Introducing History

i think uh welcome everybody the um this panel is about introducing history um or courses about to introduce history um and uh we're gonna we have a sort of interesting model today we're gonna we originally had conceived this as a workshop but that's not how it was scheduled so um we're gonna try to make this as kind of practical as possible uh by looking directly at syllabi and walking through the steps and the thought processes behind the syllabi that we all have created and um and drew i think is going to kick us off right by um by giving us a bit of an update about the gateways project which is one way of um thinking about this and has been a big leader with the aha and thinking about introduction to history so drew do you want to um get us started jennifer glad to i'm glad to be with you all it's a uh a small but mighty group so that means that at any point in time feel free to interject or let's turn it into a conversation i um pledged lendl and natalie and jennifer that i go like 10 to 12 minutes with a little bit of the onset but then really turn around to them uh or turn it back to them to go through sort of the the walk through the syllabi and the discussion around uh the syllabi so anyway i'm going to do what i told them and you i'm going to do i will share a few slides quickly uh to do this but i assure you that i'm not going to do sort of like a death by powerpoint thing at least i hope not dan you can be the gauge of that right so um you let me know whether i lived up to what i promised right but um as many of you know um the work in history gateways and really the work that the gardner institute is doing broadly and we're fortunate to do in conjunction with the aha in history gateway is all about uh exposing both the issue and then mitigating unjust design and post-secondary education and then focusing really on the things that that we control within the design and delivery of education i frequently uh with and amongst my faculty colleagues that's our courses our curriculum right so when we see certain uh evidence and we become rightfully concerned and in some cases outraged about it it goes back to well where can i do something about that and that's in the courses that i teach or the programs of study with which i'm affiliated right and my courses are affiliated so so broadly that's the issue that we're attempting to address and i won't belabor this amongst historians but i'll say uh if you want to know how far it goes back well at least it at least goes back about 300 400 years i'd recommend you look at uh deal stewart's work and change magazine recently uh let's say tuttle twisted at the roots you know that really traces it back to the what is now the nations wasn't then original colleges and how those models and those who founded them still have influence today right and there's a a lot of that that has to do with unquestioned and unchecked design which then makes it unjust design right so i won't belabor this i'm amongst friends here i know you're here because you get it so you don't need the lecture from drew but i you know going to contextualize the work historically and did that now i'll contextualize the work within gateway courses for those of you dan can give this presentation in his sleep as a matter of fact i'm trying to avoid putting dan to sleep with my presentation right so but um those of you who may not be as familiar with the history gateways project this is what happens uh when you [Music] our organization the gardener institute began collecting evidence around foundational level courses uh we defined them as gateway courses we didn't want to call them weed out or gatekeeper right because they implied blocking the gateway implies an entrance but we started collecting evidence around gateway courses probably going back all the way to 2003 but with the help of some support from a few foundations and some innovation we had going on here we began to be able to actually uh track uh disaggregated student record level data around 2013 and shortly thereafter around 2014 1314 uh i gave jim grossman a call and um jim returned my call right so i will say there are other discipline organizations that we reached out to the reason why we're embedded deeply in this work now with the aha is not simply because i'm american studies historian although i don't think that hurt but largely because jill jim answers his phone calls right or at least returns his messages so credit to jim there um then emily swaffer got involved in around uh 2015-16 said drew when are you finally going to share this evidence and so i did in perspectives on history but let me jump into it real quick what we wound up doing uh and this is brent drake a colleague of mine is at university of las vegas he's a gardener fellow and i did is we collected evidence in foundational level courses from about 50 institutions at the time that we were working with and with their permission and with their help i began to analyze broader rates of d grades f grades withdrawals free incompletes and eyes for failure we did around eight gateway courses at the time and we picked these eight not because there was anything mystical magical about them actually there was this is where the it turned out to be 36 that got back to us we're doing the most work around course redesign so it was very much so based on who responded and where were they doing work right and you'll see uh these are the eight i won't belabor this because i promise to keep it short but you'll see the intro us is was one of the eight you'll note that the enrollments vary to close to 100 000 students 96 000 in their english composition writing course and about 92 000 in psychology and then on the lower end calculus uh intro us was just shy 30 000 a little over 28 000 students across 34 institutions involved again emily after she saw the outcomes emily swafford from the aha uh you know really compelled me to share information i did uh with david pace's blessing at an isotope gathering i think it was in like 2015 or early 2016. and you know broadly what we shared in that convening got summarized into this may 2017 perspectives on history essay uh titled many thousands failed with a nod to james baldwin there right but you know what we found is that on average uh the rate of degrades f grades withdrawals were incomplete withdrawals and ice cream completes was just below 25 percent but what we also found for african american students it was nearly 44 excuse me 42 for native american students it was over 40 latinx students just shy of about um what 35 there and then for uh white students we found that it was actually the lowest right so it was lower than the course mean uh or the course average um we also found this replicated in all the courses right but it was the history essay that prompted the aha to go to uh the melon foundation and say hey we need to do something about this right so that's where we find ourselves now uh and by the way i verbalized that and that's all the uh the outcomes that we saw one big takeaway in this and it's a nod here to w.b du bois of course who wrote i guess it was a compilation of essays in 1905 the history of black excuse me the uh uh solar black folks um where du bois wrote about the problem with 20th 20th century being the problem with color line um in recent essays i we have been writing about the 21st century manifestations of the color line and the gateway course completion line being one of them right and you know the big so what in all this wasn't just that students of color african-american latinx indigenous students were not doing well in intro to us it was that not doing well in intro to us was directly and highly predictive of not being back a year later at the same institution and other studies showed that that was directly predictive of not finishing anywhere so often we see colleges and universities taught the most diverse class ever right but what they don't do is look at what happens in the literally the introductory courses that students will take right so that's what compelled us to action around this work uh and again the aha went to mellon i will say that the gartner institute even if our one of our co-founders thought the intro us many years and was a history professor in um the history of american studies they the mountain foundation would have never funded the gardner student of itself right this is why a partnership with the american historical association was so important because even though we had that evidence and we had some capacity to do this work with folks we didn't have the imprimatur or the capacity that the aha has right with regard to history educators so you know i like to think of this for those of you that like reese's peanut butter cups is what happens when you bring peanut butter and chocolate together right it makes it that much better and we've been able to do this work now this work um i'll make sure we get these slides out to those if you were here who you know we'll get them to all of you some of you may actually want them others go ahead and hit delete if you don't right but this is a listing of the 11 institutions that are in the history gateway project uh uh three around new york city for around the chicago area and for around houston or in texas broadly right it also gives you a sense of the courses where they're doing course redesign and the number of faculty involved so we have the 11 institutions with 30 unique