Author Archives: Bill Caraher

Reflective Writing

Posted on January 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

The great philosopher of history, R.G. Collingwood, famously argued that all history is the history of thought. In Collingwood’s estimation, the historian re-enacts that past in his (for Collingwood, the historian was always a “he”) own mind when he reads a historical text or studies objects from the past. While rethinking the thoughts of the actors who participated in a past event, the historian is aware and critical of his own thinking about the past. This critical practice distinguished “the best kind of historian” from other people who make it a habit of merely assembling evidence into an orderly presentation and passing it off as some kind of objective or impartial truth. Collingwood saw the ability and responsibility of historians to think past thoughts as key to the role history plays in the production of human knowledge. In fact, he argued that history was the only discipline that produced human self-knowledge.

While his arguments for the autonomy of history have not received universal acceptance, Collingwood has contributed to how I think about reflective writing in the classroom. Over the course of expounding his larger argument, Collingwood noted in an offhand way that when he reads something he wrote days before, he acts the part of the historian by reflecting on his own writing and using it to reconstruct a past thought.

This was a helpful idea to me as I sat down to struggle with constructing assignments for my graduate historiography seminar. Graduate historiography is a required course for all M.A., D.A., and Ph.D. students in history in our department. Generally, the course elicits a kind of exaggerated dread because it is designed to force students to examine their assumptions and practices as historians. In general, historians regard an ability to recognize one’s own disciplinary, historical, and social assumptions about the past as a crucial step in a student’s development in the profession. The course, then, insists that students reflect and own up to their own position in relation to the process and methods of historical thinking.

Reflective writing has become an important part of encouraging students to write and think about a text, situation, or body of material. Generally, the practice has allowed students a certain amount of latitude in how they approach a subject and has sought to instill confidence in students by recognizing the authenticity of their own engagement with material. This goals of reflective writing are particularly suitable for my graduate historiography class where I introduce the students to any number of challenging texts and push them to embrace often uncomfortable critiques leveled against longstanding academic practices. This can be, as you might imagine, a difficult task as the students tend to resist the most critical challenges to traditional historical practices. To allow students to engage these critiques in a safe place, I require reflective essays each week that respond to the readings assigned. These then become, to some extent, the basis for our discussion in the seminar.

Traditionally, graduate historiography seminars require students to, say, write a few critical book reviews and perhaps write a longer paper on a particular aspect of historical practice (e.g. women’s history, microhistory, Marxist history, et c.). These are boring things to read and largely reproduce the kind of exercises that students write in their other graduate history courses. On the one hand, historical works tend to be boring, so having students write boring assignments does not make them less useful. And, using an assignment in a graduate historiography class to reinforce skills developed elsewhere in the program can be a good thing. Increasingly, however, I want my graduate historiography seminar to encourage students to engage critically and reflectively with difficult ideas.

So, in the spirit of Collingwood, I ask my students to take their reflective writing, compile it into an archive, and to write a historical paper based that uses these reflective texts as “primary sources”. The goal is, of course, to get the students to think about how they thought about writing history. In Collingwoodian terms, I am asking the students to re-enact, critically, their own learning process.

In other words, it’s an effort to close the loop.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Graduate Instruction, Reflective Writing

Faculty Study Seminar: Teaching and Neuroscience

Posted on January 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

This spring OID is running a Faculty Study Seminar on James’ Zull’s From Brain to Mind: Using Neuroscience to Guide Change in Education (Stylus, 2011). The seminars provide a means for faculty with common interests to learn more about a teaching-related topic. Each group meets four times a semester, at times mutually agreed to by participants, to read and discuss a teaching-related book (books provided by OID). Your only obligation is to read and to show up for discussion.

If you are familiar with James Zull’s 2004 book, The Art of Changing the Brain, you know he has both a keen interest in how the brain learns and a knack for making specialized research accessible and relatable to what we do in higher education. In his latest book, Zull (Professor of Biochemistry and former Director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education at Case Western Reserve) considers how recent findings in neuroscience can inform our teaching practice. Looking at how the brain receives and processes information, he gleans applicable insights about cognitive development and metacognition. Zull argues that due to major social and economic change, a teaching and learning approach that is informed by cognitive science is increasingly necessary. In an environment in which our students can expect to hold multiple jobs (some of which may not yet exist), where technology is constantly shifting, and where information and opinion seem infinitely available, the awareness of how and why we think as we do is essential to society’s well-being.

