Writing History in the Digital Age

Teaching the Introductory Course (Harbison & Waltzer)

Towards Teaching the Introductory History Course, Digitally (2012 revision)

by Thomas Harbison & Luke Waltzer

See 2013 final edition from the University of Michigan Press

See 2011 open peer review version, with many more comments

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Introductory history courses regularly aim to meet a specific set of learning goals: introduce students to broad historical themes in an area, expose students to the importance of the historical project, and sharpen students’ critical thinking skills around evidence gathering and argumentation. Yet, the last of these goals has been difficult for many instructors to achieve. Most survey courses have large class sizes and prioritize covering a vast range of material, and instructors lack the time and interactive space for all students to genuinely practice historical methods. Practical training is pushed to smaller, upper-level history courses where time can be spent discussing, researching, and writing about a set of topics drawn from a particular sub-field.¹

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 This approach accepts that non-majors—the large majority of students in introductory courses—can do without significant exposure to the skills at the center of the historical trade. Although thorough development of skills in historical methods and extensive expertise requires the time afforded by upper-level courses, all students can benefit from hands-on experience with critical historical inquiry and the effort to produce scholarship. The writing and thinking skills at the core of historical practice are transferable across the curriculum, and they help prepare students for a range of careers.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Rarely are introductory history courses built around the development of such skills, usually as a result of tension around coverage. Most of these courses are surveys, and they begin in a moment and promise to end in a moment. Schedules require quick and steady forward progress whether or not students have mastered a period’s complexity. Faculty members, especially new ones acclimating to the vocation (who at our college teach a significant portion of the introductory courses offered), are regularly plagued with guilt about oversimplification, leaving loose threads, and moving too fast. Students in these courses traditionally write a few research or synthetic papers, participate in class discussions, and prepare for exams. The reading load is heavy, and less time is usually devoted to written work.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Models other than the survey for introductory history courses do exist. For instance, at our college, students may elect to meet general education distribution requirements via a “themes” course, which is focused on a set of ideas, circumstances, or a period. Most of these courses still proceed chronologically, but students may linger on a particular subject for weeks at a time and explore it more deeply, reducing the pressure toward coverage so embedded in the survey.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Over the past two years we have been exploring an approach to the introductory history course that we feel makes it a more immersive, and ultimately a more valuable, experience. Throughout the semester, students complete brief assignments that expose them to a range of research and analytical skills. Our goal is for students to emerge from the course not only familiar with the broad strokes of American history, but also with a hands-on introduction to the skills necessary for uncovering, exploring, and understanding that history.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Such skills are valuable to students well beyond their study of history. Gardner Campbell has argued that general education curricula should focus on “generalizable education,” and should provide “experience that stresses the kind of learning that stimulates persistent cross-domain thinking and imagining.”² Our approach treats historical knowledge as valuable in its own right, but also accentuates what is generalizable in historical methodology. Students conduct research with primary sources to deepen their comprehension of particular topics, learning about discovery, sourcing, and competing modes of interpretation. They enter into dialogues with existing analyses to synthesize their own understandings, and practice integrating their perspectives and authority with others’. They revise conclusions in the face of new evidence and arguments, better grasping the contested nature of knowledge. They do this work on a small-scale repeatedly and reflectively during the course. Ultimately, these experiences are valuable for both future historians being introduced to the field and students who will never study history again.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Given the increasing availability of digital tools, students in introductory history classes are able to engage with history in ever more intensive and dynamic ways. Over the past two decades, the Internet has made easier the integration of additional goals into introductory courses. The combination of a scholarly “pictorial turn” and the explosion of primary sources on the Web have injected introductory history courses with a more rigorous exploration of visual and aural resources.³ Readily-available data sets and archival materials allow for sophisticated lesson plans that help students better comprehend the vivid and contested density of many pasts. Introductory courses, in addition to their traditional roles, can now more directly address the increasingly important information and media literacy components of a general education curriculum.