courses and to date about just shy of 100 faculty involved in the course redesign work right now i cannot tell you all of them are involved in all of it all of the time right so but it does kind of give you a sense of the scope of the work around attempting to identify you know unjust outcomes use evidence-based and equity-minded pedagogies and redesigning foundational level courses what i'll also do and dan i wish i found this earlier it would have made your life easier when you were doing a presentation but um it's just sort of a thematic grouping of um you know where the redesigned work is happening right i showed you the 30 plus courses but the three of them broadly fit into texas history makes sense given that we have four texas institutions involved nine under us not all of them intro us um three under western sieve that gets the question you asked me a little while ago dan uh four underworld and then three which we just said other forms of history not to give them short shrift but things like middle eastern history right or things along those lines where uh but it does give you a sense i'm emphasizing this one piece because uh there may be a misnomer that this is because of the sir wrote i blame me that was about intro us that this is about intro u.s and at the risk of sounding like some sort of like late night sales ad it's about intro us and a whole lot more right so kind of gives you a sense where the work is being done i want to touch really quickly on some additional evidence that we've compiled since we did this uh and i won't belabor this i'll just spend two minutes and i'll say the same type of outcomes that we see because folks frequently think oh this is about first year students in foundational level courses the answer is yes and it's about a whole bunch of other students too right and this one particularly takes a look at transfer and upper level non-transfer students in foundational level courses including uh us history right or intro to u.s right we use the same data set and this is a big takeaway we did a comparison of transfers to transfers right in this case transfer students to receive the pell grant to transfer students who did not and what we found here in every instance include well seven out of eight instances including intro us is that students transfer students and these are transfer students at their transfer receiving institution who received the pal had the highest dfwi rates when compared to their non-pell receiving counterparts right so income clearly matters here um we found the same element around race ethnicity i don't want to belabor this i'm just going to say we found the same element around race ethnicity where holding transfer status constant uh white transfer students had always had the lowest dfwi rate with the exception of african-american transfer students in english but in every other instance white transfer students had the lowest rate it was always lower than the course average and then african-american latinx and indigenous students had the highest dfwi rates um i want to just summarize this and share that obviously transfer standing matters in complex ways race ethnicity matters family wealth matter but a big part of this really gets back to the piece where often we think transfer students went to the community college did well at the community college they did they gained they were readily admissible as transfer students and they still encounter the same challenges there that we see for first-year students and see for that initial analysis that we did and i'm emphasizing this simply because this points to something else that is going on in there it clearly isn't capacity because these students went to college succeeded in college successfully transferred there's something else going on that's why i'm very grateful for the aha's work in history gateways right and i'm very grateful for all of you because you get that something else is going on you don't find that acceptable in any way shape or form and you're rolling up your sleeves in the midst of a global pandemic and trying to figure out what can we do and probably also in part because of that global pandemic but you were doing it before and i i i know you'll be doing this work afterwards we'll emphasize this a bit more but upcoming work that we're doing and this is the aha and the gardner institute are some listening to history educator sessions in march and april 2022 and um some virtual options with the ongoing engagement with the american historical association of gardeners to around history gateways as well right we've been doing a lot of virtual uh pedagogical development faculty development efforts that are not simply open to those 11 institutions um again more on this later but for now i just want to say that uh the grateful for uh being able to be here with you now to share how we got here to share a bit of what's going on i will say the the pandemic itself you know we were cruising in 2019 with those 11 institutions there were maybe one or two that had a few hiccups along the way i don't want to do pollyanna ship excuse me i don't want to be naive about this but um you know we were we were doing fairly well and then of course that pandemic hit i will say that with the 11 institutions uh a number of them wound up using it as an opportunity to do redesign in ways that they could not have done had it not been for the pandemic right there were instances in in many instances in which um uh contingent faculty were the only ones who taught the introductory course is that the institutions that were involved in this work and there were policies on the book that said you both had to involve them in the course redesign but you weren't allowed to involve them or pay them for course redesign so you do the math there right and so the um the pandemic allowed a number of facts to get together and say okay we have some emergency or extreme circumstances let's do something with this um and and not waste this opportunity so anyway it gives you a bit of the context gives you a bit of the work underway uh gives you a sense where institutions are doing the work and some of the next steps we're undertaking but i i want to turn it back to uh jennifer and lindell and natalie because unlike me they're actually doing work in classrooms with real life students right so i want to make sure they get it i used to uh i miss it um but i want to make sure that they get a chance to uh share the types of work that they're doing that really does reinforce and inform the type of work that we're trying to do in history gateway so i turn it back to the three great thanks so much drew uh for that update and review for folks who are new to this process or new to the idea of history gateways so what we're going to do now is is walk through some syllabi and um so i don't lindel's been involved in the history gateways project for a while i think natalie and i not necessarily so and so our our syllabi have been created outside of that context so obviously in in um in conversation with some very similar concerns and um and research um so we're gonna we're just gonna walk through that i'm just gonna do that by the order that's on the on the website um just so that it's easier and less arbitrary but that doesn't mean that i go first which is unfortunate so it's not not intentional just how it shows up so um i wanted to talk a little i just want to take some time to talk about this um project that i developed in our history department i'm at wayne state university in detroit michigan um where as a university we've been really grappling with some very low graduation retention rates for a long time and have done some pretty extraordinary work in improving those very quickly um and and got national recognition for that but but still have a lot of ways to go in terms of addressing um student um student performance gaps based on race um and to continue to improve our graduation retention rates and gateway courses are a very important part of that that we had some more attention on it first and that kind of waned a bit but hopefully it will come back so this project was funded through an assessment grant through the provost's office and was part of a broader effort to to redesign the curriculum of the department to provide better scaffolding for our courses and enable us to do better assessment about our student about student performance for majors in particular by creating a kind of introductory touchstone um i proposed to do this and we've been talking about you know creating a kind of intro to history course for a long time and had never quite gotten that up off the ground so i proposed to do this through collaboration with david pace sometimes um bringing in somebody from the outside is the best and only way to facilitate conversations about really challenging earth thorny issues around a pedagogy right um because the pedagogy can be very personal um it can feel very personal many of us aren't trained in it explicitly um and and so sometimes having somebody from the outside come in and have a conversation or facilitate a conversation particularly with such a lovely model like the decoding process that david um has championed and it can be really helpful in um in laying that out and so for context you know we had a workshop with all the faculty in the department where david walked us through decoding right and particularly looking at the two courses we already had on the books an