Conference Workshop:

The History Learning Project Decodes a Department: Saying Farewell to Solo Practice

Leah Shopkow, associate professor, department of history, Indiana University, Bloomington

Leah Shopkow’s disciplinary research is in medieval historiography; she is currently completing a [more]critical edition and translation of the ‘Chronicle of Andres. She is the PI of the History Learning Project at Indiana University and with Arlene Díaz, David Pace, and Joan Middendorf, she co-authored “The History Learning Project: A Department ‘Decodes’ its Students” in the Journal of American History, winner of the McGraw Hill-Magna Publications Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award in 2009.

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So you’ve innovated in your classroom, designed assessments, collected data about whether your students were learning, and refined your classroom techniques. This is in keeping with the general view of the higher education classroom as an artisan’s shop, into which other artisans do not intrude. But each of us can only teach our students a fraction of what they need to know. Perhaps they will learn what they need from someone else and perhaps they won’t. Perhaps no one will help them learn the things they don’t learn from us. Perhaps they won’t be taught what they need to know anywhere in their program. So what can we do about it?
The next step has to be for us to go beyond our own classrooms to take collective responsibility for the learning of our students. The research of the History Learning Project has identified many of the “bottlenecks” in history learning (places where many students get “stuck”), through a process of interviewing a large percentage of the faculty in our department.
We have also surveyed history students in many classes. Using this data, we have identified the shared goals of department members and tentatively mapped out the areas in which we are meeting those goals and falling short of them. The result of this work has been the endorsement by the department of a new draft developmental curriculum and a commitment of the department to the collective work of refining and implementing this curriculum. In this session, we will discuss how we got to this place and explore strategies with the session participants about how to build indigenous and authentic collaborations of a similar kind.

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