work.

The other class that I’m thinking a bit about this summer is my Roman history class next spring. This past year, my classes had an attendance problem. It is worse in the spring than in the fall. This is partly because my institution has a 16-week semester and partly because my students, by the spring, are tired. Their attention is fraying and their energy levels are low.

In the past, I’ve thought about ways alternately to breath more air into my classes by providing writing days where students can work on their projects either in class or at home, alternating low-stakes and high stakes attendance days, and creating “lab days” where we talk about methods and practices. These have worked to varying degrees, but seem more like a bandaid than a cure.

I’ve been kicking around the idea of transforming my Roman History class, by presenting it as three modules. Students would only need to take two of the three modules. The first module would be a basic history of Rome from the Civil War to Constantine. The second and third models would he a history of Christianity and a history of Late Antiquity respectively. Each module would be five weeks, have a final exam and a primary source paper associated with it.

The students would be required to complete the first module and then one of the final two modules. They are free to attend all the classes, of course, or they can attend only those classes in the two modules that they are completing. This effectively allows each student 5 weeks (10 classes) of excused absences. It also makes the 11 weeks of required class time far more high stakes. During the 5 weeks when students won’t be required to attend class, they can use this time to work on the various writing assignments, get reading for class done, and to take care of various life events that invariably impact their ability to come to class. 

More importantly than that, it’ll humanize the spring semester a bit by making the class time more manageable for students frazzled and exhausted by the academic year and other challenges in their lives.