intermediate historian's craft course that taught that kind of introduced methods and historiography to students and then a capstone course and asked asked instructors to think about what the bottlenecks were right so if you're familiar with decoding you'll put a link in the chat in a minute um decoding the disciplines is a strategy that does exactly this right it asks you to think about the bottlenecks where you find um students facing challenges um or not meeting expectations and then thinking backwards right a bit about um about what's going on there and what as instructors we need to better do to clarify what our expectations are for students and what we're actually wanting them to learn right um so the we identified a number of things and one of the big issues uh was around um students being able to as you can see in the learning outcomes right and they're the challenges that we identified are pretty um pretty closely aligned with the learning outcomes that are listed here these are big learning outcomes lots of them right um but you know explaining the difference between primary and secondary sources identifying historical arguments formulating historical questions identifying historical evidence analyzing primary sources applying strategic reading skills to secondary sources demonstrating change over time examining arguments from different cultural and historical perspectives and discussing the politics of knowledge production in history these were things that through our discussion seemed foundational and seemed like something that students had to be able to understand in order to or had to at least have been introduced to in order to take the next step in an intermediate level course um to to do more of the sophisticated analysis um that people were expecting and hoping for and to talk about methodology right you couldn't really talk about methodology or historiography if people didn't understand the basic concepts um one of the things that we talked a lot about is um the difference between um implicitly doing addressing ideas and concepts and explicitly addressing them right and and that i think that's a big challenge in history because it's something that as a professional we tend not to talk about methodology as explicitly as some other disciplines right um there's some for some people it is a bit mysterious right we weren't necessarily taught methodology and we haven't necessarily thought it through it might be intuitive to us how we do it um you know some people talk about um some people i think historians in general tend to be divided in some in two major camps right the storytelling camp um and the kind of analytical camp um and so there's there's some challenges right and talking about what we do in the language that we use to talk about what we do and so often when we talk to our students um we we are doing that implicit teaching of historical concepts right and we do that through storytelling and that's great and it can be really compelling in writing a historical narrative but in terms of explaining to students what concepts they need to understand and helping them develop those core historical thinking skills it can be really challenging especially related to what drew was mentioning earlier about equity issues right students who did not have foundational education or or were not exposed to those things earlier um sometimes are are often at a greater deficit in trying to figure that out right it's less obvious to them so one of the goals of the syllabus that we designed out of out of that conversation was to make the historical thinking skills explicit right um and and to make them directly connected to assignments so um there's a number of things that are that these assignments are doing they're quite a lot um but the history today assignment right thinking about the relevance of history which is something that we often grapple with particularly in general education kind of gateway courses a primary source analysis a reading importance exercise getting students to think about how to read a text and what's the most important information versus other things right this is something actually that david did in a course that i was in with him that was really fantastic um an evidence worksheet again drawing on some best practices in the field and some great history pedagogy folks out there a thesis argument evidence exercise a narrative synthesis and a history for the public assignment and um so there's you know the basic language which is not helpful to go through here but one of the things that um that is really at the core of this and and structured the organization of the syllabus was the idea that um you know if we so the the idea is that this is a kind of model syllabus that could have different kinds of themes so instructors could choose a theme um and a time period and a um and a location in different parts of the world and could teach this course right we we don't and that maybe surveys aren't the best way to teach students to introduce students how to do history that maybe we're asking a lot of students to to um cover such a large range of time and it might be more challenging as instructors to help them un grasp um the kinds of key historical thinking skills while also trying to cover all that material right um so the idea is that you know you might be able to do it you might choose to do it in a large survey but you might also choose to have a more kind of focused seminar um the the goal would be that your subject would be able to um be able to cover um some basic ideas so you might have a core set of primary sources um in the first several weeks um you would talk about the foundations of historical thinking right giving students some background about you know what are facts and historical reconstruction what's continuity and change context agency those key kind of historical thinking skills um and then moving into historical questions or historical problems organized around those big analytical categories in history right gender race class generation um you could arguably add others right um depending on the what you teach and then moving to historical analysis and interpretation so um you know that analyzing historical sources um analyzing primary sources evidence narrative secondary sources argument thesis whatever right um cause cause consequences counter sexuals um multiple causes micro histories comparative history other disciplines um history and museums popular history digital history right um really trying to the idea being trying to expose students to a wide range right of ways that historians communicate and the kinds of tools that we have at our disposal so that they can see how this work is done in a really explicit way and talk about the differences between these different modes of history history writing and history research throughout the course or throughout the syllabus you see um sample readings these are um and activities these are readings that are see they're supposed to be kind of examples right so an instructor may choose to use these same readings they might choose to include use these and include additional ones that are more subject content relevant um they might um and they might choose to get rid of these all together and use other words that they they find more relevant or up to date that's totally fine but um you know the idea being that this this syllabus provides a model that anybody could conceivably use to think about um how they could they could kind of mobilize these ideas in um in advancing their own um their own subject area and introducing students so um you know this uh we're in the process of doing this now i have been teaching this in my more or less in my african history survey course and so um you can do this with uh with a non-traditional um intro courses that intro course is a um it is an introductory general education course but it's not in many universities right in many universities an african industry course would be a two or three thousand level course um but i think you know african history is an excellent example right of something that brings a whole different group of students in who might not feel um seen or represented in world history or u.s history for various reasons um and um gives them something to hold on to right and to to connect with and so there's been quite a lot of um uh of interest from students about this thing some good response i think one of the things that's really helpful about doing this in african history um is is that the politics of african history and its inclusion in the in the discipline and the representation of africans and african continent in history and whatever it gets at some of the broader politics of history as a field and a discipline that helps us um it really pushes us to to break through some of the assumptions we might have about what history is and what it looks like to do to do history work um africanists generally can't take take for granted a lot of those things um and it's been it's been very explicit for us for from the beginning and continues to be today so that opens a whole bunch of conversations about the politics of history that i think exists in every um subfield right um but are certainly more explicit in this case um so i'll stop there because i want to make sure that we can continue to share but um you know we can um we can make sure that we have opportunities to discuss at the end so i think next is natalie