This is a unique graduate history course. It is not about acquiring and displaying historiographical competence or archival chops. It is about leveraging participants’ collective intelligence and creativity to build a better mousetrap. In this graduate research seminar, students collectively will explore, imagine, and design possible futures of teaching history in United States colleges and universities. From the cognitive science of learning to the use of digital technology in the classroom; from debates over the cost and funding of higher education to debates about student learning and assessment: history and humanities faculty face a number of new challenges and opportunities that encourage us to articulate or re-conceptualize what and how we teach. This seminar is designed as a collaborative research project exploring the potentials of history pedagogy in the 21st century. Students—as individuals and as subject area research groups—will research the state of the field in different areas of history, humanities, and higher education pedagogy literature. They will then design specific syllabi, classroom activities, or assessment tools for the undergraduate classroom. Some of the curriculum designed in the class will be implemented and beta-tested in a US History survey taught the following semester by Dr. Miller in collaboration with its creators. This class will not teach you what established experts already know. It will make you a new kind of expert.
Texts:
Clayton Christensen, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out
James Gee, Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling
Sam Wineberg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past
Grading:
Students will write two book reviews, conducted two collaborative research reports, and design an undergraduate teaching tool.