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Our approach synthesizes four specific and related pedagogical processes. The methods of Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines programs (WAC/WID) have helped us develop a wide variety of writing assignments that create a deep, sustained, and multi-modal engagement with course materials. The Visible Knowledge Project (VKP) has taught us that by having students engage with course material publicly they have the opportunity to see how their classmates make knowledge. Making knowledge visible also gives instructors more chances to intervene in the students’ learning processes and produce data that they can use to redirect their teaching.⁴ The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has expanded the source material we draw upon in our teaching, moving us beyond a textbook, and helped us play with the traditional definitions and boundaries of a “course.” And the principles of networked learning tie the other approaches together, emphasizing for students that doing history is a collaborative and dialogic process. Together, these ideas have encouraged us to teach history in an open digital space that prioritizes writing-intensive, project-based learning.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Before delving into additional detail about the courses in question, we would like to share a bit about our collaboration. Since 2006 we have worked together at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), Tom first as a Fellow for Instructional Technology and now as the Project Manager for Digital Learning, and Luke first as a CUNY Writing Fellow and now as the Assistant Director for Educational Technology. We both earned our doctorates in history from the CUNY Graduate Center, and as graduate students we each worked with the American Social History Project. Luke has taught history at Baruch and Montclair State; Tom has taught history at Baruch. The courses that prompted this essay were Tom’s, and each was taught using Blogs@Baruch, with Luke as a sounding board, adviser, and occasional participant both in class and on the course sites.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 In the fall of 2008, Tom taught his first class at Baruch, an introductory U.S. history course. For nearly all of the students, this was their first class in history and was likely to be their last.⁵ Tom devoted roughly one-third of class time to historical methodology. Students used most of this time to work in groups to analyze photocopied primary source documents. Most students participated enthusiastically in these exercises, but their work was highly compartmentalized and constrained within small groups during the allotted class time. Students gained some experience practicing history, but not in the immersive, interconnected manner that Tom was seeking. Communication between instructor and students was limited to feedback transferred in a shuffle of paper; students were not seeing and learning from one another’s successes and failures in reading, interpreting, and writing about history.

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 In an effort to expand and extend the sharing process, Tom turned to digital technology. At first, this meant the college’s course management system: Blackboard. It provided students with a space to carry on discussions outside of class, where they could share conclusions from one day and pose related questions going into the next. Yet, the system replicated many of the divisions encountered in the classroom, and failed to break the call-and-response pattern in which students answered narrowly-defined questions posed by the instructor. Because of its design, architecture, and the barrier between it and the open web, the system was hostile to student-published multimedia and student voices. Student work could not be shared beyond the class, and even within the class it was difficult to create a web of knowledge that could be referenced, reorganized, and built upon.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 In the summer of 2010, Tom taught the survey again. But this time he made use of the college’s open publishing platform, Blogs@Baruch, which Luke runs and organizes faculty development around.⁶ During the first couple weeks of class, when student contributions to the blog were limited, students referred to the course site as a “resource.” They expected that it would spit out information that they needed or desired: the syllabus, readings, lecture slides, and ultimately, a grade. Over the course of the semester, there were indeed many times that the site operated as a tool for the transmission of such information, and it did so effectively. But after about three weeks, students began to see the site as more than that. They recognized that it was, above all, an active workspace that both encapsulated and propelled the majority of the work for the course. During the semester, it became clear that using an open publishing platform expanded the opportunities for a range of student work and created the conditions for pedagogical experimentation that simply were not present in a more traditionally structured introductory course.

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¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 In the following paragraphs, we detail some of the pedagogical opportunities that emerged during our integration of Blogs@Baruch into seven introductory history course sections taught in 2010-2011. We highlight six characteristics of our sites that explain why they propelled us toward our pedagogical goals. We aim to retain these attributes in future online learning spaces, and we believe the methods and skills they nurture in students should be in the forefront of any college’s general education curriculum.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 1. Active: To challenge students’ preconceptions that successful history equals memorizing content, we require them to constantly engage with a range of sources and write in a variety of modes. Students are required to visit the site between every class meeting, and at each stage contribute something new in response to a writing prompt. The prompts encourage students to specialize their knowledge in narrow topics of their choosing, positioning them to challenge historical treatment of that topic in the textbook, lectures, and discussions. This prepares students to teach their classmates about their topic and field questions about the turf they have just familiarized themselves with. There is not enough time for students to exhaustively research topics, but they get a strong taste of what it means to develop expertise, and the process by which a community of learners strives for this goal.⁷

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 The degree to which students develop deeper understanding is made visible via a series of “micro-monographs,” three- to four-paragraph essays that elaborate on very narrow topics. We find that many students, once they begin such investigations, thrive in the role of detective, particularly when assessing the accuracy of information. For instance, when students were asked to fact check Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York using a series of digital archives, most were able to effectively offer narratives that replaced and corrected those conveyed by the movie, expounding on their findings with embedded images, videos and texts from both primary and secondary sources.⁸