thank you that is so fascinating so interesting and i'm so glad that i have access to the google folder with the syllabus in it so that i can look at it um myself i did have a question i wanted to clarify we're going to go through each of us go through the syllabi and then take questions at the end yep correct great let me just uh let's see here i'm going to share my screen can everyone see the i guess it's the uh mozilla firefox window can you all see that okay okay so what i'd like to um talk about is my approach to teaching an introduction to u.s history um course based primarily on my experience um teaching this class at the university of colorado boulder cu boulder um last spring um and so that class was um history 1025 american history since 1865. and so i'd like to talk about actually two articles that have shaped my course design um and especially keeping in mind how we might teach an introductory course and implement some of you know even just some of the basic pedagogical best practices but also the practices and research from solo for instance that tells us what effective teaching practices are how we do those on a large and a large intro um course and so again just fyi they're in the chat i've dropped a link to a google folder that has um materials in there from our uh presentations um but so before and so here's here's just this slide of the class history 1025 and again a reminder that the um that there's a google folder with materials um but before i get to this actual class itself i wanted to give you just a little bit of some quick background um this was my first time teaching this particular class at cu i had actually taught two large classes at berkeley that weren't quite a straightforward intro to u.s history but social histories of the united states and so each of those classes i believe there were two classes i had taught and each of them had about 160 um students and so those were classes that did not have ta discussion sections i had graders people grad students who just um would grade uh the assignments but not teach classes um and i had also taught those two classes at berkeley in 2016 2017 so before the pandemic and so it was in person um and so then this class at cu was the first time i taught a large intro course during the pandemic and so at cu um history 1025 is offered in a range of class sizes which was actually a little bit unusual for me as well as someone who went to grad school um at berkeley the intro to us history the first half second half first half um i think capped at 150 students and second half capped at 500 students um and those were you know each semester you just had the one class to enroll in and then you had um tas um but so at cu we depending um i don't know all the details behind how undergrad studies decides this but it does vary um by semester uh and each semester there might be a range of classes class sizes for history 10 25. so um in one semester we typically have one professor teaching a large section of history 10 25 and when i say large i could be anywhere from 900 to over 200 students in just the one class with tas teaching recitation sections um and then in addition to one large offering of 10 25 we sometimes have smaller classes also history 1025 capped at 30 30 students and those ones don't have recitation meetings or graders typically and we tend to re reserve the 10 25 classes that are capped at 30 we tend to reserve those for grad students our advanced grad students who are interested in teaching as an instructor of record but so just that little bit of background so in the spring of 2021 uh when i was teaching history 1025 um my class was capped at 90 students um and the class structure you see there consisted of a lecture and then four recitation sections so that meant i had four uh tas the lecture class meetings themselves were held remotely uh so we all met on zoom and uh had lecture meetings in that way two of the recitation meetings were remote and two of them were in in person and i think the decision behind their quite honestly was just more of how to figure out how to make students and their parents happy about perhaps not having the classes entirely remote you know and having classes in person and concerns about that but also too i think practically speaking thinking about if the class is that big and i need tas um even our grad students right we've you know we've thought about how um you know the impact of the pandemic and what that means for students and their varying health needs for instance and being able to finish their education and so you know i think grad students are included in that as well and so i think um the decision there to split the recitations like that in modality um um grad students health concerns were also um faculty factored into that but so um my approach to teaching the intro to u.s history course even before i arrived at cu has been largely influenced um by the uncoverage model that lindell calder um had talked about in this 2006 article on coverage toward a signature pedagogy for the history survey and the conversations that we've had since then um you know primarily about teaching content versus skills um or perhaps some third goal that we might have in um using uh and designing an intro course i i think jennifer's um syllabus gives a really good example of that what balance if if we're just sticking with content and spill what balance um and also in my mind um thinking about how to make an intro course more student-centered versus teaching centered and so this uncovers discussion um you know has obviously raised important questions for how we teach intro history courses and for us on this panel um these questions were primarily right what does it mean we can think about these broadly what does it mean to introduce students to history what does it mean to think historically how do we define that and how can we help students transition from consumers of history to producers of history and so i had actually first learned about on coverage as a grad student um i actually had the good fortune of meeting lindell at cal he came and presented as part of an aha presentation um and so but i had known about encourage you know as a grad student so even before i taught those classes at cala's instructor of record um and so this in coverage model has influenced my course design from from the get-go so i don't have any pearls of wisdom of how to go from one kind of syllabus to another uh in my mind um coverage has always been a really important um influence and how i design courses and especially the intro to us history courses um and so i found it useful you know for thinking about what it is that i want my students to learn in an intro course um with these questions in mind of course but one question i did have even as a grad student and as someone who had not taught um as an instructor of record yet um and i'm sure lumbel has gotten questions about this um before um was how do you how do you implement the uncovered model um in a large class right even of you know just maybe 50 students right um but certainly of course i'm thinking of of the higher end closer to 100 or larger and so you know i don't claim to have figured it out um and really just my goal here is to share with you what um how i've attempted to think about this question um and you know of course under the assumption that i'm going to continue to work on this is in future uh semesters but so for this question you know about how do we implement you know kind of the core ideas um or address the questions that the uncovered model raises for us in a large class um for this question a 2020 article in the journal of american history um the top portion of it is just pictured here on the slide beyond big data was helpful for sparking some ideas and some small changes that i could make as i prepared to teach and so just briefly this article it shares the findings of a multi-year study across several campuses in the california state university system in the csu system in which historians the historians at these campuses decided to rethink hope quote you know quote unquote student success as defined by collected data that was available to them on the csu student success dashboard right so this dashboard that has this administrative driven data on student grades and demographics including dfwi and so these historians were not satisfied with this data because of as many of us would agree this data didn't really tell much about student learning of historical thinking or you know the specifics of historical thinking or what sustained student success might look like over time and so as you can imagine this dashboard focused on success markers that were important to policy makers and administrators so things like graduation rates retention rates and dfw rates uh and so it focused on these success markers and link them to demographic information like race or ethnicity pell grant status and parents education level so some of what drew um talked with us about at the beginning here but so for this csu faculty team this was limiting because it didn't help them measure the kind of success that history professors um uh you know were interested in right so you know your students ability uh to engage in historical inquiry right and interpretation um i think a lot of what we saw in jennifer's um syllabus that she shared with us and so the this csu team designed a study that merged the demographic variables and the