This semester I am teaching colonial American history for the first time.  It’s a 300-level class, capped at 50 students, meeting twice a week. As I began planning my syllabus last year when I got the assignment, I was expecting it to be a lecture course.  But then I saw my enrollment numbers: only twelve students had signed up.  The lectures I’d been envisioning probably wouldn’t work out.  I went back to the drawing board.  In my department, at least, this is hardly a unique problem to me: we’re seeing enrollments drop across our classes, and many of my colleagues are teaching classes like this to classes in the low teens or even single digits.  As we strategize about ways to encourage more students to enroll in our (excellent and important) classes, we also need to think about how to restructure some of those courses for smaller numbers of students.

The tricky thing for me was trying to figure out how to structure a class that is basically a lecture class with so few students.  The hours are not such that we can really be a seminar.  They also aren’t likely to do the amount of reading I’d like to see for a seminar course.  But I do want us to have a lot of discussion, so I spent a lot of the summer thinking about ways to encourage discussion in class while still giving them the background that they need.  So far, it’s working out (but we’re only just starting Week 3, so stay tuned).

I’ve settled upon a few strategies for the syllabus.

First, I am being much more deliberate about bringing primary sources into the classroom.  In the past, I’ve put passages from sources I want us to talk about on my power point and inserted that discussion into my lecture.  Usually a few students will talk about it, but sometimes I would be answering my own questions.  As a former student who didn’t like to speak up in a 50-person lecture myself, I sympathize with those who remain quiet, but it can be frustrating.  I worried that with only a dozen registered, that silence could be even more deadly.  So, instead of relying on passages on the slides, I’ve been bringing in additional primary sources to each class session for more hands on activities.  We break for a bit so that they can read them themselves, and then I give them time to talk with a neighbor about them before we talk as a full class.  I’m hoping that as they get more used to this, we’ll be able to skip small group discussion and move right to the full class.  Next week, I’ll be breaking up a longer document into several parts with the plan that each part will have two readers, and then they will all teach each other about the parts that they aren’t reading.  They get extra practice in reading primary sources, and the texts have so far been pretty good at generating further discussion.

Second, we are reading a small number of books slowly.  I’ve decided to do this instead of doing shorter readings out of many books because I wanted us to have some significant longer arguments to dive into.  When they’ve finished the books, we will dedicate a whole class session to a seminar discussion of the text.  So, once every two to three weeks, we are having a seminar.  I selected the books in part because of the way that each talks about the practice of doing history (with the exception of Equiano, the only book-length primary source they are reading).  We’re starting off with Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange, which beyond being a great read spends a good deal of time thinking about how we read primary sources and how we remember the past.  I’m expecting it to spark some great discussion.  The other books we’ll read together are Jon Demos’ The Unredeemed Captive, Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare, and Colin Calloway’s The Scratch of a Pen.  Demos and Norton in particular write interestingly about their process and about their sources, and I’m hoping that this will allow us to talk not just about the stories that they tell, but also how they went about constructing those stories.  More on how those discussions go as we get to them.

Finally, I’m working on encouraging their discussion by having them take leadership in the class itself.  Each student has signed up for one presentation of a primary source.  In addition to writing a primary source analysis paper for me, they are also going to be in charge of presenting it to their classmates and leading discussion in the class on that day.  These start up next week, and I’m hoping that they will foster a sense that everyone is responsible for the class going well.  When they have to lead discussion themselves, I think they become more aware of the importance of taking part in discussion themselves when it’s someone else’s turn.  I selected a range of documents that I hope will allow them to explore their own interests and research methods: some are visual, some are literary, and I’ve given them the option of a couple of large databases as well, in case there was anyone in the class who was more interested in thinking about big data instead of close reading of an individual source.  I’m excited to see what they come up with.

Oh, and I got our classroom reassigned from one that fits 75 to one that fits 25.  That seems important, too.  Because of course until we moved, there was that one kid who would always sit in the back row, with what felt like miles of empty space in between…