If you are interested in participating in this FSS, please contact Anne Kelsch at anne.kelsch@email.und.edu or 777-4233.

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Posted in Events

It’s All About the Brain, Stupid

Posted on January 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

Dexter Perkins, Dept. of Geology and Geological Engineering, University of North Dakota

My Epiphany

I started college teaching in 1981 and, like most new professors, knew little about teaching other than what I had experienced as a student. I soon realized that I was in trouble – or, that my students were in trouble – because I had no idea what I was doing. I prepared “great” lectures and delivered them, only to find at exam time that students hadn’t absorbed what I was saying. So, after a few years of frustration, I began to read to find out what experts had to say about teaching and learning.

I read about active learning, learner-centered classrooms, instructional alignment, and many other things. One of the most influential books I read was Experiential Learning by David Kolb (1984). I enjoyed Kolb’s thoughts about Skinner, Dewey, Piaget and others, and about some of the pioneers of learning science and related fields. I was especially intrigued by Kolb’s ideas about what (subsequently) has been called deep learning or significant learning, and learning cycles.

Everything I read sounded reasonable, but something was missing. In retrospect, I think the main problem was that most of what I read was based on behaviorism. The implication was that the best teaching focuses only on improving students’ learning habits and behaviors by using the correct pedagogies and developing the best learning environment. Little consideration was given to physiological factors and what actually happens in students’ brains as they learn. Just as plate tectonics was not accepted as a theory until sea-floor spreading was discovered, I needed a mechanism to explain why the behaviorist approach was valid.

In 2000, the National Research Council published How People Learn (Bransford et al. 2000). In many ways, the NRC publication reinforced what I had read previously. Key points in the first part of the report included:

Students are not empty vessels – they arrive in our classrooms with mental models, preconceptions and habits that may hinder or promote learning. Consideration of students’ preexisting knowledge is essential.
Learning is not significant without real understanding; it is simply memorization. Lacking significant learning, students cannot use what they learn in one class to solve other kinds of problems.
Significant learning will not occur if students are not actively engaged. Perhaps more important, to be successful learners, students must develop metacognitve skill to monitor their own progress.

As before, these points made sense, but I was still uncertain WHY they were important and, perhaps more puzzling, what to do about it. Then I read Chapter 5 (“Mind and the Brain”), a short chapter that, in the space of 20 minutes, answered many of my questions and fundamentally changed the way I thought about teaching and learning.

The brain is a constantly evolving organic machine that changes as it reacts to information it processes. Learning is a process of wiring and rewiring that machine. That’s it; that was my epiphany.

So, what is really going on in our brains? My summary, below, is based on many books and articles, most significantly the books listed in the references at the end.

The Brain

The gray matter of our brains consists of a zillion neurons. At birth we may have 150-200 billion neuron cells, but many disappear (are pruned) due to lack of use. The actual number that remains is uncertain and may vary from individual to individual. Zeul (2002) places the number at around 100 billion, Jensen (2005) says 30-50 billion.

NewImage
Typical individual neuron cells have a main cell body (the soma) surrounded by many raggedly leaf-like branches (called dendrites) that protrude in all directions. The cells also have a single longer branch sticking out called an axon that may extend far from the main cell body (Figure 1). Axons have a smooth surface and are surrounded by a protecting sheath of white matter (myelin) made of protein and fat. When the axons from one cell are close enough to dendrites from another, connections (called synapses) can develop.

Human thinking consists of remembering and comparing information (analysis), and evaluating or making connections (synthesis). Both processes occur because of our neuronal networks. Neurons are connected via a very complex network, and neuronal cells exchange information much like wiring circuits move electrons. When our brain processes information, perhaps visual, aural, or other sensory information from external sources, or maybe just thoughts, signals move at a blistering pace from one neuron to another. Information/signals get picked up by the dendrites, travel to the soma, shuffle down an axon, cross a synapse, and go on and on through the network. Synapses, which can develop in many places on a single dendrite, come and go throughout our lives, so our brains are constantly being rewired. At each synapse, chemical processes excite or inhibit activity in a neuron dendrite, so synapses may be either strengthened or weakened.