cognitive factors to define and measure a much broader and discipline specific vision of student success um and so i highly you know just after that brief overview i i do highly recommend reading the article um it's rich with insight especially for how to do some of what the uncoverage discussion um has called for in a large intro to history class and so again there is a copy of um i included copies of this article and responses to it in the google folder um it's also it also makes an important insight about equity i would say at least um uh that our pedagogical methods and again uh some of us have already spoken a bit about this so i'm i'm really just echoing what's already been said but you know that our pedagogical methods can have an impact on our dei uh goals right so things as simple as scaffolding and formative assessment can positively affect retention and and that was actually one of the things that um that one of the key takeaways i took um from the article and so for the purposes of my history 10 25 class there was that insight and also just really kind of this reminder of i should go back and think about scaffolding and for formative assessments um and how you know i can implement that um in a large class and try to be uh creative um with that so these kinds of things that we typically limit to a small class right um i was inspired to think about it um how it might work uh in a large class and so again the csu study shows us how this is and i highly recommend it so you know so these two articles here um key in influencing um in terms of the learning goals i wanted to prioritize methods i could use or adjust and especially with the specific circumstances in a large intro to us history class and so in terms of implementing those core ideas from the coverage model i was mostly interested in thinking about i think especially as a grad student this is what stuck with me when i first read the uncovered article was what do we mean when we say you know introduce students to history and what do we mean by think historically um and so you know i knew that i didn't want to just cover content with students but i wanted them to do something with the content that you know i shared with them um and so to help with this in history 1025 i decided well actually within history 1025 and the other classes i taught i decided to identify a course theme and then i developed two course questions that would help us to explore this uh theme and so here this is from the syllabus first page of the syllabus give you a chance to take that in and so what you see here the course theme i have they're underlined uh in red right and so as you see there the main idea being that we would study major events in us history through the experiences of marginalized groups of people and so with that kind of focus in terms of a theme that wouldn't mean thinking about two questions two specific questions in my mind um that i have underlined here in green so these two core questions that kind of fall under that umbrella of the course team and what ways and for what reasons is democracy work for not working in the united states and what does it mean to be an american and who gets to decide and so i know that developing questions is not an uncommon thing uh for uh for us faculty to do um i'm certain that many of us develop a list of questions that we include in the course description um for instance but what i would say that i've done it differently even if only slightly differently is to keep the focus on just the two questions um and broad enough to reflect the recurring theme uh the course theme but also specific enough that i as the instructor would not be tempted for instance to simply lecture on every and anything that had ever happened in us history which i know even for myself as someone with a lot of pedagogical training more than the average person that goes through a phd program it can be really easy to just kind of move forward in that way um and so the course question helped to rain that in for me so you know having the course theme and questions um meant that i was giving us a a concrete starting point um for studying the you know thinking about about the past and studying the past and also doing something with the past right because these questions were meant for inquiry um were meant to give students a chance to practice historical literacy which is as you see here on the slide underlying um in blue is the other rule that i described so this course theme uh and the questions help me with these two questions here that not in my mind have animated the uncovered discussion now the article on the csu study again inspired me to create these frequent opportunities for students to engage with lecturer and then to produce you know to practice historical thinking skills um and so i developed these weekly exit tickets it's on page four in the syllabus and there in the yellow highlight is a definition i give for the students purpose behind the weekly exit tickets and just these short assignments with questions to help them do something with the lecture material um and not just focus on the course theme and questions that have a really precise questions and so you can read more about the logistics on the syllabus again it's in that folder pages four and five um so i won't go over those details but i did want to share um an example of just one weekly exit ticket to give you a sense of what these questions were um and so i typically you know um try to develop questions for each lecture or at least a key idea to help um anchor the lecture to the course theme and questions um and in this case to give a sense um um you know give students some practice with them to help them with the weekly um exit ticket so here what you see this is if you look at page seven on the syllabus this is week three here we had two lecture meetings uh one on race and american empire and the other on chinese question in the american west um and so for the monday class on race in american empire i actually didn't have um a question or a key idea for them uh it was early in the semester i don't think i was fully prepared then but i did share with them um the weekly um exit ticket um and you can see here that it's highlighted there in yellow um there are instructions around it but how did ideas about race culture class and our westward expansion shape the way american society defined american for the wednesday class on the chinese question in the american west i had a key idea which you can see there on the upper left and also a specific question about a primary source we had discussed which you see there on the lower left the question there was this image we had looked at called a statue for our harbor um and it was in the wasp magazine so in the wednesday lecture i gave a little bit more guidance to them and so with these class level questions i was trying to be a bit more specific because i wanted them to think deeply about the content or the primary sources to think about evidence as you can see with the one question there under check under and check your understanding um but with the weekly exit ticket i tried to develop fairly broad questions but contained by the week um and in part because i didn't expect one correct answer and so my hope was that the phrasing would encourage students to you know be more selective about the evidence they chose to use and how they analyzed it for the answers that they came up with um and these exit tickets ended up you know i ended up telling them and encouraging them to use them to write for instance to take home exams that they have ultimately um and i did have one more thing i wanted to say but i'm gonna stop after just this last point um ultimately i think uh the weekly exit tickets were possible and especially in a large class because i had tas um i think that you know the csu study i still think you know one was encouraging to me that i could do something like this in a large class i still think that there's a lot to learn um from it and for different departments to think about as they design an intro to us history course um but i would be lying if you know i you know said that that was the only reason um in a practical a very practical sense having the tas who could read you know those weekly exit tickets was tremendously helpful and given the structure of the course um you know if i if i didn't have tas then i would not have been able to do that you know do this or at least not in you know the first three years of being on the tenure track um or in the middle of a pandemic and and with the remote uh remote class that i was teaching um for the first time so with that i do want to stop because i feel like i perhaps maybe have gone a little bit over um but again happy to answer questions uh later great thank you so much natalie um and yeah if people have questions feel free to go ahead and put them in the chat and we'll we'll get to them um in the discussion later you can hold on to them uh but lindell uh we want to hear from you hi everybody it's always wonderful to go to aha and make a presentation about some research that you're doing but it's a real thrill to be able to walk you through a syllabus and to me that's just a sign of how welcoming the aha has become to teachers over the last decade that we have a chance to do this i'm going to tell you about my introductory history course i teach it two times i teach two sections fall and spring at augustana college the