Methodology – Ammon Shepherd

History Lab: rethinking the Western Civ course

So, I finally get to teach a college course this semester. Way excited! But I refuse to do the normal lecture format. Seriously, we are still stuck on that teaching method after all the research and scholarship about the best ways to teach? (These all came up as results for searching in Google Scholar with the terms “how students learn” and “scholarship of teaching and learning”, which returned over 3.7 million results.)

Screen Shot 2013-09-06 at 12.38.57 PM — over 600,000 results for “scholarship of teaching and learning” on Google Scholar

Screen Shot 2013-09-06 at 12.07.19 PM — Over 3 million hits for “how students learn” on Google Scholar. You’d think we would know how students learn by now…

I still believe the “learning pyramid” has merit despite it’s obvious over-generalizations and fabricated percentages. Lecturing has it’s place, but not in my class room. If anything, I want to be less boring. 🙂

Apparently false learning pyramid, created by me.

So, I got to thinking, what format do I want to use for my Monday-Wednesday-Friday, History 100 Western Civilization class? I landed on a discussion based lecture format for Monday and Wednesday, and what I’m calling a History Lab for Friday. The sciences have this same format. Lecture on two days a week, then go to a lab where you practice what was preached. I figured we could do the same thing with critical thinking skills taught by the humanities. Monday and Wednesday will be a bit of me talking about the time period, with a healthy dose of questions and comments from the students based on the reading they have done. Then on Friday we have a History Lab where we critically examine a primary document from the time period we are learning about. I’m open to other ideas on what to do during the History Lab. I’m excited to see if any students offer suggestions.

Today was our first History Lab, and it went very well, I think. I will get the students opinion on Monday, to make this exercise an all around learning experience. For today’s History Lab I divided the students into groups of five (any more than that gets a bit unmanageable). They each picked a popsicle stick I had in a cup at the front of the desk. There were five popsicle sticks with the same color, but a different “filter” written on each of the five sticks. The filters are the biases, or lenses through which to look at history. They included race, gender, science/technology, social class, art, religion, and politics/government. After the students organize into groups, I give them a primary source document to read together, then discuss the document based on the filter that they have. After enough time to allow individual groups to discuss, we discuss altogether as a class. To track participation, attendance and provide accountability, each group had to write a summary of their discussion on the back of the paper, including their names and which filter they had, to be turned in at the end of class.

This seemed to work out pretty well, and the students had great comments. We looked at “The Spartan Creed”, a poem written by Tyrtaeus in the 7th Century B.C. (unfortunately no reliable source found, just this post in a forum). The most noticeable thing about this document is how heavily male centric it is. Granted, it’s a man writing about war, but there is absolutely no mention of a female. It can be implied by the use of the word “children”, but no fighting for the protection of wife and family, just city and children. Here are some of the comments the students made on their papers for a few of the filters.

2013-09-06 10.23.17 — Directions are an absolute necessity for group work to function well.

Gender: Men are dominant, only men are warriors. No reference to women. The society was very male dominated. Women had no role in the Spartan military, so the code is less relevant to them. Females are not even mentioned in the creed, so men are obviously the dominant gender. Among the men, they are expected to be strong, courageous, honorable, every trait that makes them a mighty soldier, a protector of their city-state.

Art: War is their art, the structure of their army, how they fought, etc. It doesn’t specifically say anything about art, but the way this is written is a form of art and the way the author makes out a man to be is like a piece of art.

Religion: War was treated as a religion. Soldiers were treated as gods when they returned. In death, a Spartan man becomes immortal as his memory is honored as if he is a god. To understand this one must know that in his life he was worshiped for being a good fighter and so that is carried over in a glorious death. Religion and personal values seem to all be related to war; gods are mentioned but the creed is centered around the personal honor of a warrior.

I was pleased with the results. All of the students were engaged in the group work and came up with something intelligent to write about. The beauty of this model is that each student has a focused purpose to look at a historical document, and then is held accountable for sharing something.

Do you have ideas for what we can do in our History Lab? Leave a comment below, and I’ll give it a try!

[Post image from Wikimedia Commons: Glass containers, experimental magnifiers and chemical or alchemy paraphernalia in the Lavoisier Lab 1775 by Jorge Royan. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munich_-_Deutsches_Museum_-_07-9631.jpg]

Writing is like carving in stone

Cross posted at NaziTunnels.org.

Like a block of stone

I recently finished writing and rewriting and writing again the essays for several scholarship applications. It is probably a good thing, but that was the most time and effort I have ever spent writing three pages of text. I went through several revisions of each essay, had the wonderful Fulbright advisers at George Mason read and reread the essays, and even went to the vastly underused (by me anyways) campus writing center.

Roughing it out

My personal essay started out as being a little too personal, as in informal. At the writing center, I also realized that the opening paragraph was too negative. I wanted to show how as a child I deeply disliked school. In first and second grades, in order to avoid going to school I would often hide in the backyard or somewhere in the house, and generally make a big stink every morning. One time my mom drove me to school (two blocks away) and when we got there I jumped out of the car and ran off into the neighborhood for an hour or so. The rest of elementary school through high school was better; I did not put up as much of a stink, but I still did not like school. I was convinced that I would never have anything to do with school again once I graduated from high school. That’s how my essay started out, a general idea of what I wanted to write about. Like a big block of stone that I hacked away at.

