Our Journey, Day 67

When I was cleaning my stuff out of my office on campus, I found a lot of old posters for courses I've created. Over the years I got in the habit of making these 8.5x11 and 11x17 advertisements for new courses. I designed a lot of experimental courses over the years. It wasn't really much more difficult than what I was already doing, taking over courses my predecessor had created or altering surveys so they covered what I thought was important and used open textbooks. And it gave me a chance to talk with students about topics that excited me and that I thought might interest them as well. Mostly, I was right about that and these courses attracted pretty decent enrollments.

This was probably partly due to my success in getting the word out to people who otherwise might not have heard about new courses in the History department. I would have the print shop run off a pile of posters I designed with the help of a graphic artist in the communications and marketing office, and then I ran around campus putting them up on announcement boards and sometimes just taping them to doors and walls. This was probably against the rules (I certainly never saw anyone else doing it), but no one yelled at me.

This is one of the posters. You can see more in the video

Over the years I created a bunch of experimental courses, some of which I upgraded into listed courses. In the summer of 2019 I taught "Readings in Latin American History" and a "Readings in Environmental History" that became History 3650. In fall 2019 I created a History of High Technology course, which was fun because I got to tell some stories of my own career in the 80s and 90s. In spring 2020, I taught the first section of my new American Environmental History (3650). In fall 2020 I taught a Gilded Age and Populism course and in the spring of 2021 an experimental "US and Latin America" that covered the difficult relationship between us and our southern neighbors. In fall 2021 I taught Historiography -- that was a requirement for majors and really only open to them so I didn't make a poster. In spring 2022 I co-taught a new "Native Americans and the United States" course. I was the junior partner on that one, so I didn't make posters. I did make posters for Intro to Equity in fall 2022, but then in spring 2023 I was the junior partner in a collaborative Economic History course, so I made no poster.

One of the reasons I would make posters and put them up around campus was that it seemed like the only way to get the word out. Although I could and did announce to my students what I would be teaching the following semester, there was no departmental or college or university promotion of new courses. Even when there were mechanisms in place, they didn't always work as planned. For example, I'm teaching American Environmental History for a final time this semester. I was asked to dual-list it as a 3650/5650 section, which would make it available to grad students as well as undergrads. The reason for this is that in Minnesota, High School teachers need a Masters Degree or eighteen credits in the subject area in order to teach AP History or CIHS (college in high school) classes. This is a relatively new requirement, so there are apparently a lot of high school teachers looking for online classes. I listed my course as they requested, but got no grad students. Turns out, they never bothered to list my course in the system-wide online database of available courses that these teachers use to find a class. Oh, well.