Teaching history survey: challenges, innovations, and adjustments in Civilizations I
Civ I (HIST 117) covers the history of the Western World from the earliest times (Ancient Mesopotamia) to c. 1600. I had never taught the course before coming to ACU, and much of the material in it was somewhat new to me before I prepared the class, since my training is in modern history, and this course covers ancient and medieval history. Because of the huge scope of our material, I begin by introducing and illustrating the anthropological concept of worldview as a lens through which civilizations can be viewed. This lens provides an anchor point that we come back to throughout the semester, applying the same set of questions and ideas to each civilization that we discuss.
On the first day of Civ I, in a dynamic and self-reflective discussion, we talk about the five worldview questions that each civilization asks and answers:
- Where are we and what is this place like? (cosmology)
- Who are we and where are we going? (human nature/purpose)
- What is the problem, and what is right and wrong? (ethics)
- What is the solution? (ethics)
- How do we know? (epistemology)
This discussion defines terms, requires thinking about the values and behaviors of our own society as compared to others, and sets the tone for a course that, if all goes well, should include a great deal of discussion and working towards specific learning objectives (application of the worldview lens across multiple civilizations) as a community of respectful, compassionate, curious scholars.
Use of the worldview lens as a thread throughout the course (students must apply it in their major paper and in the essay portion of their final exam) provides continuity in a class that might otherwise feel overwhelming in its range and detail. I have found this method—an innovative one, as far as I know—to be very effective. It’s also a good way to make sure that the course achieves the learning objectives specified by the requirements for inclusion on the General Education Cultural Awareness menu.
Difficulties in this class during its maiden voyage, fall 2010: During this semester I had a TR 8:00 class in which students often failed to engage despite my best efforts. On a few occasions, I had to reprimand students who were texting, talking, or even reading the newspaper in class. One student in this section was also borderline disrespectful. By mid-term, this had improved. In my opinion, the improvement stemmed partly from surprise at my willingness to reprimand, and my brisk handling of the borderline disrespectful student.
In order to try to change the feel of the course, promote greater classroom community, and avoid this problem in the future, I added a new assignment in the spring 2011 semester: an in-class group presentation in which students led their peers through discussion of assigned texts. My hope was that a presentation would build students’ collegiality and engagement with each other more quickly, and give the students more perspective on how difficult it can be to get up in front of a classroom to lead discussion and present material. I also thought it would improve students’ learning and attention span if they got to hear from their peers more frequently. I’m not sure if the addition of the presentations is the reason, but I’ve had no problems with student engagement or respect in these survey courses since then. And a few semesters down the road, one of these student presentations produced perhaps my favorite ACU moment ever: two students summarized the Aeneid in verse, set it to the tune of “American Pie,” and performed it in class (with great gusto, I might add.) It was epic.
In later iterations of the Civ I course, I have added more use of the arts to illustrate course themes. In particular, we flesh out our discussion of the shift from medieval to Renaissance by listening to the music of Perotin, Josquin des Prez, and Shakespearean troubadours, and looking at shifts in painting and sculpture from Giotto and Donatello to Michelangelo and van Eyck. A student’s response to the use of this material in a Spring 2015 iteration of Civ I is included here: Melissa‘s email.
Teaching Core: The Best and the Worst of Times
There’s a reason all of the 2010-11 Core faculty got a mug that says “Surviving the first year of Core? I’ll drink to that!” When I taught Core 120 with Dr. Susan Lewis and Dr. Greg Straughn in the spring of 2011 (Core’s first year), the class was extraordinarily difficult to teach for several reasons. Most importantly, the class size was far too large at 109 freshmen. Despite our best efforts and multiple strategies, we as a teaching team found it very hard to promote constructive discussion, which was quite necessary for the sort of topics covered in the Core. Introspection, critical engagement, and the ability to make connections between ideas and across disciplines are central to the Core’s goals; however, these types of skills cannot be taught and tried in a room of 109 (somewhat hostile) freshmen.
I often became extremely frustrated and discouraged while teaching this class, mostly because I worked harder and longer hours preparing for this class than any other course I have ever taught, and despite my and my colleagues’ very hard work, our efforts often appeared to fail (again, I think due to class size, student hostility, and other problems inherent in the Core in its first year). Much of the time, I felt like an ineffective teacher in this class.