The brain’s neuronal network has sometimes been compared with a river drainage network, or to a tree or bush with many branches, but is really more complicated than these simple analogies suggest. Each neuron may have 10,000 or more connections to others, and there are on the order of a million miles of wiring in our brains. When born, we only have a fraction of all the synapses we will later develop, but they develop quickly (synaptogenesis) – the largest number within the first year or so; then the total decreases for the rest of our lives as unused connections are pruned and new ones develop. At the same time, the brain can produce new neurons that contribute to memory and thinking.

The neurons and synapses we use, stick around; others are pruned. So they are gained by experience, and lost if not used. Consequently, what a person does, sees, hears and thinks about lead to changes in the brain. Rewiring is an ongoing process and connections are made and broken in just seconds or minutes. Reinforcing those connections takes longer times, and much reinforcement is done while we are sleeping at night. Firmly connecting new circuits to old ones may take days or longer, but eventually circuits and connections that are fired the most may become “hard wired” and semi permanent. Specific skills such as driving or dancing, or knowledge of a particular subject – all are wired in the same way. Such connections are difficult to develop and perhaps, more difficult to eliminate. (Think about this the next time you encounter someone who is stubbornly wrong about something!) So, the brain adapts as needed and growth is different for different people depending on their experiences. Researchers, who have actually been able to “see” (image, using several different techniques) brain connections form, find that different parts of the brain develop and respond to different kinds of stimuli. Brains of musicians are wired differently than brains of figure skaters, for example, and different people respond to stimuli in different ways.

One key component in all this is the myelin that forms the protecting layer around axons. Myelin, essentially, can change a local road to a super highway. The better myelinated an axon is, the better and faster the signal transmission. At birth, few axons are myelinated. Myelin develops in different parts of our brain at different times, making us better and better thinkers and firmly cementing some bits of knowledge or skill in our minds. Coyle (2009) suggests that myelin may be the most important thing in our head. Studies reveal that expert athletes, musicians, or scholars all have different parts of the brains that are especially well myelinated.

What’s It Mean?

So, students are not empty vessels. They come to our classrooms completely wired. They have knowledge, mental models, and habits that are built in. This prior knowledge consists of real, physical brain circuits. Unfortunately, those circuits may be poorly or inappropriately developed, and a student’s knowledge and ways of thinking may hinder learning or make it difficult for them to understand what we are trying to teach. When students fail one of my exams, it may not be that I am a bad teacher, or that they are bad or lazy students. It may simply be that they do not have the brain circuits necessary to succeed. When students tell me that they are “bad at science,” it really means that they do not have the requisite neuronal networks to succeed, or at least to believe they can succeed, at science. So, we teachers need to help students develop new mental models and to eliminate old ones – a physical process involving changing the structure of their brains.

Many authors, including the ones referenced in this article, have talked about the importance of deep/significant learning. Consideration of the brain’s dynamics explains what this really means. When superficial leaning occurs, students may temporarily absorb some information for short term recall. They may learn how to do something, but the new skill won’t be long-lasting. In contrast, when significant learning occurs, physical changes occur in their heads. The learning experience has been strong enough to develop new synaptic connections between neurons. New knowledge, new ideas, new ways of thinking become semipermanent fixtures as neuronal networks are modified. Coyle (2009) argues convincingly that significant learning cannot be obtained without what he terms “deep practice” because deep practice is necessary to promote myelinization. Call it what you want, deep practice, targeted practice, focused practice – the key is that all practice is not the same. If we want to promote significant learning, we have to teach in a way that promotes meaningful, significant, practice and thinking.

