This summer’s workshop on Open Pedagogy pushed me to develop an approach to teaching introductory History courses that escape the pattern I had settled in for a number of years: me lecturing in each class period while students (supposedly) complete readings in two textbooks – a narrative chronological history and a book of primary sources – and then with students writing a brief paper at the end of the semester. This involved a complete rethinking about my aims for the introductory, Core Curriculum Tier 1 History courses I teach. While I knew that students in these courses routinely did not complete the assigned readings except when to prepare for a scheduled quiz, the experience I had had teaching last year in the hybrid format (half of the teaching in the classroom and half taking place through Canvas) showed me that students definitely could write and share ideas with each other if given a conducive environment.
The smaller Open Pedagogy group meetings over the course of June and July helped give me the confidence that in class meetings this fall I could do things other than lecture. (Holding class in seminar style had always been the aim, but one that usually remained unfulfilled unless students could discuss things in class other than the assigned readings.) I developed an approach for my Open Pedagogy classes (I have two this fall, both HIST 1101 Being Human in Antiquity – formerly titled Foundations of the Western World) that focus on students in class accessing primary and secondary sources available on-line, learning how to select and read them, and then write about these sources. In the last month of the semester students will use what they had written earlier in the semester as springboards for a final course essay that will be posted on the course Web site, which I also developed this summer.
While over the summer I developed a plan for what would happen in class meetings throughout the semester, I still feel like I won’t know just how to teach using these approaches and openly available sources until I actually experience doing so.
The student feedback on the writing assignments I developed was encouraging and gave me the confidence that my thinking on the assignment prompts (and the writing and rewriting of them!) was paying off and that my assignments stood a reasonable of being easily understood and managed by students. The student feedback was especially helpful in helping me see where I needed to provide more structure in having students report to me what they were writing on.
My work this summer on these two sections in which I will use Open Pedagogy was also strongly influenced by my decision to apply a practice of “ungrading” – student work in these two sections will not be graded. I have pledged to students to provide timely feedback on their written work, and I will require that assignments be submitted on time. (Mary Isbell and I discussed how to approach student failure to submit work in the semester.) While students will determine their own grades at the end of the semester, students do know that I will reserve the right override their suggestion, though only if they cannot come close to justifying the grade they assign themselves.
As a result of this work with the Open Pedagogy Fellowship I am trying many new things this fall in these two courses. I hope we as Open Pedagogy faculty can continue to meet, to share ideas, and to strategize in making our teaching effective in new ways.
