American History 2.0 (2009-2010)
During the academic year 2009-2010, I served as graduate assistant for Dr. Penne Restad of UT-Austin’s History Department. Dr. Restad had received a grant from the university’s Transforming Undergraduate Education fund, intended to finance proposals rethinking the undergraduate experience; in Dr. Restad’s case, she proposed to reconfigure her large 20th-Century US History survey class, incorporating techniques from team-based learning and refocusing class activities towards interaction rather than passive absorption of information. Playing with these ideas, she named the project “American History 2.0.”
Screen shot of American History 2.0's website, which I maintained in the year 2009-2010.
For the first semester of this year, Dr. Restad, another graduate assistant, and myself had the luxury of spending months planning this survey course. We read lots of literature from others who had closely considered the history survey (see, for example, Lendol Calder’s idea of “uncoverage”), as well as primary documents and a few secondary books that we were considering assigning for the course itself. During this time, Dr. Restad and I also learned the content management system WordPress, and I took on the role of maintaining the course website, where we planned to post all of the primary sources we’d use in the course itself.
In the second semester of this project, we tested the ideas we had come up with on a group of survey course enrollees. Every day in class, students arrived having read a group of primary documents; they got into “project groups” and were given a sheet of paper with a specific assignment having to do with analysis of these documents. As an assistant and observer, I went from student group to student group, seeing how they reacted to the project parameters we had set up, watching as they marshaled arguments for answering our questions one way or another. This experience was tremendously useful, as it immediately revealed to me the ways that documents confounded the students, bored them, or engaged them, and showed me how our project questions catalyzed this boredom or engagement.
The final component of this project was a small seminar that ran concurrently with the survey class, and was intended for students who wanted to become history teachers upon graduation. This seminar was titled “The History of Teaching U.S. History,” and aimed to introduce these students to some critical issues in the teaching of history; the discussions we had in this seminar were fueled by the students’ observations of the workings of the survey course, which they also attended as observers. As the assistant for the course, I was a part of this seminar, positioned somewhere between the teachers-in-training and the professor in charge; I offered feedback on students’ journal entries, and engaged with them in conversations about pedagogy, course planning, and politics.