Thinking about the brain as a living, evolving, organism makes it clear why students must be actively engaged if they are to learn. Engagement means that they are really using their brains, and the exercise promotes the physical changes necessary for real learning. In Teaching With the Brain in Mind, Jensen (2005) says that promoting engagement requires us to teach in a way that is focused and relevant. We need to deliver information, or assign tasks, in absorbable chunks, and reinforce what we do. Repetition, perhaps involving previewing, reviewing, revising and other things students can do, is key. These activities promote physical changes at the synapses (termed long-term potentiation) that strengthen the synapses and make them especially receptive to future similar inputs. Metacgonition is also important because, as students monitor what they are learning and evaluate outcomes, the connections that manifest learning are strengthened and reinforced.

Understanding the physiological basis of learning is one thing; using this knowledge to revise instruction is another. There are many paths that could be followed and no one way is best. For some practical examples, check out Teaching With the Brain in Mind (Jensen 2005), the New York Times Best Seller Brain Rules (Medina 2008), or the recent and very engaging Talent Code (Coyle 2009). There are many other good references, but these three are both informative and a fun to read.

References

Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., and Cocking, R.R. (2000) How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Nat. Acad. Press, Washington. 374 p.

Coyle, D. (2009) The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How. Bantam Books, New York. 246 p.

Jensen, E. (2005) Teaching With the Brain In Mind. Assoc. Superv. Curric. Develop., Alexandria. 187 p.

Kolb, D.A. (1984) Experiential Learning: Experiences as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs. 364 p.

Medina, J. (2008) Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Pear Press, Seattle. 301 p.

Zull, J.E. (2002) The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning. Stylus Pub., Sterling. 263 p.

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Posted in Dexter Perkins

On Teaching

Posted on November 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

The Fall 2011 (Number 2) On Teaching newsletter from the University of North Dakota’s Office of Instructional Development is now available!

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Posted in On Teaching

Midsemester Reflection of a First Year History Teacher

Posted on November 17, 2011 | Leave a comment

Robert Caulkins, Department of History, University of North Dakota

Bob is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History and has graciously agreed to share some of his experiences as a first semester instructor with our Teaching Thursday audience.

Bill Caraher recently asked me if I would contribute a piece to the Teaching Thursdays blog and, although I read this informative blog with some regularity I have always been hesitant to add my proverbial two cents to this column—I had not actually taught a college level course of my own. As Bill has since pointed out, I can no longer say that, and in fact I’m really excited about some of the developments that I have recently observed among my US History to 1877 students. This excitement comes from actually watching one component of my teaching strategy work with my students.

When I initially constructed the syllabus, selected the textbook, and chose some ancillary readings for the course, I had a very broad concept for the class in mind and that was to examine the historical development of the “American Character.” Early in this conceptual stage I decided that by presenting early American and colonial history in a comparative manner that was more closely tied to anywhere else other than the American portion of the North American continent and not focusing just on what white Europeans did once they arrived on the shores of the future thirteen colonies, I believed that my students would be able to make larger historical connections to what many people believe are uniquely American values and characteristics. My greatest hope was that I would be able to pique the curiosity of the students concerning where these “American” traits originated from. Of course implementing this plan was another matter.

Throughout the teaching process I have faced the same problems and difficulties that most other teachers have had to deal with and one of these issues is getting adequate feedback from the students on the effectiveness of my teaching. While I’m as human as the next teacher and would be overjoyed to hear what a “great teacher” I am, I’m also enough of a realist to know that there are students in the class that are there for any number of reasons, some of which do not have anything to do with satisfying an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of American history. More pragmatic issues such as filling electives or completing general studies requirements are motives that are just as important to some students as the motives of those who see history as a component of their liberal arts education. In order to find some sort of balance or center to aim at as a teacher, I started the semester by giving my class of fifty a survey with some questions that I hoped they would answer honestly, providing me with enough information to allow me to tailor certain aspects of the course to achieve my teaching objectives.

The survey allowed the student to remain anonymous as no names were required or wanted—in fact I told the students that if they did not want to fill it out they did not have too. I did not receive a single returned blank survey sheet. The survey addressed six questions, and while the class roster provided an answer to the first question, which was, “what year or grade are you in?” is available in People Soft, having the student identify themselves as freshmen or sophomores while providing a brief writing sample had some value in determining who I was teaching and what my expectations of them would be. While there is no way to draw grand conclusions from this particular question their handwritten responses allowed me to connect the rest of the survey to the grade level of the student. There were no surprises in the answers, out of fifty students, forty-four of them were either first or second year students, and here they were almost evenly divided.