sections have 30 students in each so it's a total of 60 students i'll be teaching this course to it at any given time it's called rethinking american history 1877 to the present this course has been 30 years in the making when i start first started teaching us history survey courses right out of graduate school i was a regular stand and deliver college teacher you know every class was a one-hour lecture the students were at a textbook they took a midterm and a final and i i believe i had them write one big essay towards the end of class that's that's what this course was 30 years ago as you're going to see here in the syllabus it's evolved quite a bit since then today there is no resemblance to the creature it was uh now a long time ago i want to talk about three things in the syllabus first the learning outcomes that i set for students to perform in this course second i want to show you the assessments i'm using to find out whether they can perform those outcomes and then third i'll show you the design of the course how i teach to get them to do well on the assessments so let's talk first about the learning outcomes and like natalie my outcomes proceed for some big questions three big questions that we study in this rethinking american history course are what's the story of american history when historians tell stories how do we distinguish between plausible stories and dubious ones and third how does historical thinking help me as a human being and a citizen i became convinced some years ago that i wanted to talk about meta-narratives of american history in this course in a article she published two years ago jill lapore summarized my thinking on this uh matter she said just because we academic historians don't talk about medinares to our students doesn't mean other people aren't giving them meta narratives to believe in and i i that's totally right i believe americans are starved for a new story or new stories to tell about the history of this country that makes sense of it and two recent historical events make me believe this the first is donald trump because he had a make an incredible story to tell about american history that many americans leaped to believe that and that's his make america great again narrative and the other event was the 1619 project and the rapid adoption of that curriculum in schools and the positive reception of the project in many quarters just indicates how story starved americans are um and and open to the idea of using stories to make sense of the american past so that's a the first big question in the course and of course historians um don't believe all stories are equal and so to avoid against a natural relativism that might result from teaching students that there are some great stories out there and different stories to make sense of the american past i i teach them how to think historically about stories so that they can separate sense from nonsense and then this isn't just a academic exercise that we're involved in in this course i want them to know how this activity is going to help them as human beings and and in their careers and professions and their families so those are the three great questions that drive the learning outcomes and in particular on the second question here i want them i want them to learn i'm going to come back to those slides these particular heuristics of historical thinking heuristic is a mental shortcut that experts use to do what they do and and the problem with heuristics is once we get good at them we don't think about them anymore and and that's why historical thinking sometimes has not been taught in college classes or high school classrooms is because they're invisible to us and we just assume everybody knows how to do this stuff already well they don't so i week by week introduce students to new historics of historical thinking and the ones i've identified as being appropriate for an introductory course or these asking a good historical question and recognize good ones from bad ones learning how to connect between sources from the past how to connect uh primary sources to secondary sources in order to test their value third sourcing of documents uh which sourcing has been called maybe the historian's most unique historical thinking skill that we practice and makes us different from people in other disciplines they learn to form arguments using evidence multiple perspectives and finally recognizing that there's always going to be limits to what we know so that we have to be humble about what we claim to know and finally narrative storytelling i want my students to be able to both tell a story and to recognize a story when they see one come back to the previous slide that storytelling has been something i've on my mind for a while now i give students an assignment called the story of american history in the first week of class uh they have to tell a a one or a two page no it's a one page story of the american past um 20 years ago about half the students were telling what we call the glory story it's a freedom quest narrative about the united states as you can see that's the blue section of the chart here this is data i've collected from my students i have now over two thousand student-produced stories of the united states that they do before we do much teaching in my course so this is just coming naturally out of their heads 20 years ago about 50 percent of them told a glorious story narrative of the united states i've gone two years now where not a single student had that story to tell and not a single student was making sense of the american past along the lines of a freedom quest narrative what's replaced it you can see in the part of the bar chart that is gray or black what's replaced it is no story meaning the student writes a narrative that has the the the uh model of this happened and then this happened and then another thing happened and then this happened and then another thing happened and it's just chaotic and it doesn't make any sense at all it's just a recital of random facts and events that they kind of sort of remember from high school history classes we call that the chaos non-story and it's what most of my students tell here in this this year it looks like over 80 percent of the stories students turned in a non-story so it's become important to me as an act of democratic citizenship to teach students to know what a story is and how to tell one and in the course i introduced them to seven great metanarratives about the united states and here a student has made a meme for me that that identifies the stories they are the glory story and it's opposite what we call the gory story where america's a past is a litany of atrocities and oppressions high ideals and mixed results um cycles of whatever you often times of war um barack obama's story of america out of many one and the people versus the elites i'm not claiming that these are the only metanarratives people have used to make sense of the american past but they most of the time when i encounter someone's story the united states i can fit them into one of these categories students come into the class thinking that history is the story of the past and that the job of historians is to figure out what the single best narrative is to tell about it so i'm trying to correct that misconception and teach them that in the discipline of history we have a standard called plausibility and we want to tell stories that are at least plausible which means there can be more than one way of making sense of aspects of the american past but an infiniti of stupid ways to make sense of it that becomes our mantra in the course there's always going to be more than one possible way to make sense of the past and an infinity of dumb ways so those are the learning outcomes i set for the students the assessments now look very different than from 30 years ago i do not give examinations and as of two years ago i stopped assigning essays i stopped assigning essays after a three-year study that i made with a research partner where we examined sections where students wrote four essays over 10 weeks and sessions ident other sections taught identically the same way where they didn't write any essays and we tested them for their ability to perform some of the some of those historical thinking heuristics that are important in the course and and we were shocked to find that the students who wrote essays performed worse overall on historical thinking heuristics than the students who didn't write essays and i i invite you to read our article published a year ago in the journal of american history sort of laying out the research and what it means but it makes sense in a way because essay writing is a foreign activity for most people and it just kind of gets in the way of them learning to think historically it becomes a distractor in terms of the equity matter i think one of the reasons you have that high dfw effect rate for students coming from underrepresented groups or who are pale transfers is that typically those students don't come from backgrounds where the essay is a known way of expressing oneself the more i looked into the history of student essay writing yeah everything's got a history right well the essays got a history too the more i investigated that history the more convinced i became that there is no reason to be signing the history essay in an introductory course so i dropped it instead now i've gamified my quirks to gamify a course