My Current OER Project
This is a presentation I put together for a Minnesota State showcase of Open Education (OER) projects. Over the past several years I’ve written about a half dozen OER textbooks, three of which are featured in the Open Textbook Library.
Last semester and this semester I’ve been working on a new textbook for my US History I course and a redesign of the course to make it work as an asynchronous online experience. I teach US I every semester, alternating between online and in-person. Previously, instead of using a commercially published textbook and primary source reader I had shifted to using a popular OER called The American Yawp, published by Stanford University and written by a team of historians who were grad students about when I was (and when they wrote most of the content). It’s a good textbook, but most of the authors are Intellectual and Cultural historians.
While I respect and value both IH and CH, I’m actually an Environmental and Social historian, so I was already adding quite a bit of content in lectures and supplemental readings. So it seemed natural to me to turn what I was adding into a REMIX of the Yawp incorporating my own contributions. I didn’t publish this to the OTL however, because I didn’t think it was unique enough.
Then I became very interested in using primary sources much more extensively with students. Primary sources are documents written by the actual people of the past rather than by historians looking back at it. They can be public (things like newspaper articles, pamphlets, political speeches, and state letters) or they can be private (like diary entries and personal letters). Often, they give the reader a perspective that isn’t the same as what gets recorded in the history books. Sometimes the difference can be surprising and challenging!
I’ve always incorporated a few primary sources into my history surveys, but recently I’ve begun playing with the idea of really focusing on them and making these contemporary voices the centerpiece of my course rather than a supplement. I discovered I was not the first historian to think of this. About a hundred years ago a Harvard professor named Albert Bushnell Hart published a five-volume set titled American History Told By Contemporaries. Each of the volumes contained a couple hundred documents written by people who lived through the major (and the minor) events of American history. In addition to the five volumes he wrote for college-level readers, Hart published similar volumes for High School and even elementary students.
I took my inspiration from Hart and also from one of the pioneers of OER, Robin DeRosa, a professor of English at UNH who published An Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature around 2015. I decided to write a volume for US History I that would include some narrative sections written by me, like a normal textbook, but would devote much more space to primary sources. Many of these were sources from Hart’s books, which were published between 1897 and 1903 and were thus out of copyright. But I spread a wider net and collected primary writings from other anthologies, from excerpting passages from longer sources published in the past, and even from previously unpublished letters I had discovered myself in archives.
The process of preparing this anthology was pretty straightforward but time-consuming. Each of the (currently 206) sources I’m using in the anthology needed to be edited for readability. Sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century writing can be challenging for today’s college students. The point, I thought, was not really to impress them with how much different language was in the past (as it might have been if I had been writing a literature anthology). The point was to make the ideas and expressions understandable without altering them so much that the tone and style (and meaning) of the original would be lost. This involved punctuation changes more than anything else. People in the past used to write sentences that could span entire pages!
Another element in the editing process was getting each of the passages down to a reasonable word length without losing the meaning and value of the source. Some of the passages in Hart’s volume ran to several thousand words. I found them very interesting, but when I first tried them out on my students I got push-back. Even dedicated History majors found some of these passages TMI - too much information. Not to mention first-year survey students! So I set a goal for myself that no passage would be more than 1500 words long.
In each of the fifteen chapters there will be twelve or sixteen readings. In my in-person classes when I use this anthology, I divide the class into four groups and assign a quarter of the readings to each (they’re subdivided by theme). I have lecture-discussions at the beginning of the week and discussions of the sources at the end, where the groups report out the sources they have read. In the online course much more of the student time is spent interacting with the text, so they read all the sources. In order to facilitate this a bit, I have also included mp3s of me narrating each passage at the end of the text. So they can listen to me while they read, listen to all the sources and then read and annotate them, or whatever works for them.
I think interacting more with lots of diverse voices from the past rather than historians’ choices of what’s “important” gives students a better sense that just as today, not everyone was on the same page or had the same understanding and opinion about the big events of our history. I’ve been able to include several passages that contradict each other on facts and interpretations. But possibly more important, I’ve also been able to include passages in which people discuss ideas that aren’t even related to what a typical history might consider the burning issue of the day (year, decade). Hopefully, this will suggest that there was always a lot going on in people’s lives, just as there is today. I don’t think this minimizes the impact of the big arguments of our past (or present), but it does suggest that there’s more to life than those history-making crises.