When I began teaching history, my primary goal was to help students understand the skills involved in historical practice as a way to accommodate, synthesize and intelligently use the ever-increasing volume of communication they deal with, both personally and professionally. The high-level critical thinking and analysis we employ to deconstruct, contextualize and synthesize primary and secondary sources can be used equally well in support of a historical argument, to analyze a voting choice, or to justify an important business decision. However, in a recent course evaluation, a student expressed disapointment that my assignments were too focused on supporting an argument with evidence. While I rejoiced that the student felt comfortable using a newly learned historian’s tool kit, I was reminded that historical practice sometimes overshadows the wonder that comes with unfamiliar names, dates, and places. My ongoing teaching challenge is thus to both demonstrate the utility of historical practice and simultaneously communicate my awe of and enthusiasm for the past.
Because this teaching challenge requires a joint emphasis on systematic practice and fervent enthusiasm, I utilize two very different sets of tools to structure my classroom and assignments: activity theory and industry experience in the high-tech world. Activity theory highlights the importance of understanding each student’s object, or set of goals for engaging in a particular activity. In addition to focusing on the object of learning, activity theory also provides a systematic method to evaluate the tools that help students reach their goal, and the role the community of students plays in reaching a student’s goal. To address the difference between my skill goals for my students—critical thinking, historical reading and argumentation—and my students’ memorization goals, I have adapted my high-tech industry experience to the classroom. I emphasize communication and its real-world applicability as a way of bringing the world of social networking and the collaborative technology behind it into the classroom.
These two sets of tools come into play in the opening lecture of a 75-person class on early medieval Europe, which I began by prompting students to think about their friends’ Facebook pages as contemporary primary sources. Students already see Facebook as a place to interact, so from an activity theory standpoint, the technology I chose meshed well with my goal of getting students to participate very early in the semester. And, in fact, a majority of the class enthusiastically volunteered information about the kinds of social, religious, political, and economic framework they might be able to glean from something as simple as a Facebook status update, unconsciously supporting their claims with evidence by referencing information from the Facebook page. Then, together we explored the similarities between their Facebook-honed interpersonal skills and the historical skills necessary to analyze a wide variety of texts and images created by early medieval writers and artists. By introducing analytical and citation skills in a familiar environment, students became more comfortable applying those skills in the unfamiliar context of medieval Europe.
Navigating the difference between primary and secondary source can also be a challenge for undergraduates. In a 150-person class on outbreaks of bubonic plague between 1350 and 1950, students used a social network called Twitter, which allows unlimited 140-character updates, to document their experiences reading and analyzing a longer secondary-source book about bubonic plague in twentieth-century Hawaii. By posting short responses to specific questions, complete with page numbers, students were able to track their own progress through a monograph entitled Plague and Fire (James C. Mohr, Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown, Oxford University Press: 2004). In addition to carefully analyzing the structure of a secondary-source argument, the task required students to actively practice several specific historical skills: note-taking during the reading process, citing and analyzing primary- and secondary-source documents differently, and incorporating specific evidence to support a specific historical argument.
The careful emphasis on student initiative in the Plague and Fire reading is also a direct reflection of my communication goals for students in the classroom. Discussions, whether in large lecture halls or small discussion groups, require students to formulate thoughtful arguments supported by evidence from documents. They also need to express those opinions in productive ways that contribute to both their understanding of the materials we read and to their classmates’ understanding of those materials. Finding ways to create student-generated conversations has led to several very specific classroom practices.
First, I structure lesson plans and writing assignments that increase student-mediated activities in the classroom. My primary assignment structure, for instance, includes entire class periods devoted to small-group student paper workshops rather than to exams, a practice that works as well in small classrooms as it does in large lecture halls. While I ultimately provide feedback of my own, the responsibility students take for the public consumption of their own work and for the improvement of their classmates’ work creates an environment that mimics the workplace as well as engages students’ historical analytical skills.
Second, I carefully attend to indications that students need or want to divert from the topics I had planned for each classroom session. At one point, during a lesson plan designed to help students find different voices in a historical text about early Puritan North American colonists, two small groups mutinied. They proposed instead that their two groups should be merged, because the arguments they had been assigned to study were too intertwined to separate. Both student groups worked together to find documentary evidence to prove to me that their assessment of the lesson plan was correct, and they won their case quite dramatically when the class came back together to report on their smaller group tasks. Role-playing games and creative-writing-style adaptations of primary sources also serve to bring students into creative dialogue with each other and with their sources, techniques which challenge students to bring their own concerns and opinions to the discussions and encourage them to voice those opinions.
Finally, I emphasize the systematic nature of both historical analysis and the presentation of historical analysis. One session on writing historical arguments in my medieval survey course takes the form of a mad-lib. Students are asked to write an introductory paragraph that contains carefully structured blanks built into grammatically complete sentences. The exercise helps students walk the narrow line between too much information and a too-generic introduction. It also articulates the methodology of writing to students whose comfort zones are outside of the humanities. One student initially joked that she felt like she was in a math class but later admitted to using the process to make her own paper writing more efficient. An algebraic approach to history—treating arguments as a series of variables that fit into an argument-equation—also helps students understand the conventions of presenting arguments without restricting their individual modes of expression.
In the process of presenting lectures and guiding classroom exercises, and in letting go of the reins occasionally, I often find myself learning as much as my students about how communication works. As humans in a world augmenting its own networks of communication at a blinding rate, we find ourselves constantly asked to analyze the intent of documents created by a vast array of people in a wide variety of forms delivered via a number of different forms of media. Seeing students create their own paths into and out of the texts we discuss has helped me find different ways to communicate with them and to understand the documents with which I work in my own research. In the future, I hope to continue my search for parallels between historical practice and the technology around which students already structure their own social lives, so that I can incorporate those new techniques equally into small discussion groups and larger lectures.