means they do lots of activities and assignments many of them low stakes and they accumulate points over the weeks of the course and you can see from the distribution pie chart here that there's a number of different kinds of activities that they do repeatedly these include quizzes over the main points of the historians we read they complete um film guides anytime we watch a film we have a history seminar which is a day in each unit where i roll out a new heuristic and that day is filled with activities that they do in class and they get points for it after we're learning the new heuristic i send them to what i call the history gym this would be the equivalent of what other people call history lab or history workshop at my college where over 50 percent of the students are varsity athletes in some sport i call it history gym it just resonates with them and they work out they work out using the new heuristic and practice it um anytime they recognize one of these heuristics and the historians that we're reading they can write me a paragraph that gives me the page number the quote and how why they think that that particular move that the historian making represents the heuristic that they think it represents they get points for that that's called historians at work and we have two debates in the course um where we take the material that we're learning and apply it to present day issue this spring the first debate is resolved that american schools should teach that american history began in 1619 this so they're debating whether the 1619 product should be taught in schools and then at the end of the course we're debating resolved that american democracy in the 21st century is a failure this question inspired by what happened last year in january the 6th they accumulate points which i have named after mountains because i personally like mountaineering and i just thought that was cool and fun why are there so many points well the people i was learning gamification from said because it's fun it's funner that way to give 200 points for quiz instead of two points i thought okay i have no background in gaming i have never played a his a game but on campus now i'm called the gamer professor because students just assume i must have a deep background in this to be teaching my course this way and that's very funny to me the other aspect of gamification that i like and that speaks to the matters of inclusion and equity is that there's more than one way more than one path to get a grade they don't have to march in lockstep to what i assign them to do so i have bonus activities that they can do on their own that can quickly catch them up if they fall behind for example and this has been really useful during the pandemic when students have been out because they've had coded or had to quarantine some students like to write essays and so they can and they get big points for that students love to make videos so i give them that option and i'm acquiring a library of history videos that i can actually use in class as students make those for me just last week i had a history meme assignment to find out whether they had learned anything in the first two weeks of the course the first two weeks of the course is a unit called rethinking history where i try to unpack their misconceptions about history and um and i wanted to know you know is anything good coming out of this so i had the students make a meme on the theme rethinking history and out of 60 students only three missed the mark so i i now can say with some confidence that this opening two-week period is worth pursuing here are some of the memes this is a history gym assignment for the sourcing heuristic um now that i'm looking at it didn't actually have the activity that's on the back side and i don't have a picture of that but uh i think in this history june they they are to go to a uh chapter of a book i'm making called uncovering the story of american history and they they look at documents from some unit that we're in and they have to provide a terrible example of sourcing as if they had never heard of this heuristic they have to write a so-so example of sourcing as if they were a student who is new to the concept and not not yet fully capable performing it and then they have to write an excellent example of how to source a document so those are examples the kind of assessments i'm using in the course as far as how i'm getting them to be able to do well on those assessments i'll just show you a piece of the schedule this is from a current term and you can see there's the first six meetings are on the theme of rethinking history and then we begin our reconstruction unit each unit has this pattern of four classes four class meetings to begin a unit students watch a film on the subject that gives them an emotional connection to the subject and inspires them to come in with questions that they have about the period or your topic in question here we watched the free state of jones they did that as homework and completed a film guide and came to class we discussed the film and then i rolled out the heuristic for this uh first historical unit and that was questioning and then for the next class meeting they they went to history gym and brought that work to class and on this day we sit in a circle and discuss the questions that they've generated about reconstruction using primary documents from my book understanding the story of american past as evidence to answer the questions with then um on the third day of the unit we read the first of the two historians that were reading in the course and that would be howard zinn so we were asking what is howard's end story of reconstruction they take a quiz on his main argument or what's the main claim he makes in this chapter and then we do that again but with our second historian who is jill lapore in her book these truths each unit has that pattern of inquiry and speaking of the books that's another thing that makes the course look really different from 30 years ago instead of a textbook i have students read actual histories and these have changed over time and today i think there are seven or eight really good um narrative driven histories of the united states that people could have to choose from i'm representing a number of different points of view oh you can see there we are also reading a graphic novel approach to history called the silence of our friends which is a story about a little moment in the civil rights movement that takes place in houston texas in 1967 so i will stop with that great thanks so much lindell um so i think i mean yeah there's some super thoughtful and helpful um conversations and ideas about what it means to teach history what it means to introduce students to history um and different kinds of models and i see um other people in the chat have been chiming in too scott is teaching in a very different kind of context at a community college with a huge teaching load um and some and some constraints and sharing some of his ideas there which is great um we have about 15 minutes left we want to give an opportunity for people to ask questions or make comments scott if you want to share any of the stuff that you've been sharing in the chat or talk more we would love to hear it or anyone else uh natalie uh yeah i i actually have two questions i just want to pose them but if others because i've already spoken that length if others in the room have questions we should definitely get to those first but um one was for jennifer and lundell um uh jennifer so your syllabus like i said looks so great and so i'm trying to remember is this something that has been adopted in your across the entire department that you all have adopted as a model to follow for teaching any intro level course and and if so what was the conversation like if you'd be willing to share about getting a department to agree to do that to follow um a template um a fantastic template but a way of you know restructuring the intro course i find that many faculty will often say well but that just goes against my academic freedom which i think is a little exaggerated but so um if if you have adopted that yet or if you plan to or and as much as you're willing to share anyway what that kind of conversation what the conversation looked like um and then for lendl um you know you started and you said you know this this class you know looks different than even just 30 years ago and then i saw your comment also in the chat very helpful comment about how to think about these questions and so forth and so um i just am so kind of in awe just like well in 30 years well i finally get it right um and um so i i think at the core of my question kind of in thinking about that thinking about what it looks like when someone is starting right their tenure track career and then how the class evolves because our classes do evolve is um over the years or you know yeah i guess over the years what what is your sense of you know did students resist you know that you were basically violating their expectations of what a intro course might do or did they have expectations that you were just going to you know like as you say you had originally started by doing the traditional thing as you started to change your approaches um what was did you get any kind of resistance from students um and how did you i suppose aside from saying there's research to support what i'm doing were there other ways in which you tried to convince them that