Last year I began thinking about compiling a survey of approaches to the US survey. I conducted a poll, in which more than 50 people kindly participated, and began gathering my thoughts. (And then I had a baby, which derailed things for a bit…they are so high maintenance!).

So as I turn back to this project, and for my first post of this academic year, I’m going to start with the flipped classroom, and the way I am approaching it this semester. This is not a survey of flipped approaches (please leave some links to others that you have found useful!), but rather it is my iteration of it given some specific limitations that arose this semester.

A few notes about this approach:

• I am a big believer that students, particularly at the introductory level, need guidance through the textbook material, and some presentation of it in lecture form. This is entirely discipline specific: to do basic work in history, such as the reading of a primary document, requires a breadth of knowledge to understand complexity and nuance that would be contained therein. In general, I use some form of interactive lectures and small group work in my classes, but this semester I’m using almost entirely active learning sessions, and I have adjusted my learning goals for the course to reflect this.
• I went with this approach because I am teaching a hybrid section, and because of our scheduling, I only meet 12 times with the students in the fall semester.
• Hybrid/blended teaching is great because of its capacity for allowing for universal design. I have students keep a “Participation Journal” to evaluate their own participation in class, so that I can have one-on-one conversations with them via that format and I can identify any issues that might arise in class. It gives more reticent students a chance to comment on class material, as well as another forum to reflect on course material online, rather than only our in-person meetings.
• This is a course of 30 students, so the selections I have made reflect that classroom size.

In this flipped/hybrid survey, I have identified my learning outcomes as the following:

The goal of this course, and all your college level courses, is your cognitive freedom. This implies an ability to reason and argue based in content knowledge learned or gathered through the process of research. No matter your professional goals, these skills will enhance your value as an employee; moreover, such attributes are valuable in creating a productive citizen. Assignments and readings will all contribute to these goals:

Skills:

• Connect primary sources to historical context using reference material and historical arguments
• Evaluate historical arguments by reading scholarly work
• Identify arguments about and articulate changes over time
• Manage time and plan for deadlines efficiently and effectively with minimal supervision

Content Coverage and Big Questions:

• America’s changing role in global affairs
• The evolution of politics, the presidency, and the state
• Cultural identity and change
• Economic growth and crisis and the changing experiences of work, exchange, technology, and consumption

Citizenship:

• Consider how Americans have interacted with laws and government institutions from the local to national levels
• Evaluate the connection and contradictions among democracy, citizenship, and cultural pluralism
• Consider the relationship between domestic affairs and international relations
• Apply historically derived definitions of liberalism and conservatism

I am using the Bedford/St. Martin’s edition of Henretta, America: A Concise History because it has chapter reviews that prepare students for the online unit quizzes.

I designed the course in units that correspond with the textbook, and selected one scholarly article or book chapter for each that students will read, and dedicated one class per unit to explore how historians write about the past. The other class sections will use active learning activities to apply the knowledge that they gained from their readings.

The articles I selected:

• Bruce Schulman, “Brand Name America: Remaking American Nationhood at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” pp. 17-36.
• Gary Gerstle, “Civic Nationalism and Its Contradictions, 1890-1917” (chapter 2) from American Crucible
• Beth Bailey, “Rebels Without a Cause? Teenagers in the 1950s,” History Today, vol. 40, February 1990, pp. 25-31.
• Jefferson Cowie, excerpt from Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

(this selection process was ridiculously difficult for me. I will probably switch the Gerstle chapter for his essay on the Protean character of American liberalism, if I think my students can handle it; it pains me not to have an essay on New Deal liberalism, but I teach other courses in which I go into this in depth, so I will touch on it with an activity but not a reading. Sigh.)

The class thus takes a similar pattern for each unit:

Day 1: in-class activity to make sense of the content of 2 textbook chapters and related documents

Day 2: in-class activity for the next 2 chapters…

Day 3: review of an article or chapter by a historian that introduces an argument (which can also be used in writing their documentary source analysis paper…dastardly, I know)

Rinse and Repeat for the next Unit. (total of four units)

For these in class activities, I have a running theme. On the first day, I had students select a fictional individual from a list, and step by step compile a biography of that person. They had to pick his or her race or ethnicity, religion, country of origin, living circumstances, family situation. I then had them identify 3-4 developments in the Gilded Age that would have shaped this person’s life, and then assess whether his or her life was getting better or worse. They worked in groups and input their findings on a padlet (the results are illustrative of reading comprehension and attention to detail — I am convinced that I should now add being detail-oriented to the learning outcomes of doing history). I also had them search photographs on loc.gov for an image that they felt captured this person and their experiences.

In the intervening week, in their Participation Journals, they are to review these entries and refine them, which we will also do in class.

In the coming class, day 3, they will explore how the depression of the 1890s affected their worker, and explore what political issues would have won this person’s support. Here is the exercise we will use, in Keynote. We will first start by selecting issues that the voters would have been drawn to in the 1890s, and classify him or her as a Republican, Democrat, Populist, Progressive or Radical. Then we will look at the two major parties in 1896 and 1912, see how various issues were taken up by the parties, and have their individuals vote in each election based on county electoral return maps (thank you, Wikipedia, for putting these online).

I have designed the in-class exercises to support the students’ work in the online component of the class, which includes composing several essays for each unit, as well as two document analysis papers, which are based on primary sources for each unit. Because it is a flipped classroom, I tried to hew closely to the structure of the textbook to provide structure and clarity.

I plan to continue using these fictional individuals throughout the semester to help develop students’ historical empathy, which is a broader goal that I have mentioned to students in class, but did not include on my learning outcomes in the syllabus. I explained that this is a skill that is quite useful in many areas of work: marketing, market research, business planning, policy and public affairs–i.e. being able to see an issue through someone else’s eyes and reconstructing their experience is a valuable skill. Occasionally I will assign them individuals whose experiences would be quite different from their own, but in this first iteration I let them choose.

Benefits of this Approach:

–helps students learn how to work in groups

–provides ample opportunity to apply their reading/knowledge

–multiple opportunities to review, reflect, and comment on material for class

–several introductions to the material that will be used in their assessments (particularly their document analysis papers)

Downsides:

–students can get weary of group work and active learning (something I hope won’t happen since we only have 12 meetings)

–requires that students have done the reading and thought about it. The textbook reviews help with this, but active learning requires still further attention to detail that does not always come with the first read-through of a textbook

–the coverage problem (see my tears): while I haven’t given up a textbook (in fact, this approach suggests that I’m doubling down on the textbook, but I have ideas about how to reform this going forward), it does feel like there are huge, important chunks of content that are being left out.