Other problems: the course as we had to teach it was far too impressionistic and rarely achieved the depth or context it should have. As a historian, for example, I cannot in any way agree that Core is a sufficient replacement for a Civilization course.
We lost the students during the first 3-4 weeks because we frontloaded the most difficult and unfamiliar material (Marshall McLuhan’s theories of media and the Asian philosophies). The course also lacked rigor in assignments, with only one paper assignment requiring more than three pages.
A few things I think did go well: Greg, Susan and I decided to do a “dwelling in the Word” segment for five minutes of each class. This promoted connection between us as a team, between us and the students, and integrated faith into the class, often in a very personal way. The best thing for me that came out of this first Core teaching experience was the opportunity to team teach–something I had never done before. It was wonderful for me to get to work with two such bright, experienced, and dedicated professors in my first year here at ACU. Team-teaching promotes connections across disciplines and exposes faculty to different teaching styles. During my semester with Susan and Greg, I learned so much about using technology in the classroom (we employed iPhones almost daily), incorporating various kinds of media (Susan’s specialization), and handling a very difficult situation with grace and professionalism (Greg in particular modeled a cool and firm yet compassionate response to student hostility that amazed me).
I agreed to teach Core 120 again the Fall of 2011, this time with Lauren Lemley. Both of us had taught the previous spring on teams of three, and we both felt we knew some things that we should avoid this time around. We also suspected (correctly) that having a smaller class size would help; with only two professors, we had a cap of 70 instead of 100+. Lauren and I tried to correct some of our prior problems by beginning with more comfortable and familiar material first, to build students’ confidence and our rapport with them. We also spent much more time talking about research and writing and assigned a lengthy (12-15 pages) research paper students worked on throughout the semester, with periodic consultation with the professors, class time set aside for peer editing, and very detailed feedback in the grading of multiple drafts. Lauren and I also abandoned the Ten Theories of Human Nature textbook in favor of a battery of primary sources, which we used in combination with the popular Young Adult novel The Hunger Games. We felt that the primary sources were more meaty and immediate readings than the secondary source textbook, and we were pleased with how the students received them. We approached many of the topics that had proved divisive in the first year of Core through the lens of Hunger Games, applying ideas and criticisms first to the novel’s society, before turning our eyes upon our own society. This seemed to effectively calm or eradicate student hostility to some of the more challenging topics in the class, such as racial and gender inequalities and their effects on identity. In more recent iterations of our Core 210, we have moved on to a more current popular YA novel with similar themes: Divergent, and added a weeks-long apocalyptic scenario in which students are required to work in teams to overcome basic threats to survival, set up governments and communities, make laws, and choose to accept or reject outsiders. The outline of the apocalyptic scenario and related assignments can be found here: Core210Apocalyptic_Faction_Project (1).
Student evaluations of my Core classes (provided in the next section) clearly show steady improvement over the many times I have taught it–a fact that Lauren and I are extremely proud of. As with Greg and Susan, teaching with Lauren has proved wonderfully stretching and inspiring for me. Lauren is a highly motivated and creative teacher, and I find myself striving to become better just to keep up with her! After working with her over several years now and observing her success, I have begun incorporating some of her pedagogical approaches into my history courses. For example, Lauren designed a mid-term debate for Core with clearly delineated topics, timed responses, and themes. I decided to do something similar in Nineteenth-Century Europe, but had the students adopt the positions of late eighteenth century philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and Edmund Burke in their debate. Lauren’s letter of support describes our collaborative work on Core 120/210 and is available here: Elliott Tenure Letter.