For the sake of brevity I won’t go over all the questions, but the two questions that have since provided the most utility for my teaching were, “What questions would you like answered while you are here?” and rather surprisingly, “Where are you from, and what is your ethnic background or heritage?” The big question for me, was to discern what if anything the students enjoyed learning about and how to best connect the events of the past to them personally in the present and their own personal history or background seemed like a good place to start. The responses to the question of what they wanted answers too did not produce what I thought were any profound revelations. One student expressed curiosity over the role of religion in the formulation of laws while several others wanted more information on wars the United States had been involved in. Another student wanted to know why an entire semester was devoted to a survey course that only covered half of the country’s history. For the most part I was left with the impression that those whom I was dealing with possessed a kind of tabula rasa when it came to their own country’s history. The responses concerning their ethnic and cultural background however, were brimming with information. According to their answers the entire class was native born and all students but one claimed some ethnic or cultural background, the lone dissenter simply identified himself as an “American.” This ethnic background information became useful in that I could use it to lead class discussions on a nation formed by diverse groups of immigrants by linking the colonization of North America to the students own immigrant roots. The trick was going to be putting these two components together and provide the students with enough information to stimulate their curiosities to the point where they would develop questions concerning the country’s past.

Last week, after giving the class their second term examination results, I directed the students to write a short, in-class essay on what they have learned to date about American history. Several of the students stated that they had augmented their existing levels of knowledge but pointed out that they had benefitted from some particular area of history that extended beyond the usual limits of a survey course in American history. But the majority of the students almost without fail noted the expanded or more cosmopolitan manner of how they now viewed America’s early history. Many students noted particular historical characters that they had never heard of before, while other encouraging feedback concerned student’s comprehension of complex concepts such as the application of “enlightenment era” philosophies during the formation of the country. But it was individual observation and comments that gave me the most satisfaction. One student expressed relief to know that divisions and rancor between political parties was not new or a twentieth century development and was very surprised to know that it has existed since the formation of the nation. Other students expressed surprise over more mundane aspects of what had been taught in the previous nine weeks of the semester—such as reconsidering the cultural mythology surrounding Christopher Columbus. Other students professed a new understanding of the history of slavery in America, some complete with expressions of surprise at the levels of suffering endured by slaves held in captivity. Overall I am very pleasantly surprised by what I had received as feedback being two-thirds through the semester. I truly appreciate this opportunity to share my experience with others and I hope that some of this may be beneficial to the other rookies coming along in the future. I am reminded though that the semester is still not over and there are a few other items though where the jury is still out on how my class is dealing with requirements for the course such as their writing assignment on selected portions of Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy In America. This might make an interesting follow up post.

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Posted in Graduate Instruction, First Year Reflections, Robert Caulkins

Help Needed for the Capstone Assessment Project

Posted on November 8, 2011 | Leave a comment

Anne Kelsch, Director, Office of Instructional Development, University of North Dakota

Nineteen faculty met in May of 2004 to read and score student papers, written by graduating seniors in a variety of majors, for written communication and critical thinking. The aim of the project was to find out how well these two intellectual skills, at the heart of both the old General Education (GE) program and the new Essential Studies (ES) program, would be demonstrated by students at the time of graduation. We sought to determine whether their writing and critical thinking met standards of achievement that faculty had determined to be appropriate for graduates of the university.

The following report summarizes both the process and the findings. Conclusions from that study and other assessment projects conducted for the GE program were discussed extensively by members of the GE Task Force and influenced decision-making regarding the ES program. Now, with the first large group of ES “completers” due to graduate from UND this spring, it’s worth revisiting findings from 2004 as we prepare to conduct a similar assessment of writing and critical thinking skills this December when we will examine a sample of student work from several different Essential Studies (ES) capstone courses. The goal is take a close look at the learning of our senior students as they close out their undergraduate programs at UND.