Adding Detail

I wanted to convey all of that in a couple of sentences, all to point to the irony that I am now pursuing the highest degree one can attain in school, and that I am still in school 16 years later, with another three years to go (I did have three years off in there, though). But the gal at the writing center was right. It was a bit too negative. Instead I focused on my strengths as an historian and my technical skills. This worked out much better, since this is one of the major focuses of the dissertation. Through this constant revision and insight from others my project started to take shape.

Finishing

One of the other really neat things about spending so much effort on an essay (especially one about my dissertation research) is that I was really able to focus my arguments and tighten up my thoughts on what I hope to accomplish. Through this process of constant revision I realized three things that I wanted to focus on in my dissertation: the story of the underground dispersal projects; how the projects are memorialized or not, and what that says about Vergangenheitsbewältigung; and an argument for the change in what is considered scholarship in the historical profession. Going through the constant revisions has changed my focus in some small ways from my original proposal in the dissertation prospectus, but that is to be expected. I feel that I now have a much more polished and obtainable goal.

All images courtesy of Akbar Simonse, who photographed Mark Rietmeijer sculpture. http://www.flickr.com/photos/simeon_barkas/sets/72157600224554402/

Writing Proposals

This post is cross-posted at my dissertation site.

I spent the day researching grants and reading about how to properly put together a proposal. I also spent a bit of time plotting out my todo list for this semester, creating a checklist of tasks and when they are due. I made the list in my Google Calendar, so it’s not available to be embedded on this site. I’ll have to work on finding a replacement or something.

One of the places I’ll be applying to for a research grant is the Social Science Research Council (http://www.ssrc.org). They happen to have a short paper on how to best write a proposal for their competitions, and being no dummy, I know I can apply these tips to all the proposals I write. So here are some tips from their paper, “On the Art of Writing Proposals.”

Purpose of Proposals is to Persuade

The main thing to realize when writing a proposal, is that you are trying to persuade the approval committee that your project is better than all the others. The trick is to do it in as short a space as possible—in the first paragraph, or at least the first page—while including all of the points the readers are looking for. In the end you want the readers to associate you with your project (Billy’s the guy researching blind Algerian water cave fish with telepathic properties), rather than other mundane tidbits (Jane is the gal from New York City, right?). It truly is an art.

What do they want?!

All scholarly projects require three basic merits: “conceptual innovation, methodological rigor, and rich, substantive content.” Additionally, the readers are going to be asking three questions that the proposal needs to answer:

What are we going to learn?
Why do we need to know?
How do you prove it?

And this all needs to be done initially very clearly, succinctly, and as forcefully as possible in the shortest amount of text.

Let me be clear about this…

It’s important to keep in mind that the individuals in the approval committee come from varying disciplines. Therefore, the proposal needs to be clear, free of the jargon typical of your discipline, all the while explaining the boundary pushing or unique way your project approaches your field. Keep the focus of the proposal on the ideas and leave the technical aspects to an appendix. Make the first page explain as clearly as possible what the topic is about, and what the readers—essentially, what the granting committee—is going to learn from this.

So What!

This is the crux of the whole matter. Why in the world does anybody need to know about this? What’s the point? Who cares? Why?! This is sometimes the hardest part to figure out. I know it is for me. I continually mull this point over. Do I really have a convincing and compelling reason. It seems for the time being, for me, that my biggest compelling reason, my “so what?” is because it hasn’t been researched before. While that may be a valid reason, be careful. Others may conclude that there is adequate justification for there to be no scholarship in the first place. There are other aspects that make a research topic important and valid. “Turning points, crucial breakthroughs, central personages, fundamental institutions, and similar appeals to significance of of the object of research are sometimes effective, if argued rather than merely asserted.

Apply the topic to current political, economic or social debates. How is your research not only timely but currently urgent, such that it provides a new way to view current issues, or turn the direction of current understanding?

Also try to be fresh and appealing in your approach. Promote the apparent contradictions, extrapolate on puzzles, and catch the readers off guard with surprises. Take the less traveled path. If current trends lean towards one area of research, but your topic can gyrate towards a new and fresh approach, take it!

Oh Yeah? Prove it!

It is important for the proposal committee to know the methodology of your approach. Do not just tell them what you will discover, but how you intend to discover it. What types of sources, what means of debate, what technology will be employed? But don’t just list out your tasks and how you’ll do them, argue why this is the best course of action to achieve the results you intend to acquire. Because some readers may be from interdisciplinary fields, take the time to explain “what parts of your methodology are standard, and which are innovative.” Some ideas to cover:

Activities you plan to undertake to collect information
Techniques you will use to analyze the data
Tests of validity you will apply
Specify the archives, sources, and respondents

Finally, proposals should describe the end product. Will the grant help to complete a dissertation chapter, a book, a digital project? Be specific as to what the proposed outcome of this supported project will be.

End with the Beginning in mind…

And begin with the ending in mind, of course. It takes a long time to write a decent proposal. Start early. Give yourself several weeks, or months if possible. Write a first draft and set it aside for a day. Then revise and set aside again. Ask others to take a look at it. Revise it again. Make sure your opening paragraph is succinct, to the point, and effective.

The closing of your proposal should reference the beginning. If you mentioned a story or a specific and compelling reason for the research, reference it again. The effect is to try and tie it all up in a neat little package.

Now, get back to work!

Well, that all sounds really good. Now if I can just apply it to my proposals!