I have the good fortune to be teaching a graduate class this semester, to a cohort of Worcester Public Schools high school teachers. It’s a course in Constitutional History since 1877 for a local TAH grant called “Securing the Blessings of Liberty.” Last night we had a really productive discussion that got me thinking.

The day’s topic was civil liberties and free speech during World War I, including the cases of Schenk, Abrams and In Re Debs. The assigned reading included excerpts from the case decisions so I thought I’d augment that with the original pamphlets & speech that brought these men before the courts in the first place. And as we wound our discussion down I also wanted to use these documents to consider what we as history educators ask our students to do when we teach from primary sources, so I asked for some meta-reflection:
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Last semester I blogged about a couple of experiments with incorporating library searches and materials into my US History II survey class. I teach it every semester so I’m always tweaking. This term I started off in an overcrowded, overheated classroom with an oversubscribed class list, so I begged a room switch and I ended up with one of the campus’s best-kept secrets: a classroom that has been configured to the liking of the art history professors in the Visual & Performing Arts department. Ah. Classroom nirvana. Big, odd-shaped, with individual desks, no windows, warm in winter but not stifling, with soothing adjustable lighting, a HUGE screen that’s permanently down, and whiteboards on a different wall (in most classrooms, we have the genius design of having screens that, when pulled down, cover the whiteboards). And bonus: it’s in the library building, one floor down.

This week was our third “workshop day” when I have students play the historian. The first two were laptop-based, using digital archives and multimedia. But for this one, I wanted them to use… wait for it… actual books Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the premise of this post: a syllabus should be more than a boring, text-laden legal contract. If you let it, it can also be 1) a thing of beauty, and 2) a tool to think with about your teaching and your students’ learning.

At this point I hope you can see why this post comes late in my series about course and syllabus design (you can read part 1, part 2 and part 3 plus a part 3a if you care about the nitty-gritty of governance and assessment). Actually putting the stuff into a document necessitates having stuff to put, and all the course planning should happen long before you decide what font to use and what color paper to print it on.
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I’ve been blogging about stages in my course & syllabus design process, sparked mainly by the syllabus workshop in last week’s faculty development institute (part 1, part 2 and part 3 cross-posted to the Juvenile Instructor). I went back to a course I had taught in 2009 and which I hope to offer again this coming fall, on American religious pluralism. That is a version of a course that I first taught probably ten years before that, as a graduate student and then in several iterations as an adjunct at Brandeis. So it’s been revised, revisited, rewritten and taught many times; it’s by no means a new course for me. It’s also one that has no trouble being seen (by me, or by others) as an important and timely course offering. The case hardly needs to be made that students benefit from understanding how religion has figured in American history and from gaining a notion of what adherents to various world religions believe. That said, one often has to position, frame, or justify a course to different potential audiences, and this post tackles some of the things to keep in mind when you do. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Part 2 in a series on course & syllabus design; Part 1 is here.

I last taught “Religions in America” in the fall of 2009 as a special topics course in history, which meant I didn’t have to jump through any approval hoops. Since that time, I’ve put the course through our university and General Education governance so it could be listed with a course number in the regular catalog. Now that I’m planning to teach it again in 2012-2013, it’s time to revisit the course from the inside out and update its learning outcomes and course expectations (and give it a revamped web presence). All of this can be done without altering its catalog description or governance approvals–which is an important point if you are inheriting an existing course and are looking to redesign it or reinvent its pedagogy.

My 2009 syllabus enumerated course objectives (old-style, professor-centered). Read the rest of this entry »

This will be a series of posts about the process of course creation, using my “Religions in America” course as a case study. I’m thinking about it this week because this is my university’s faculty “Winter Institute” and as part of it, there’s a two-day syllabus development workshop.

Course creation and syllabus design were not something that was covered in any great depth during my graduate education. I used syllabi I like as a model and tried to imitate the teachers I thought were exemplary, but as a general rule: pedagogy was a taboo topic. I don’t know if it seemed beneath us, or too self-evident to merit comment, or irrelevant to the research-and-dissertation-writing process… but you know, when I write those out that way, it seems so obvious that in real life it is NONE of those things, and that it is not only a worthwhile topic for us to talk about, but in fact a NECESSARY one. Read the rest of this entry »

This winter break I’ve enjoyed two luxuries that worked well in tandem: our woodstove, and a stack of books I’m reading for the sheer enjoyment of them. Yes, okay, some of them relate to upcoming courses I’ll be teaching, but mostly, just because I had long blocks of uninterrupted time over the break to read and absorb. During the semester I almost never have time to read outside of my teaching, so it has been a delight. Here’s what I’ve had my nose in over the last couple of weeks.
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Today was the last methods course class session, and the topic was History on the Internet. Williams’s The Historian’s Toolbox, which was published in 2007, was our reading for today. Williams tacks on a chapter at the tail end about history on the web. For the most part, he’s talking about ways to access digital archives and electronic versions of published scholarship. He spends a good chunk of the chapter disparaging Wikipedia, picking up on Stephen Colbert’s notion of Wikiality and “truthiness.” And at the very end, he tosses in something about blogs written by historians as yet another format for scholarship.

It strikes me that Williams’s perspective is so, so 2007.

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So I’ve been looking forward to going to a THATCamp since I narrowly missed the first one, by being lame enough to go home after the 2009 Omeka playdate (which was great, by the way, and completely worth the trip). If I’d stayed one more day in my hometown of Fairfax, Virginia, that June, I would have been an inaugural THATCamp participant, and MAN! That would have been major bragging rights at this point, since it has gone from being a small one-time nerd camp for historians and developers, to being an international franchise with its own czarina and replicating itself in different regions faster than H1N1 in a college dormitory (67 meetings in 3 years, and they’re just getting started). I also had to miss the first THATCamp New England in 2010, so I was pretty happy to clear my calendar to attend this one

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Tonight (Friday, Oct 21, 2011) I’m one of the three “Bootcamp” instructors for #THATCampNE, The Humanities And Technology Camp New England, at the Mandel Center at Brandeis University, my graduate alma mater. It isn’t really a formal presentation, because those aren’t what THATCamps are about, but it’s got a title: “Digital Humanities in the Classroom: Simple Steps.”

Here’s what I’ll be featuring, if you’d like to play along

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