This December project is our first try at assessment of “C” course work, and it’s our first cross-course look at learning outcomes for the ES program. After this initial project, we expect that the process will become a regular feature of the assessment plan for ES. The project will be led by Joan Hawthorne, Director of Assessment and Regional Accreditation, and Tom Steen, Director of ES, with support from Anne Kelsch and the Office of Instructional Development. The plan is to organize a team of faculty from across the campus to work together in a half-day retreat where we will review student work samples, using previously-developed UND assessment rubrics. Based on the team’s work, we will gain a picture of the quality of student learning in their general education at UND. Results will be shared with the full campus community, and they will be used in the ES program review planned for 2012-13. Those involved in the scoring will be invited to discuss the results and suggest ways to strengthen our offerings and program features in ES. The plan is to conduct this assessment work on two ES goals each year, thus setting up a two-year cycle. This year, the assessment focus is on the two goals most frequently used now: Thinking & Reasoning and Communication. In addition, since some “C” courses are approved to also meet the requirement in Advanced Communication, the project will also examine the more in-depth learning that “A” designated capstones are aiming for.

We could use your help. To conduct the Capstone Assessment Project, we need campus faculty members to serve on the assessment team. Ideally, team members should include faculty who have taught ES courses, been involved in validation/revalidation of courses, and served on the ES or GER Committee. But ES is a campus-wide program, and faculty from all programs and majors, whether directly involved inES or not, will also have useful perspectives. If you have an interest in what our students are learning in our undergraduate programs, please volunteer. To do so, contact Tom Steen, Office of Essential Studies, 777-4434 or thomas.steen@email.und.edu.

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Posted in Anne Kelsch, Capstone Assessment

The Substance of the Syllabus

Posted on November 3, 2011 | 1 Comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

I’ve been thinking about how I run a digital history practicum lately and considering how my experiences in this laboratory course can inform how I teach in more traditional courses. Recently I received a comment on a post that I cross-posted with my own blog, regarding my decisions to go without a syllabus in my digital history practicum. The well-meaning commenter seemed appalled that I did not have a syllabus and went so far to insist that I “owed the students” a syllabus.

This got me thinking.

It’s not that I didn’t think about making a syllabus or couldn’t be bothered to do it for this class. Instead, I decided that the course was not a traditional course and the goals associated with the course divided evenly between learning by practice and a well-defined goal independent of the learning process. The course had as a client the Chester Fritz Library and the success of the course dependent in part on the success in putting together a digital history collection and various online exhibits for the library.

So at the start of the class, instead of circulating a syllabus, the class of four graduate students met and discussed the various expectations and deadlines for various parts of our project. As a result of this discussion, the class itself created an informal syllabus. Since then, we have mostly held to the various deadlines, although I am not convinced that we did as well with the various expectations that involved parties had for the class.

I will admit that this course is a unique case, the students are almost all graduate students and advanced graduate students at that. We met informally and cultivated a flexible, collegial atmosphere rather than one informed by the traditional teacher – student dyad of authority.

I had lunch last week with my fellow Teaching Thursday editor, Mick Beltz. Over some sandwiches we discussed the tendency toward contractual understandings of syllabi among students and the rise of the “student as customer” mentality. We speculated about a slippery slope where the student as customer arrives in our classroom expecting a precise definition of what it is that they will learn, how much better it will make them, and what the eventual value of this knowledge will be on future earnings and happiness. The quantitative and qualitative character of the imparted knowledge is girded about by a contractual syllabus and a series of rigid rubrics and standardized assessment methods that track the students’ progress through a series of environments arranged like a decentralized assembly line designed to produce a perfected person, a qualified employee, and a happy customer. While we all agree that some parts of this model are inevitable or even intrinsic in how higher education has been conceptualized in the US, the reality of this increasingly commodified view of the educational experience is depressing and limits our ability to adapt to a dynamic classroom environment, disrupt the student-teach dyad, and challenge authority.

In fact, as a result of our conversation, I began to wonder whether the syllabus does more to create the contractual and consumerist attitude by students toward their education than almost anything else. It immediately places the faculty member in the position of someone who owes the students something. I always imagine the syllabus as a document that basically tells the students that I have something distinct and material to impart and sets their expectations of my performance. Like a contract with a local company, the student is put in the position of making sure that I deliver on the goods that my syllabus/contract promised.