Pedagogy, Innovations, and Adjustments in Selected Upper-Level History Courses
Recent Europe, which covers European history from the end of WWI to the present, proved to be a surprisingly fun class to teach. I taught it in the fall of 2011 for the first time, writing everything from scratch (and teaching myself a lot of new material along the way.) Before teaching this class, I’d always rather loathed the twentieth century, which I found depressing and, well, too recent to be very interesting. But in prepping to teach the class, I discovered a love for the Soviets–endlessly fascinating!–and for less commonly studied aspects of twentieth-century European history like Separatism and Autonomy movements (IRA, ETA), punk and Nazi rock culture, and interwar eugenics. I really enjoyed communicating these new-found interests to the students. I also enjoy the research paper work students do in this course. I decided to assign a paper in which students place a literary artifact of the twentieth century in its historical context. In 2011, three students wrote papers (on Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, and Kurt Vonnegut) that they then polished and presented at the Phi Alpha Theta regional conference in the spring. It was really rewarding for me to work so closely with the students on these projects–I helped them polish and prepare for the conference after the class ended–and then see them present. They all did really excellent work. In the fall 2013 iteration of Recent Europe, I added a new assignment. It requires the students to identify five current Europe news stories and report briefly on them in class, connecting the story to course themes. So, for example, students might bring in a BBC piece on the vote for Scottish independence, and I’d tie that to broader trends towards separatism in Europe since WWII. In practice, this assignment illustrates more effectively the immediacy and relevance of the material we’re covering in this class. Recent Europe lends itself less obviously to the integration of faith and learning than some of my other courses, but I do take the opportunity to talk about European secularization in the twentieth century and discuss causes for the shrinking church and what our response should be to this phenomenon. In the Fall of 2015, I’m adopting an approach to research that worked very well in Mongols, Poppies, and Satyagraha in 2014 and setting aside a week of class time for one-on-one research tutorials partway through the semester, and the final week for a miniature conference, with the students assigned to related panels based on their research topics. The last time I tried this I had seven students present their work in Asian history at the Research Festival the following semester, and I’m hoping for similar results with modern European history this time.
I picked up Renaissance and Reformation Europe for the first time in the fall of 2012, my third year. The early modern period is out of field for me, but I’ve always found the era intriguing and was eager to learn more, and especially to incorporate lots of art and music into the class. I also wanted to conduct a very rigorous study of the theology and ecclesiology of the various Protestant reformers, particularly with these ACU students, many of whom had a strong background in church history already. This class is a delight to teach–I always learn new material, and the students emerge with an impressive capacity to discuss humanism, compare the arts across Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, and contrast Zwingli, Luther, and Calvin’s understandings of church government and the Eucharist. The students researched and wrote papers on early modern topics of their own choosing; one of the best was Luke Morgan’s study of humanist pedagogy, which he extended into a discussion of modern curriculum. Luke turned this paper into his senior capstone project, which I directed, and also presented it at the Undergraduate Research Festival. Luke begins his doctorate in comparative literature at Texas Tech in the fall of 2015.
In groups, the students in Renaissance and Reformation Europe were also responsible for presenting over and leading the class in discussion of one scholarly journal article, and they did a fine job with this project. I find that student leadership of discussion frequently promotes better participation and more lively and challenging points than if I lead discussion myself exclusively. When I teach this again, I want to do a better job with the Renaissance music discussion (perhaps by consulting Greg Straughn or Matt Roberson for more guidance, or having a guest lecture; I was a bit at sea in this area myself.) This course provides wonderful opportunities to integrate faith and learning, since the material directly engages questions of theology, ecclesiology, church/state relationships, and unity vs. difference. Our conversations about the reformers’ and Catholic understandings of God and the church came quite naturally in this class. We were also often able to find connections between our own experiences in Stone-Campbell or Baptist communities and some of the early Reformation ideas. In particular, I drew some parallels between Menno Simons and David Lipscomb that the students found interesting. In 2014, I also had a student who is a devout Lutheran and was able to bring a strong background in Luther’s unique theology to our conversations.
The upper level course I have been least satisfied with is HIST 495 History of Asia, or Far East in Modern Times, as the catalog has it. This very dated title may be one of the reasons for the low enrollments in the class. In 2011, I had three students, and in 2013, I had four. These are very low numbers when one considers that my upper levels usually contain fifteen to twenty students. In both 2011 and 2013, the students’ background in the material and attitudes toward the class were so varied as to make good discussion somewhat difficult. I also struggled to adjust a class that I had written as a lecture course to such a small size, in part because no matter what size the class is, if the students don’t know very much about the course content, I have to give them that information. I tried to make the class into a broad study of China, India, and Japan since ancient times, and worked to emphasize the Asian perspective on Asian history as much as possible, rather than teaching from Western sources written about Asia. So I had the students read the Ramayana (one of the two most significant Hindu epics), the Bushido (the samurai handbook), and Gao Yuan’s Born Red, a memoir of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. I do think these were good choices for texts, but the rest of the material felt fairly flat and ill-suited to the smaller class size. Overall, I think the class was probably too broad and too lecture-oriented.