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Such activities set up reflective conversations in class about the processes in academia and commercial publishing by which monographic works are produced, interpreted, and synthesized. In this context, students began to evaluate their own work as a secondary source. This prepared them to practice modifying their historical narratives and conclusions as they answered their peers’ questions and gathered new information. Assignments immersed students in the process that is so common to the work of humanists: constructing an argument and adjusting it recursively in the face of questions and new evidence. By doing so, they experienced first-hand the evolving and contested nature of historical understanding.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Through these types of activities, which range from flurries of informal discussion to synthesized research subject to revision, students constantly grapple with competing sets of ideas. This type of exploratory learning is closely in line with our belief that students learn best and acquire generalizable skills when they are producing knowledge.

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 2. Social: In the open environment of the course site, students routinely view and respond to classmates’ historical arguments. In class we review model critiques, guiding students toward the practice of constructive criticism. Students’ quick access to new information from digital archives across the Internet enriches our online conversations. In addition to helping classmates by asking questions and offering critiques of blog posts, students often voluntarily share sources with one another. The course sites extend and tie together our face-to-face meetings: sometimes work on a site helps set up in-class conversations by establishing questions and lines of argument, while at other times it serves as an extension of debates and investigations that germinated while we met.

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 The social dimension of Blogs@Baruch became more pronounced when we incorporated BuddyPress in the fall of 2010. This WordPress plugin allows students to build profile pages, track their work across the installation over their career at the college, and interact with other students system-wide. The simple act of linking their account to a profile picture gives students a stronger attachment to the course site, as their profile picture shows up every time they leave a comment in the system. The front page of Blogs@Baruch shows an activity stream of recent publicly posted work, increasing the likelihood of serendipitous connections within and beyond the system.

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 During the fall of 2010 and spring of 2011, Tom had students from two simultaneous course sections share a single web space. Many of the most probing questions and constructive criticisms were launched across sections. The extra social and physical distance between the students worked as an advantage more often than not, with shy students more likely to speak freely from a somewhat more anonymous position. The additional voices in the conversation intensified the rate at which ideas were exchanged, and gave each class more material to consider.

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 Students at Baruch are introduced to Blogs@Baruch in their Freshman Seminar courses and more and more students are using the system in their classes. We are exploring ways to develop curricula that take fuller advantage of the networked nature of this publishing. We have seen what can happen when we link a couple of sections of a class that share a professor and a syllabus; we would like to explore how the curriculum of the college can be impacted by experiments around interdisciplinary exchanges and co-teaching across departments, with the expectation that such a learning community has great potential to teach students the value of collaborative and cross-disciplinary production.

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 3. Open: Blogs@Baruch has granular privacy control: sites can be open and indexed by search engines, open and not indexed, open only to Blogs@Baruch users, open only to users added by the individual site administrator, or open only to administrators. Beyond that, individual posts and pages may be password protected, and authors may publish under an alias. Much of the faculty development and instruction done around the system is oriented to equip users to best navigate these options given their needs, and such instruction regularly extends to the classroom. The default setting on all course sites on the system is open, a choice we have made to urge members of the community to think through the possibilities of openness.

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 Everything the students contribute to our sites, unless they themselves choose otherwise, instantly becomes visible across the Web. On a few occasions, students have received comments on their posts from professional historians. In one case, a photo archivist from a presidential library asked a student about the provenance of an image he had posted. Apparently, the image the student had used was pervasive on the Internet, but the original source information had been lost. The student did not have the answer to the archivist’s puzzle, but the situation prompted a series of valuable teaching moments about the implications of open publishing, the work of the archivist and the historian, and the complex issues that surround questions of intellectual property in the digital age. Such conversations help students better comprehend both the power and ethical implications of researching information on the Internet, as well as the evolving nature of historical knowledge.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 A learning environment as open as this also profoundly improves students’ ability to imagine audiences for their writing. Before using an open publishing platform in the survey course, students wrote primarily for us as the instructors, with some peer review sprinkled in. When students publish to an open platform, indexed by Google, the stakes are immediately raised. We spend significant time in class discussing the implications of openness on writing and review processes. Such diversity of audiences and intensive peer review—core WAC/WID principles—sharpen student writing and their historical thinking.

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Institutions and instructors doing coursework on the open web should be aware of but not hamstrung by concerns about FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act). Though FERPA has not adapted to new communication realities, such pedagogical experiments do require thought and ethical consideration. FERPA alone is an inadequate guide to such consideration. Sharing student work publicly is not a violation of FERPA; but students need to know that this is happening, and need to have control over their work, including the ability to remove or restrict its viewing if they so choose.