what you were doing was right that you know you knew what you were doing and i suppose i'm asking as a woman of color or sometimes it can be really difficult um to get that kind of trust i think from the students and then when you totally switch it on them you know do something they're not expecting it can really mess with them so those are the two questions i have um yeah i mean i'm happy i hope you talk about that briefly uh so this was part of a broader departmental um redevelopment or curricular project and um so i would say i know you have a little experience with this too i think if you're going to do stuff like that you have to make sure that you engage people now i will say that they're um not that everybody had the opportunity to participate in developing the syllabus very few people took me up on that um and then had opinions afterwards about how it was designed and that's a problem and i think that's something that as in for leadership and departments if this is something that you want to do then making it clear to instructors this is something that we're doing together and if you want to have an input on what it is then you have to participate in the process of development um is is really critical um i will say that what so we're in the process we had conversations before the pandemic and then it got paused because nothing was happening during the pandemic and now we're picking it up again about officially adopting it it is on the books in the department um my guess is that what's ultimately going to happen is that um some form of this syllabus will um will get adopted and some people so we will still have other like traditional intro level survey courses but some people will choose to teach it as history 1001 um and and we'll we'll teach it in this model very explicitly um as an intro to history course um like intro to the discipline course or interest introduction the practice of history um and so i i think that's probably what's going to happen uh i'm supposed to teach it this next year very explicitly i've been trying to like you know show people that it could be integrated into a traditional survey course over time um in my own but i'm i'm hoping that we'll be able to to shift that uh lindell do you want to follow up the question was have i experienced pushback from students when they encounter a very traditional looking history course and the the answer is no and students don't like textbooks students don't really like listening to an hour-long lecture and when i say students maybe if i'd done this where i started at the university of chicago maybe there maybe they would have pushed back but i didn't i i was at an open admissions college when i started rethinking the introductory course students could not it was clear after 10 minutes they were all asleep and i could not be a lecturer-oriented teacher in that institution and as far as augustana augustana is a a fine college and we have students running the gamut of abilities um and i've never had pushback there either like for example i've been asking students what do you think of this gamification idea since i started doing it two years ago because i thought there might be some resistance to that you know it's like 95 percent of them love it and the five percent who don't just think it's too hard it's too much work i will say this though um the mistake one can make is to start uh redesigning a course and then not explain why you're doing it this way to students and i think the fact that i have six meetings on the theme of rethinking history at the beginning causes some of this would be resistance to go away because once they understand what history really is then what we're doing makes total sense yeah i would agree with that lindell i'd do a similar thing and it's really made a huge difference i think i see scott in the chat has said something else or said something similar that that being explicit about what he's doing and why he's doing it um has really helped in explaining and getting students on board the other too much work thing is an issue though yeah um uh drew sorry jennifer were you asking me yeah did you have a hand up yeah yeah yeah no it's actually a it's a comment based on something that natalie had shared earlier really it's natalie you talked about the beyond big data essay from the teaching textbook section the journal of american history um and i you know i just wanted to comment or add i in reading that and it's been a few years right so this is all from memory a few years ago and apparently there have been some global issues that have transpired since i first read that but you know in reading it what i was struck with is the uh the authors the instructors wound up doing exactly what on some level um the csu's chancellor's office was hoping they would do which was considering the evidence and then digging deeper right so as as much as they were recoiling to this or responding to this you know what what they conveyed was sort of a simplistic approach to it and say they were going deeper they were using it as a catalyst or at least a launching point to go deeper i remember reading it and it gets us back to the types of things that you're describing doing in your courses they talked about the types of things that were the best predictors of who actually succeeds and they didn't use this verbiage but it was you know it wasn't race wasn't ethnicity once you looked into the degree to which students saw and again these are my words not theirs purpose and relevance in the course and and to me at the end of the day well that's what this is about right i mean you know whether you're gamifying at augustana or wherever you're doing your thing right it's about having students see the purpose and relevance of the field of history and and thinking like a story and acting like a historian uh into their lives so you know i credit all of you i i i wish they would have like identified that and then said like and these are the types of strategies to go there it sort of ended there right but you're sharing the types of strategies that go there right so i'm really grateful and i'm i'm not doing it to just be critical it both uh that article both moved me but it also it irritated me and i mean that as a critical friend of it right it's kind of like okay now that we know that this is about helping students see purpose and relevance and feeling as if they belong in history how do we do that right i mean what are the strategies so anyway i digress but just picking up on it just because you focused on it earlier natalie and i agree with you it's it's been one that stuck with me i just quickly i you may have noticed i was one of the people to respond to the article to write a response and that was um i think maybe that i didn't push bring forward too much either but it was i did make sure to mention it because to me i i felt like that was that was the big thing i felt like it was buried you know where and i think they were very careful in the phrasing because i don't think they meant to say that those factors didn't matter at all i i don't think so at all i think rather was to say that if you adopt good pedagogical practices first off and then also go further and do more scholarly type teaching with social research for instance you actually can create a curriculum that would be accessible to more people right into the kinds of things that like lundell and and i think ultimately myself i think in trying to have those weekly exit tickets was also about just you know i think to lendl's point that you know writing an essay you know for you know is not going to be something that maybe you know the lower performing for lack of a better phrasing students can do but for me it was just but i want to give them practice like let me give them practice then doing that and getting that feedback from tas who you know are able to do that so so yeah i agree with you on that point i wish they had that just was such a smart point and i went to a csu so it's not like i didn't feel offended by it you know that's just like like this is absolutely correct so yeah to your point it's almost like they buried the lead but i mean it's anyway i digress they they published it i didn't so i it's it's uh i'm commenting from the cheap seats here in brevard north carolina via zoom yeah what's i mean yeah i do a lot of assessment work on our campus and one of the big things that we're constantly explaining to instructors and this is part of a failure on the part of assessment leaders sometimes or administrators in taking assessment results for granted right and assuming that you can stop there and not doing the bridge building to work with instructors to think about pedagogy and how it translates into the classroom but that's something that we say all the time right so assessment in and of itself does not improve student success how we respond to assessment helps us understand student success and and can lead us to revise our assessment instruments right um but if we're having that conversation we can we can do that work but if we're not having the conversation and connecting with instructors through assessment and and seeing them as experts and important partners in the process then we're always going to miss out right

Channel: American Historical Association

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Id: cG7XWyMbc18

Length: 85min 55sec (5155 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 06 2022