Contingency, Agency, Responsibility

How I plan to teach this fall

The Westworld piano-roll is not inevitable.

It took me a while to begin thinking of course syllabi as tools for mapping out my goals for the semester. At first, they were things I needed to do to prove to people in authority that I was prepared to teach a subject. Then they became a roadmap for students. Over time, I saw some examples (isn’t it weird how most of us when we’re History grad students never have a course on how to write a syllabus – or any type of instructional design, for that matter) of things other faculty were doing. At one point I realized the course was supposed to align with a set of goals and outcomes dictated by Liberal Education (Gen Ed) standards, so I began incorporating some language that spoke to that. At another point, I noticed that my course had a relationship with but wasn’t exactly the same as the description in my university’s catalog – which had been there who knows how long. So I started including that language and saying how my course was going to build off that but also where it was going that might be a bit different.

I’m thinking about my courses for next fall at Saint Paul College and beginning my planning well in advance. This is a bit of a change: I began working at Bemidji State University seven years ago as an emergency replacement for a professor who, rather than returning from a sabbatical, went on sick leave. I was slotted into three of her classes that first semester, then all four the following. They thought she’d be coming back the next fall, but she didn’t and I was rehired. She retired that year, and in addition to teaching her courses I began teaching a new environmental history course of my own. When I say I was teaching “her” courses, I don’t mean I was working off a syllabus or plan she had prepared and left for me. I was never able to find any syllabi. In several of the courses, there were textbooks already chosen; so at least I had a rough idea of what she had been planning to cover. They were very expensive textbooks and I quickly decided to shift away from them toward open educational resources when I taught those courses again, but that’s a different story.

In any case, I have the advantage this year of having the entire summer to think about my fall classes. Also, unlike past years, I won’t be doing quite as many “new preps” this fall. I’ll be teaching courses on African American History and Women in US History, but I've covered those topics in my other courses and the rest will be things I’ve taught before. The name of the game in those will be improving my content (and publishing OER, but again that’s another story). So, as I’m developing these two new courses and improving those others, I have a nice opportunity to take a deep breath and ask myself what I really want to do. And to examine what I’ve been doing and ask myself why.

Rather than just listing out the Lib Ed goal areas on my syllabi, I’m thinking about writing my own set of objectives. I had a lot of time to think about my teaching goals in the long application and interview process that led to me getting the tenure-track position I had been filling as an emergency replacement for several years. So I have a pretty good idea of what I’m hoping my students will get out of courses I teach. Here are the main ideas:

Contingency is the catch-all term that covers one of the big critical thinking goals. Basically, it’s the opposite of inevitability: the past didn’t have to lead to the present we’re living in today. There was no providential plan (I show students examples of how people in the past believed there was, with readings like Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana), and there was no teleological trajectory (I show students examples of this belief, with readings like Marx). There are implications of these beliefs, when people think they’re the chosen race or tribe or nation. Without being too heavy-handed about it (I hope!), I try to suggest that present forms of exceptionalism are as problematic as past ones.

Another element of history I want to stress with my students is multi-causality and the difficulty tracing simple cause-effect relationships. Rarely is there a single source of a change and it can tell us a lot about the attitudes of the past (and the attitudes of historians) if we critically examine the factors that are credited with causing change. This can lead to discussions about the interpretive nature of history and historical scholarship. Although I do expect my survey students to learn some “facts” about the past, I’d also like them to gain an understanding that not only isn’t there really a single “right answer” to most complex questions, but there are nearly as many interpretations as there are people thinking about history. Which is not to say that all interpretations are equally credible or valuable. This is a big opening to discussions not only of how to critically assess interpretations, but to inquire what the standards of credibility and value ought to be, and who ought to set them.

I’d also like my students to get a sense (even in intro-level courses) that in addition to there being multiple interpretations of the past, there are so many sources available to examine, interpret, and weave into stories of the past that it’s natural for honest, well-meaning people to disagree. I try to expose students to a variety of primary and secondary sources that address the past from different points of view and using different data. This nearly infinite variety of sources and interpretive perspectives suggests that there will be a variety of different ways history can be done. I’d like my students to get a sense very early that there are sub-disciplines that produce insights that enrich the overall picture. I haven’t cracked the code on inserting this into my content yet, but I’d like to show students how something like social history’s use of data to say something about the people who didn’t leave copious written records can be useful. Last semester I talked a bit about the demographics of transiency and persistence in early America to enhance the students’ understanding of the decennial census data and ask questions about social and political power. I’d like to do more of that sort of thing.

One thing that enhances my goal of showing the relevance of history is the fact that it’s often contentious. This semester in US II I talked about the rise of the “Lost Cause” narrative along with Jim Crow in the South. Revisionism about the Civil War is an easy way to dig into both the changes over time in historical thinking, and also the ongoing stakes of the debate. I think this is another point where students can readily see that just as there are currently differences of opinion over what ought to happen, there are differences over what happened in the past—and think about how those two issues are related.

Some people say history is written by the winners (my students say this a lot in discussions, I’ve noticed). I’d like to demonstrate that actually history is written by everybody but the winners’ stories are often easier to find. And have them think critically about why we often want to identify with the winners. Some people say history repeats itself (or at least rhymes). I’d like to show that it doesn’t, but people often make similar choices when faced with similar problems. Scarcity, competition, and similar challenges often lead to similar choices. But again, they don’t have to. To borrow a metaphor from Westworld, maybe we only run through the same piano-roll-like looped programs over and over because we don’t examine the choices before us. Looking at the past as a series of choices people made may help us recognize that the present is also a series of choices leading to the future. That suggests both agency and responsibility.

Tags: #Syllabi