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 Though users should be aware of the risks, we believe the pedagogical benefits of open learning far outweigh any potential downside. Using an open system for student production makes learning processes more transparent, promotes dialogue between students and source materials across the web, and drives home to students the reality that they are engaged in making actual knowledge.

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 4. Media rich: In addition to linking to a vast network of media, students on Blogs@Baruch can easily combine video, audio, and images with their text composition. WordPress enables them to elegantly combine multiple media forms. Many assignments call on students to present and interpret evidence represented in a variety of formats, introducing students to the power of multimedia to represent (or misrepresent) historical ideas. This brings them face to face with particular methodological challenges that accompany the use of visual and aural sources, and offers them a sandbox in which they can practice distinctive techniques for reading such sources. As they embed images, students consult online tutorials for analyzing visual evidence (such as those provided on History Matters), and write up their findings.⁹

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 The aesthetic richness of the site is achieved primarily through the work of the students. They constantly illuminate points in their own writing using multimedia. At times, they are given an opportunity to contribute to site design. For example, in one assignment early in the semester, they uploaded images that they deemed representative of important turning points in U.S. history. For the remainder of the semester, their images rotated in the course site header. This encouraged students to see themselves as producers with a significant degree of control over their learning space. Students have remarked that seeing their work profiled prominently on the site gives them a sense of ownership over the space.

¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0 As students work through the challenges of reproducing and interpreting visual and aural evidence in support of their arguments, the past becomes more vibrant and recognizable, and they learn valuable and broadly-applicable media literacy skills.

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 5. Metacognitive: Our writing assignments regularly encourage students to categorize and prioritize their arguments. When we drafted the general architecture of the web space, we structured the space with a flexible categorization system that brought order to the content as it accrued over time. We created two types of categories: major themes of the course, and out-of-class assignments. We intentionally left the taxonomy loose, leaving much of the classification work to the students.

¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 Before adding any text or media to the site, students must think about the most appropriate placement of their new information, deciding whether to write a new post, respond to an existing post with a comment, or reply to a comment in a threaded conversation. Students also gain experience classifying knowledge after they have finished composing a post. When they tag a post, students must extract the three or four key ideas present in their discussion, implicitly defining their work relative to the larger themes of the course. Their choices contribute to the building of a folksonomy of the content of the course. The tagging organizes the roughly five hundred posts authored by each class during the semester into archives. This eases assessment and review, as students and instructors can review a portfolio of contributions arranged by theme, and the dominant tropes of the course emerge.

¶ 33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 As the class brings order to an increasingly complex web of information over the course of the semester, we reflect upon the process together. Students witness how new ideas and concepts emerge as layers of meaning develop. The abilities to manage and create taxonomies, regroup, rearrange, and reinterpret knowledge are valuable skills both within and beyond the discipline of history.

¶ 34 Leave a comment on paragraph 34 0 6. Immersive: Many existing history teaching modules that employ technology punctuate single units alone. Our course sites on Blogs@Baruch build over time and reveal to students major themes and connections across a course in a way they can easily grasp, engage with, and revisit. The publishing environment enriches the class as a laboratory does in the hard sciences. It gives students hands-on experience with the skills of the historical trade, especially analyzing primary documents. Thanks to digital archives and projects such as The Lost Museum, Picturing U.S. History, and The September 11 Digital Archive, we witness students grapple with historical questions while navigating a sea of sources.¹⁰ During assignments that require them to engage with these types of complex data sets, students visualize the tension between breadth and depth in the study of history, engage a range of methodologies, and develop a sharper awareness of historical perspective.

¶ 35 Leave a comment on paragraph 35 0 The Blogs@Baruch space also immerses the teacher deeply in the pedagogical experience. As the Visible Knowledge Project has demonstrated, digital tools can foster transparency of processes that allow teachers to not only better assess their students’ learning, but also their own teaching strategies. Documentation of student learning in an open web publishing space forces important questions about teaching to the surface. Some of those questions include:

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• How can student work outside of class be seamlessly integrated with face-to-face experiences in the classroom?
• What types of writing should students spend their time on?
• How tightly should instructors scaffold research and writing assignments?
• How frequently and bluntly should instructors redirect communication from and between students?
• To what degree should larger research and writing projects be assigned across the semester relative to smaller, daily tasks?
• How often should students practice and reflect on methodology and historiography, as opposed to historical content?
• What factors determine whether students should work independently or in groups?