It wasn’t until my conversations with Mick, that I remembered my first experiment with unconventional syllabus writing. In my Latin 202 course last semester, I wrote a one page syllabus with some vague learning goals. (Something along the lines of “Learn Latin gooder” or “to engooden your knowledge of the Latin language.”) I did this because I was not entirely confident with the level of preparation the students had or my own abilities to “engooden” their Latin. Over the course of the class, we discussed various possible assignments re-arranged the value of various successful and failed assessment activities, and established together expectations of weekly work. This was successful (mostly) because it created an environment where we could adapt the class continuously to our performance. I remember being encouraged by discovering that I am not the only one who approached my classes in this way.

For my digital history practicum, I anticipated that advanced graduate students might see the syllabus as redundant and perhaps condescending. The goals of the course came as much from our conversations with our “client” (the library) as from what the students wanted or what I expected them to learn. In other words, the syllabus became redundant in an environment where the students knew that they had to learn to complete a task.

This kind of environment, of course, simulates life. As the students in the class look ahead to writing their dissertations, they will likely discover that this process does not come with a syllabus. Moreover, when they write their first scholarly articles, there are no deadlines, learning goals, assessments, or rubrics that constrain what they do or document what they learn. Even outside of the comfy confines of the academy, the students will inevitably discover that life does not offer syllabi. Success, happiness, and fulfillment, do not come by fulfilling the obligations set out on a sheet of paper.

Do syllabi do more harm than good?

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Syllabi

Thinking about Teaching Digital History: A Follow Up

Posted on November 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

A short follow up to a post from two weeks ago on Teaching Thursday. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Profhacker blog has featured a couple of short posts on integrating a digital project into a class. The author, Amy Cavender, is discussing how she’s doing this in her class with a post here and a follow-up post here.

Some of her observations resonated nicely with our post on collaboration and teaching digital history through practice.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Digital Humanities

Thinking about Collaboration and Digital History in Practice

Posted on October 20, 2011 | 3 Comments

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

Over the past half semester I’ve been working with a dedicated group of graduate students on public and digital history practicum. The practicum focused on the creation of a digital history collection and exhibit celebrating the Chester Fritz Library’s 50th Birthday. This project has had its ups and downs and we’re only half way through the experiment, but I felt like we had gone far enough along to reflect on some of the things that I’ve learned coordinating a class in an intensively collaborative, digital environment.

The class was designed, at least in theory, around the needs of our “client” the Chester Fritz Library and through several meeting with various stakeholders in the process – the Director of Libraries and the heads of various divisions – and sitting in on a town hall like meeting of library staff, we developed an overall strategy on how to approach the library’s 50th Birthday as a digital, public history event. The library helped us set some deadlines and shape some expectations for how this project would fit within the festivities that they had already planned in the fall of this year.

Fritzat50

Check out the page here

The class itself consists of a five student dream team (as an Eagles fan I can say that): 3 Ph.D. students and an M.A. and a B.A. student. At the midpoint of the semester, I asked the students to reflect upon their experiences in the class and my observations below derive in part from these reflections. I not only received their generous permission to reflect on their reflection papers, but I’ve also asked them to check out this post and comment on my efforts to summarize their thoughts.

So here they are:

1. Structure and Room to Fail. When I initially imagined the class, I had figured that our conversations with the library would help us shape our project, its deadlines, and goals. So I did not create a formal syllabus, but rather created a list of suggested deadlines for various aspects of the project. In other words, the course lacked much in the way of formal structure, in part, because I hoped that our stakeholders and the students would set deadlines and goals.

They did move in this direction, but I overlooked one small issue in the planning of our public, digital history collection: the time to struggle and even fail. Some of the students initiatives which seemed quite reasonable involved far more time than any of us expected. The combination of unexpected delays, problems with workflow, and even plans or projects that didn’t work out, slowed the project down and the lack of a firm class structure gradually eroded a sense of urgency. Only a firm intervention set the class back on track, but by then, I think that the class was behind where we all hoped we would be as the public festivities started around homecoming week.

In the future, I think a firm structure would have provided some context for the kind of risks/reward analysis that my team considered when embarking on a more difficult or ambitious component of the project. In other words, we might have been more conscious of delays and other risks of ambitious plans, if there were checks on he system throughout the process.

