This winter our History of Women and Gender in the West course was originally part of a learning community with the Women’s Lit course. With falling enrollments, the two courses had to be unlinked and, while the history class went, the lit course did not. This created an opportunity to incorporate some of the ideas the AHA Annual Meeting had spurred as my colleague, Amy French, and I quickly restructured the course and redesigned the assignments. I teach the first half of the course, through the mid-sixteenth century, and Amy teaches the second half from that point to the late twentieth century. Over the years we have offered the course by itself, we have learned that I often spend a great deal of the first half of the semester building basic historical concepts and skills on which Amy can then build. This year’s design combined traditional assignments that asked students to use databases such as JSTOR and Project Muse with a larger digital history project in which they would edit (or submit the start of) a Wikipedia article on a person or topic in gender history. In addition, students created individual blogs through which they shared their analyses of weekly reading assignments. The blog assignment sounds elementary, but for several of our students it was a challenge and focusing on general gender history concepts as well as establishing a blog (with help from our Writing Reading Information Technology Center coordinator, Jennifer Niester-Mika), set the digital humanities tone from the first course meeting.
What were we able to accomplish in eight weeks? Students created blogs, produced weekly entries, and commented on one another’s posts. They accessed, analyzed, and used academic journal articles on a topic of their choosing within the parameters of gender history in the west from 3000BCE to 1550CE. They used online resources to identify key books on their topics and then to access book reviews of those books (as the short time span did not allow them to read several books). They performed Google and Google Scholar searches on their topics and compared the results with those from academic databases. They created Pinterest boards to catalogue representative findings from these searches and these boards were the “springboards” for discussions about peer review, pay walls, and open access sources. They completed Wikipedia’s training for editors, read and analyzed an existing Wikipedia article, analyzed how their research fit into the existing article, and composed and submitted additions to existing articles, most of which were accepted for inclusion (much too rapidly for their comfort).
What did they learn? In their presentations, wonderful results revealed themselves. Students began talking to each other about their processes. They asked one another about research resources. They revealed that they had sought out and spent significant time with our reference librarians (not a project requirement). They revealed that they felt pressure to perform at a higher level than in other course projects because they knew the world was reading their work. They learned that gender history often works with limited primary sources and that doing gender history requires a great deal of detective work and the courage to be speculative in a way that is supported by the sources. They learned where the articles they rely on, as so many of us do, come from and they thought critically about their level of trust in that resource. And they learned about their topic in a deeper way than superficial biographical information.
I am calling this a huge success for a pilot project. I hoped for some of these outcomes. I would never have asked for all of them. What will I do differently in the second version? From student suggestions: ask them to choose topics by week two; to assist in this choice, offer a list of possible topics as well as the option to create a custom topic. From my own observation: use the blog entries to catalogue their project process rather than their reactions to and analyses of the group document assignments.
Diving in was worth the risk.
proflauradull--The View from the Chair 