Teaching Thursday: Writing Reflexive History

Here is a brief description of my grading criteria for my Graduate Historiography Seminar.  The main assignment is an experiment in reflexive historical analysis. The rather draconian requirements largely serve to prevent graduate student require course malaise.

10% Weekly Journals

Each week you should write a reflective journal entry on the readings from that week.  There is no fixed format for these journal entries.  They should be between 1000-1500 words in length (although longer is certainly acceptable). They should be typed.

Each journal should represent a series of book notes. Typically, these include the topic and thesis of the book, the major elements of the author’s argument, and some reflection on the book’s significance. My book notes tend to include some discussion of how the book could fit into my own research interests.  I generally cite the book throughout my notes including page numbers in parentheses. These ensure that your notes are clearly tied to book.

I will expect book notes to be submitted each week after class.  Failure to have book notes completed will result in a 5 point deduction from your final grade.  This means that you have to take preparation for class seriously.

60% Synthetic Analysis

This analysis will draw upon your weekly journals as the “primary source” for a synthetic analysis of your own interpretations over the course of the semester.  If, as Collingwood argued, “all history is the history of thought,” your goal is produce a history of your thought over the course of the semester.  The weekly journals must stand as a foundation for your analysis.

Invariably, your understanding of difficult texts, the relationship of these texts to your own research interests, and the relationship of these texts to other texts discussed over the course of the semester will inform your synthetic analysis to a considerable extent.  Moreover, you may find the additional readings from the supplemental bibliographies provided for many of the weeks will help you produce a more effective synthetic understanding.  The best papers with draw upon your archive of weekly journals as a source for exploring the texts and concepts.  This means attempting to address these texts as both historical sources (with a logic of their own) and as texts with a relationship to other texts (classroom discussion, the books under discussion, and any other readings).

As all historical writing, your analysis must have a thesis and a method for engaging the material from your archive of weekly journals.  The best synthetic analysis will show a willingness to stretch outside of any narrow intellectual comfort zone. Since the class has an explicitly conceptual (or theoretical) foundation, you must address and critique the theoretical foundations for the discipline of history in your paper while at the same time demonstrate some ability to consider your own study of historiography in a historical way.

This is a creative project, and I will reward in equal measure creativity and hard work.  The final product must include both your archive of weekly journals (approximately 15,000 words) and a complementary synthetic analysis of around 10,000 words.

30% Class Participation

For some reason, it has become popular to sit silent and stone-faced during the discussion of difficult texts.  Many of the texts in this class will pose significant challenges and push us out of our comfort zone.  Every graduate student in the class is expected to participate in the analysis, interpretation, and critique of the texts.  Students who do not contribute to the work of the seminar will be penalized. While I will not grade individual performance in each class, I will maintain a running assessment of each student’s participation.