¶ 37 Leave a comment on paragraph 37 0 These pedagogical puzzles do not disappear with the implementation of an open publishing environment, but they are more routinely foregrounded in the preparatory process, and in order to make the space an effective one, the instructor must grapple with them. While projects like the Visible Knowledge Project have exposed the “intermediate thinking process” in particular projects and course units, publishing platforms like WordPress now make it possible across not only an entire course, but multiple iterations of the course. Both students and faculty can navigate the sites conducting the type of “socially situated learning” promoted and prized by the VKP as “intrinsic to the development of expert-like abilities and dispositions in novice learners.”¹¹

¶ 38 Leave a comment on paragraph 38 0 Assessment and Moving Forward
When Luke asked Tom’s students how they felt about their course blog, one student responded “I don’t like it because it keeps the class always on my mind.” To a faculty member, this is praise with faint damnation. We all want our students to be absorbed in our course, even if we would prefer they be less resistant to such absorption than this student. We have not yet designed a formal assessment to measure student learning within this type of course, though it is something we would like to find the time and resources to implement. Students in these classes are certainly writing more frequently and voluminously than they have in previous courses that we have each taught. In earlier iterations, students wrote on average three five- to seven- page papers, or roughly four thousand words, over the course of the semester. In these recent courses, students are writing about twice that, just in shorter and much more varied bursts.

¶ 39 Leave a comment on paragraph 39 0 The course sites are highly effective assessment tools. They paint a more complete, richer picture of student performance and understanding than does a traditional midterm/essay/final exam model. A significant portion of the final grades (at least 30 percent) is determined by the quality of students’ work on the course website, where they are judged on creativity, effort, attention to instructions, and the timeliness of contributions. Instructors can respond to students as frequently as they wish, although we found it to be most manageable and effective to concentrate on redirecting student writing with general advice aimed at guiding revisions. If we detected historical inaccuracies or improper sourcing, we intervened immediately with a detailed response, but otherwise tried to judge student contributions generally and in the context of the broader conversations in which they were engaged.

¶ 40 Leave a comment on paragraph 40 0 We are sensitive to concerns that some faculty members may refrain from implementing a course site such as that outlined here due to fears about increased workload. Yet, such concerns are often overblown. After the additional labor of re-conceptualizing a traditional syllabus and crafting the writing prompts, the workload during the semester was similar to what we faced when teaching with minimal technology. As we read student posts in advance of class meetings, we were aided in both assessment and preparation, since the material enabled us to hone in on struggles students were having with certain concepts.

¶ 41 Leave a comment on paragraph 41 0 Questions of scale and efficiency inevitably arise around teaching with digital tools. Like most public universities, ours is under significant pressure to cut costs. Two methods that are being explored are dramatically increasing class size to save money on labor, and offering online instruction to save money on space. Technology is necessarily implicated in both of these processes, and we have been insistent that Blogs@Baruch and the services of the Schwartz Institute not become regarded as “efficiency” tools at the college. But faculty members are increasingly caught in a situation where they are forced to teach courses much larger or different in structure than what they would prefer, and the experimentation around questions of pedagogy and curriculum development that we are doing can provide guidance and models through this transition. Small introductory history courses at large public universities are simply not on the horizon anytime soon. This context increases pressure on faculty to stress coverage, because assigning reading and delivering lectures appears to be more manageable and measurable than having students produce a significant amount of work in their own words.

¶ 42 Leave a comment on paragraph 42 0 We have not yet attempted this model in a class with more than fifty students, but feel as though it could be adapted, with some modifications toward group work and co-creation, to a course of any scale. We are eager to try such an approach. Our experiments suggest that courses that embrace and build upon the idea of “the student as producer” can invigorate introductory history instruction, as well as introductory courses in other disciplines, while pushing back against the passivity and anonymity that prevail in larger courses.¹² It is important that we not eschew factual knowledge, but we needn’t be limited by concerns about coverage. At their best, these courses not only provide a baseline for our students to know about the past, they also teach our students what is to be gained by doing history.

¶ 43 Leave a comment on paragraph 43 0 About the authors: Luke Waltzer is the Assistant Director for Educational Technology and Thomas Harbison is the Project Manager for Digital Learning at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College. Both authors hold PhDs in History from the CUNY Graduate Center.