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Project Goals
I request a $2,500 Mellon Teaching with Technology Fellowship from the Associated Colleges of the South to design a new course, "Reconstructing the South," with active learning pedagogy, an electronic archive, and a World Wide Web site during the spring of 1999. The course will be offered to 15 advanced undergraduates at the University of the South in the spring semester of 2000. Unlike on-line courses and distance-learning models, "Reconstructing the South" is dedicated to exploring how a small group of students and their professor can employ Web resources for collaborative inquiry into a specific era of American history. Meeting as a seminar, the group will discuss, debate, and assess primary materials I place in the course's electronic archive. Each student will also be responsible for more individual analysis over the span of the semester, writing three medium-length essays and a final examination. Technical Requirements No new equipment or software will be required to complete this project. I will use existing scanners, servers, HTML-authoring software, and other tools at the University of the South to compile the archive and create the Web site pages and links for the course. Most of this work will be done with the Macintosh G-3 computer scheduled to arrive at my office later this summer. Although no specific outside support is necessary, I would welcome suggestions from historians at other ACS schools who have developed similar electronic archives or Web sites to support their courses. Institutional Support Various individuals and departments at Sewanee have offered assistance and pledged support for this project. Provost Fred Croom has approved my request for a one-course teaching reduction (without reduced salary) during the spring 1999 semester. By reducing my teaching load, I will have more time to find and incorporate primary source materials, and to plan and shape the course content and goals. The Center for Teaching will provide a student intern for at least one week in January 1999 to assist me in the initial Web page construction. Computing and Network Services will provide and maintain server space during the grant period and as long thereafter as I wish to employ the site. Academic Computing and various staff members in the duPont Library will offer basic computing, digital research, and Web navigation instruction to students in the course. I also have the option of requesting a work-study student to assist me for 8 hours each week collecting, transcribing, and entering texts during the spring 1999 semester. Implications for the Curriculum More than most eras in American history, Reconstruction remains controversial. One encounters divergent theories of what happened and why, contrasting interpretations of source material, and conflicting opinions of whether the reform efforts helped or hampered the region -- and these current issues also marked debate in the 1860s and 1870s. This multiplicity of voices and views make Reconstruction a difficult topic to teach effectively with traditional lecture courses or seminars, but render it an ideal forum for courses employing a Web-based archive of original sources and active learning pedagogy. The identifiable product of this grant will be a "Reconstructing the South" Web site introducing advanced undergraduates to primary sources -- letters, diaries, legislation, maps, cartoons, sections of autobiographies, journalists' accounts, and Freedmen's Bureau agents' reports -- each of which will inform students' approach to the age and reveal its many points of conflict. Every class meeting will focus on several original source items, with the instructor guiding the class toward informed interpretations of the material, rather than propounding a single theory. The electronic archive will also provide a foundation for student research papers on specific aspects of the post-Civil War South, combining a wide range of primary materials, links to other sources and databases, and guides to printed information. This project's origins can be traced to an earlier, less ambitious revision of a companion course. In January 1998, the University's Center for Teaching provided a student intern to help me create a Web site for "America's Civil War." Planning and creating that Web site compelled me to reconsider my teaching goals and methods. While I previously relied primarily on lectures to transmit information and guide student inquiry, I began to explore how digital information presented through a Web site might encourage more active learning. I will offer this computer-based version of "America's Civil War" to 25 advanced undergraduates in the coming term, fall 1998. You may visit a preliminary version of the site at http://www.sewanee.edu/faculty/Willis/Civil_War/index.html "Reconstructing the South" will borrow many ideas and techniques from the preceding course, and my experiences teaching "America's Civil War" will inform how I choose, arrange, and structure materials for this class. As on the Civil War site, the new course's home page will be the center of the Web site, with connecting links to the class syllabus, a large selection of on-line primary sources, scanned illustrations from the era, and a subject-based index linked to other electronic text archives and Web sites where students might pursue essay topic research. "Questions of the Day" pages will allow students to ascertain the next meeting's focus before reading the assigned material; these questions will then guide our inquiry and discussion during class sessions. Despite these crucial similarities, I foresee a number of pedagogical distinctions between the two courses, many arising from the Reconstruction class's enrollment limit of 15 students. With only 15 participants, each student will be able to contribute more fully to discussions. The limited enrollment will also allow me to focus more closely on student writing; "Reconstructing the South" will be offered as one of the University's "writing intensive" classes, with additional writing assignments and supervision (and special credit) for participants. In general, the smaller group will better support engagement in a common analytical exercise. Rather than lecture from behind a podium, I will spend my time posing direct questions to individuals, engaging the class in debates, forming small groups to assess particular issues, and always returning to the central questions: "what happened, why, and to what consequence?" Students will be challenged to form and defend their own historical narratives of the past, not simply expected to write down my interpretation and parrot it back on exams. The Web site for "Reconstructing the South" will contain some features not found on my Civil War site. In order to support student essays, a topics page will suggest ideas for student analysis in papers of 5 to 10 pages. I will also construct a chronology page listing the important political, military, economic, and social events of the era to help students place the archive's documents and illustrations in historical context. In what is probably the biggest change, I will install and moderate an ongoing discussion board as part of the site, allowing students to continue their exploration of topics beyond the usual class hours. There are some risks associated with this undertaking. First, this pedagogy has not been employed to teach history at Sewanee and is being attempted at few private, liberal arts colleges. Colleagues might, therefore, misunderstand the purposes of the course and the accomplishments of its participants. I will provide a special introduction to the course for my History department colleagues during the spring 2000 semester, when the class is first offered, and would be happy to discuss it at a gathering of historians from ACS schools thereafter. A second difficulty is the sacrifice of narrative continuity. Any course employing so many documents and illustrations -- and eschewing a textbook -- creates a number of "voices," not all of which proceed in a linear, or even a reinforcing, fashion. My most significant pedagogical challenge will be to provide my students with the over-arching context and historical implications of the era as I encourage them to dig into the specific realities presented by primary sources. Despite these challenges, I believe the "Reconstructing the South" Web site and new course pedagogy will offer students a unique opportunity to "do history" and think historically about vital issues that remain debated in our shared culture. Assessment The class will incorporate assessment at five points. Three of these will entail formal evaluations offered by the students (at the beginning, middle, and end of the course), while the other two will be engaged throughout he semester. At the first meeting, class members' knowledge of the subject matter and their facility with basic computer functions will be surveyed. At mid-semester, a follow-up assessment will determine which students need help with mechanical functions or course content, and participants' suggestions will be solicited. At the end of the semester, the students will be asked to specify which aspects of the course they found most and least challenging, what additional issues the course might consider in future offerings, and why they found this method of instruction more or less helpful than traditional history courses. A fourth mode of assessment flows from the course's organization: I will gauge students' engagement with the material and mastery of its implications at each class meeting by assigning them a participation grade for that day's work. Finally, moderating the discussion board will allow me to determine which documents the students find intriguing, overly complex, or unhelpful, and to judge class members' technical needs and accomplishments. A summary of the assessments and plans to respond to suggestions will be posted on the Web site after the course's conclusion. |