Active Learning and Public Engagement in the History Survey: Teaching with Service Learning, Wikipedia, and Podcasting in Jewish History Courses

Society for History Education. California State University, Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, CA 90840-1601. Tel: 562-985-2573; Fax: 562-985-5431; Web site: http://www.societyforhistoryeducation.org/

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33

History Instruction; Higher Education; Jews; Service Learning; Encyclopedias; Electronic Publishing; Collaborative Writing; Audio Equipment; Information Dissemination; Judaism; World History; Active Learning; Student Projects

0018-2745

The prevailing long-term trend in university history instruction--especially when one considers the rise of the historical seminar in the nineteenth century and the source-method of teaching in the twentieth--has been towards teaching methods of analysis. That is to say, by reading documents and sources, students can learn a way of looking at the world--to think like a historian: to constantly look for context, to examine change over time, to seek evidence and analyze it closely. There are three critical challenges in constructive courses and curricula. First, there must reconsider survey classes. The "facts-first" approach, the "coverage" model, and the efforts to teach "cultural literacy" still maintain a certain pedagogical inertia, manifested in how instructors usually teach individual classes and how the wider history major frameworks situate introductory classes to provide prerequisite knowledge to allow students to delve into deeper topics in upper-division courses. Second, it is necessary to look to learning objectives beyond the individual class. History courses should certainly have aims tied to the specific subject at hand, but one can also articulate overarching student objectives--what students will take away if a course is the only university-level history class they will ever take, or, alternatively, what they will gain from a sequence of courses or a major at large. And finally, if training students to think historically is an objective of instruction in history, it must be situated in the pursuit of a higher goal and framing for the humanities in general. Consequently, in a series of courses in medieval and modern Jewish history taught at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017-2018, Jason Lustig experimented with assignments and course structures to explore these issues and how academia can look beyond coverage and achieve higher-order objectives in teaching history over a sequence of courses.

ERIC

2022

EJ1339129