I just revised my teaching page, simplifying it and adding some new resources. One of the assignments I included was a new one, which I called — for lack of a better name — a “Use of History” Essay. The assignment asked students in my introductory, general education Modern Europe survey to choose a news article or opinion piece from a mainstream magazine or newspaper and evaluate the ways it used history. I was impressed by the quality of the work even though I was concerned that I had not done enough to prepare them for the task. It’s relative success means that I might be on to something and with some greater scaffolding and revision have a nice way of introducing some more advanced concepts into this course.
The Context: My department is currently re-evaluating our curriculum in light of some broader University changes to our core general education requirements. While we have not yet settled on a precise replacement for our 100-level introductory surveys, it is the consensus that we need to do something a bit different. Following what seems to be a broader trend in the field, we are moving more toward an introductory course that, while it will still introduce students to a historical topic or theme, will emphasize the skills that a history course or major can offer students. Our goal, broadly speaking, will be to show how the study of history matters to the individual student, to our social and political world, and to the future. A key way of achieving this goal, it seems to me, is to emphasize the relevance of history to the everyday lives of our students. Perhaps in 2020 this point doesn’t need to be made, but more generally students seem to have some difficulty in connecting the past to the present, at least at first. In any case, in advance of offering a totally new introductory course, I decided to try out a new assignment that would at least begin to get at some of these goals.
The Course: As it stands, the course is a standard survey of European history from 1500 to the Present. As with all surveys, I struggle with the problem of addressing everything I would like in the time constraints of a semester while also ensuring that I take enough class time to practice skill-building, discussion, and review. My current syllabus, for instance, has much less post-1945 material than other versions of this course that I have taught (something I hope to rectify for next semester). Assignments for the course have generally been fairly standard: a couple of identification and essay exams, a short analysis of a primary source document, a longer essay on a book we read and/or a summative essay that answered a question I provided.
Preparation: Throughout the semester, I made a concerted effort to regularly address the course objectives listed at the top of the syllabus. I did this by including the objectives on assignments so that students were aware of which objective a particular exercise addressed. This assignment addressed all four course objectives, including the third, “Relate historical phenomena to present-day issues and controversies.”
The final essay was not the first time, however, that this goal came up in the course. First, throughout my lectures and discussions I made sure to bring the class back to the present-day relevance of the material. This ranged from linking the significance of conflicts over religious difference to contemporary pluralist societies, to considering the relationship between colonization and debates about memorialization, and to questioning the resilience of democracy in both the past and the present. I also took the time to lead discussion of the election, which was a way of demonstrating how historical knowledge could inform an understanding of current events. Second, students regularly completed a discussion board assignment that asked them to situate the history we were learning about in light of a contemporary issue after doing some additional reading. One prompt for instance, had students listen to a podcast or read an article by Haitian historian Marlene Daut and answer the question “”Should France pay Haiti reparations?” I may jettison this assignment because I continue to struggle with assessing discussion board responses and students struggle with carrying on a real discussion, but it will need to be replaced with some assignment that helps students practice situating history in relation to the present.
The Assignment: You can view the full handout at this link, but in broad strokes the assignment asks students to choose an article from a mainstream news publication that explicitly draws on history to make a claim about the present. The goal is to develop an argument about how the author deployed history in order to make their own claim, not really by assessing the “accuracy” of the history presented (a task beyond the scope of the course, the assignment, and freshmen students) but rather by exploring its mode of argument. A strong argument for this assignment addressed the relationship between the present and the past.
The handout itself is more elaborate than most of my assignments. Because this was an introductory course I did not want students to struggle to find an appropriate article or to develop a clear research question, both of which are skills beyond the scope of the course. Instead, I provided a series of possible questions they could address and a list of relevant articles they could use. I also provided some publications and databases they could use to find other topics of interest.
The Results: Most students used one of the articles provided on the list to write their essays, the most popular of which were Rebecca Spang’s discussion of the French Revolution and gerrymandering and Liz Mineo’s Harvard Gazette article on Columbus Day. This makes sense to me as these were two topics that we addressed most often in class. Students were interested in comparing their reading to the arguments made in the articles. For instance, when addressing Columbus Day, many students went back to the selection from Columbus’s letters that we read earlier in the semester. For the most part, students attempted to wrestle with how history was deployed to make a particular political claim and assessed its relevance to the present.
Some students did get hung up on “proving” whether the claims made in the articles were true or not. A revision of the assignment may need to restrict topics to ones that we addressed more fully in class so that students feel more comfortable making broader claims about the issues at hand. I may, for instance, restrict essays to the themes we address most fully in the course and that I explicitly link to the present: ideological conflict, racism, and democracy.
The assignment continues to need more scaffolding throughout the semester, but it seemed to pique more interest than normal in a final assignment. It involved more advanced skills than I normally address in an introductory survey. Finally, it was refreshing to receive papers that showcased much more original thought and variety than I normally encounter when I simply ask students to answer a question on some of the course material.