2. Digital Immigrants. The digital learning curve was steeper than expected even for the most committed digital immigrants (i.e. students who were committed to learning digital tools but not “natively” familiar with them. I dislike the term “digital native” and “digital immigrant”, but in this case it seems particularly useful). In particular, I found that the students struggled to keep pace with the expectations of the digital world, where content has to appear continuously or at least at regular intervals to attract attention in the din of the internet. Student work patterns tended to encourage episodic writing usually toward the end of the term when papers become due. Asking them to produce content continuously throughout the semester and to write it directly into the digital stream (via a blog, a Twitter feed, and a digital collection) clearly created issues for our students who felt more at home with crafted final papers that emerged from long(ish) gestation periods and were refined over multiple drafts.

History is rather unique in that it tends to privilege to final product over the process. Historians tend not to dilate long on methods. The importance of the final product over the various intermediate steps that a scholar would take along the way, contributed to my students’ reluctance to expose their creative process to the world. So not only was the pace disruptive to their workflow patters, but they had few examples of pre-publication, public work to look to for guidance (and they do not read my blog or any other academic blogs.)

3. Collecting vs. Interpreting. One of the most interesting challenges of the process of producing web content on the fly is that my students initially insisted on a rather rigid division between the process of building a digital collection and the process of interpreting it. This divide, of course, is grounded in traditional models of historical research which imagines the first step to be data collection which forms the foundation for the analysis and interpretation. This approach relies on a view of historical artifact as objects that exist outside of the interpretative process. In fact, historians are still something bothered by the idea that our research questions can and do shape the kinds of evidence we look for in our sources and collections.

The dichotomy between collecting and analyzing is not grounded in reality, of course, (as any graduate student in the field could tell you): historical evidence and collection are the product of conscious decisions and selection processes. In other words, the collection itself – with its limits and character – is the product of historical thinking in the same way that more formal, written analysis and interpretation is. Understanding these two processes as separate created a rift in their workflow and contributed to their difficulty in creating content continuously for the collection

4. Collaboration. In working with a group of students, I somehow expected a magic moment of collaboration to occur as individual’s found complementary interests, abilities, and schedules. So far, this has not happened. In fact, most of the year it was a challenge to get the entire group together at one time (we did not have a scheduled class time because I anticipated having to meet in different venues and with different stakeholders; this oversight is related to my point 1) much less having them work together as a cohesive unit.

The lack of collaboration between the students led them to be concerned that they were working on the same projects at the same time. Moreover, it became difficult for the students to synchronize content production, analysis, and interpretation across multiple sites and across different forms of content. The result is a series of fine semi-independent projects that are attractive, intriguing, and almost exciting, but not nearly as good as they could have been.

I’ve learned the collaboration requires a certain amount of leadership on my part as the instructor. On the other hand, understanding how collaboration worked and didn’t work brought to the fore the challenges of public and digital history as a process. While collaboration always seems like a way to make a project easier, it also requires that all participants have a commitment to a particular approach to documenting and understanding the past. Finding this middle ground for all the collaborators likely requires more effort from everyone involved that simply letting team members go out and work on related, but ultimately independent projects.

Of course, this is the genius of promoting collaborative work at the University. It forces collaborators and supervisors to not only articulate a (frequently shifting) final product, but also forces everyone involved to focus on process. As so much of what we do in the humanities is refining our processes (methods, procedures), I have come to appreciate the value of collaboration not as a means of getting students to work together, but rather as a means of unpacking the process of creating the knowledge.

5. Final Projects. As the semester crosses the half-way point, I’ve begun to think about what I can expect of this group for a final project. To some extent the work itself – with all its flaws and strengths – represents a final product. On the other hand, it seems like a public work should represent more than just an exercise in process. To manage a final product, we have to have consensus on what would make our efforts to collect and analyze a digital collection successful. (This does not mean that the process has to be closed or the final results definitive.)

At the same time, we need to have some kind of reflective component to the class so that we can all consider the academic, intellectual, and practical lessons of our work. My hope is that this blog post is a first step toward that.

Crossposted to New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Digital Humanities, Digital Workflow