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Contact Name: William R. Caraher Employee ID: XXXXXXDepartment: HistoryStop Number: 8096Office Phone: n/a Email Address: william.caraher@und.eduProject Summary:Flipping the Textbook: A Proposal for Using the Scale-Up Classroom for Developinga ‘Signature Pedagogy’ for HistoryOver the past 20 years there has been growing discussion of a “signature pedagogy” forthe field of history. While no consensus has emerged, recent scholarship has come tosee the introductory level course as a key laboratory for developing new approaches toteaching students to produce historical knowledge about the past. Approaches thatfavor “uncoverage” where students focus on methods rather than the endless list of names and dates have gained favor among many forward thinking historians. Practiceslike flipping the lecture and collaborative learning have sought to expose theintermediate learning processes and extended the faculty grasp from the lectern to thelaptop to promote a more systematic approach to knowledge production and skillretention. The Scale-Up classroom fits well within the more extreme approaches toproducing a managed learning environment. The panoptic character of the Scale-Upclassroom provides an ideal place for careful, observable, collaborative knowledgeproduction. The goal of History 101 in a Scale-Up environment will ask students to write a history textbook collaboratively from scratch.
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Flipping the Textbook:A Proposal for Using the Scale-Up Classroom forDeveloping a ‘Signature Pedagogy’ for HistoryCourse number and Description: History 101: Western Civilization INumber of Sections Offered: 1Single Instructor Enrolment Figures: 150 per classScheduling: 7:00 pm – 9:20 pm Tuesday NightSchedule:Traditionally, the Department of History has taught History 101 at night for bothpedagogical and social reasons. The former are outlined in the body of the proposal.The latter involve making the course available to the largest and most diversecommunity of learners possible.Project Description:
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Background and Experience3. Goals and Design Principles4. Assessment Strategy5. Maximizing the Use of Available Resources6. Classroom Structures to Meet Learning Goals7. Classroom Procedures8. Conclusion9. Works Cited10. Appendices
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1. Introduction:
Despite over 100 years of critique, the large lecture-style history class has changed verylittle. The traditional arrangement of the class positions the faculty member as the "sageon the stage" and the students in the audience in order to maximize the number of students exposed to the content in a controlled environment. Across campus, however,this form of classroom organization has gradually given way to more dynamic andinteractive arrangements between student and teacher. While the much-maligned jargon of "active learning" has lost favor in recent times, there is no doubt that a greaterdegree of interaction between faculty and students has become increasingly normalized within pedagogical literature and day-to-day teaching practices of faculty. Withinhistory, however, enrollment pressures, efficiency expectations, and old habits havecontinued to support the presence of large lecture style classes particularly at theintroductory level or at least seen them as antithetical to carefully managed learningoutcomes. Occasional efforts to flip or invert the lecture have met with the typicaldifficulties: large classes, lecture bowl style seating, and limited space for students tomeet, work, share, or write.In recent years, the rapid expansion of digital technologies has offered new ways toovercome the physical limits of the classroom. Discussion boards, integrated socialnetworking components, and the use of new and multi media delivery systems haveexpanded the educational environment beyond the physical confines of lecture hall,distended the concept of learning communities, and challenged the tension betweengroups and individual learners.Despite the expansion of the digital frontiers and a continuously renewed commitmentto "active learning" and "flipped lectures", traditional textbooks persist as the main way in which students encounter "content". Traditional textbooks are generally linear,unappealing, and expensive obstacles that many faculty feel as compelled to workaround as to justify to their students. Remarkably the history textbook of the 21stcentury is structurally similar to the textbook of the mid-20th century, even if thecontent has changed to suit new academic fashions and tastes.My proposed use of the Scale-Up classroom is to create a History 101: WesternCivilization course where the students write their own textbook. This takes itsinspiration from recent discussions of inverting the lecture, conceptual literatureprojects that compose journals or edited books in a fixed span of time, collaborativespirit behind projects like Wikipedia, and the socially disruptive "DIY" practicesassociated with the edu-punk movement (Groom 2008).The main goal of the Scale-Up History 101 Course will be to produce a syntheticHistory 101 textbook. The class will break into 15, 10-12 student groups, eachresponsible for a 5000 word chapter in the textbook. Using online resources,collaborative digital and classroom work spaces, and a restructured history lecture whichfocuses on methods, key interpretative themes, and techniques for writing history,
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Scale-Up Grant Proposal
This is a grant proposal to use a Scale-Up (http://scaleup.ncsu.edu/) type classroom at the University of North Dakota.
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