History of Asia does include fairly extensive discussion of Eastern worldviews and religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Jainism, and thus offers opportunity to talk broadly about similarities and differences between Eastern and Western spiritualism and religion. The students were surprised to note some similarities between Jesus and Siddartha, and found some things to admire in Confucian and Hindu ideas. I think the best point that can be made with this material is this: Christianity as many of us know it has been westernized: it is an individualistic, compartmentalized faith. We might do well to pay more attention to the community-oriented, holistic aspects of Eastern religion, which are certainly not inherently opposed to Christianity. In fact, we can see many traits in the early church–say at the end of Acts 2–that look like the communalism we see in Asian religion. This is a point that I also make in Core 210.
In the fall of 2014, I completely overhauled HIST 495 and in its place taught a 440 that I called (tantalizingly, I hope) Mongols, Poppies, and Satyagraha: China, India, and the West since the 14th century. I wrote this class while feeling very emboldened by the great experiences I’d just had in 2013-14 with Historical Methods and the Historiography Capstone, both what I’d call non-traditional history courses in that we spent just as much or more time in student-led discussion, in-class workshopping, or other kinds of active learning as we did in lecture. But Methods and Historiography are both courses that emphasize the acquisition of skills more than the acquisition of content. What would happen, I wondered, if I applied a less narrative-driven, more interactive model to a traditional, content-oriented history course like an Asian history survey?
So I designed Mongols, Poppies as an experiment. I dropped the idea of presenting a chronological narrative, planned to lecture only as much as absolutely necessary for context, and vowed to come up with multiple ways to get the students talking to and interacting with each other and with source material. I also reconsidered my approach to exams. Typical upper-level history exams are all written, usually essay exams, and they’re best suited to students who have a strong memory for detail and write well. I had been thinking practically about the crucial skills for the discipline of history and about my students’ career trajectories in the wake of Methods and the Historiography Seminar, and decided that exams in this new class should allow students to display their knowledge in a way that more accurately reflected the real-life practice of history. Thus I chose to have students take their exams orally, in class, in groups. This made them think on their feet; it forced them to make connections between ideas and events mentioned by others; and it also scared them to death. Though the latter was not my goal, I found ultimately that the oral exam format promoted confidence and initiative in many students who had previously not done as well on written exams in my other classes. I’m not going to switch over to an oral exam format entirely, but I do want to continue to use this approach from time to time. It gives students whose verbal expression is stronger a chance to show what they can do, and I think promotes quick-thinking and collaboration skills that will be useful in any workplace setting.
Mongols Poppies used a great variety of pedagogical approaches and media. We watched and discussed in class portions of a Maoist propaganda film, a Bollywood biopic, and a Chinese romance. Students read and presented over primary sources from the Dao te Jing and the Ramayana to recent news stories on the Three Gorges Dam. Debates about the immolation of Hindu widows, or sati, required students to take on the persona and positions of British colonial officials and the Bengali bhadralok, high-caste Hindus, in the nineteenth century, and then to trace those same communities and positions into current times. Students listened to and engaged in group discussion of BBC podcasts on the Khans of the Mongols and reviewed legislation defining rape in contemporary India. Two of our ACU international students, Keyi Zhou and Valeritta Liddle, graciously agreed to come into class one day for a panel discussion. They described their experiences of religion in China and India, their perceptions of the American education system and American Christianity, and their views on the most recent developments in Asian politics.
As much as possible, I tried to let the classroom become a place of exchange and discovery in which the learning was driven (and much of the speaking was done) by the students themselves. The semester closed with our mock-conference, in which the students presented their research papers in ten-minute presentations, took questions, and engaged in critical debate about the relationships between their ideas. I was very happy with this class. I know that the format, and especially the oral exams, were difficult for a few of my students who prefer more structure and direct, linear instruction, but the majority of the students really seemed to benefit. And I had the most fun I’ve ever had teaching.