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Another FaCTS Mellon Project

Teaching History in the Archives: Inverting a Research Methods Course

by Dr. Elizabeth S. Manley

This project seeks to redevelop an existing class - Introduction to Historical Research and Writing (HIST 2415) - through a model of inverted teaching and learning. I have taught this core majors course for the past six years and have attempted to provide more hands-on experiences for our students; this past fall I collaborated with the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC) to hold weekly classes in their archives and focus on individual research projects, resulting in a "flipped" classroom. While highly successful, some of the issues that normally get sufficient time in the traditional classroom seemed to suffer. With this FaCTS grant, I will address this imbalance and the result will be a further refinement of HIST 2415 to be taught in the fall of 2016 with the continued collaboration of the HNOC. The course re-development plan proposes four central components: assessing the skills and competencies conveyed through the archival component of the class and determining how to improve them; identifying the skills and competencies students are not fully acquiring; elaborating on best practices to teach these skills and competencies outside the classroom; and contructing assessments that accurately measure students abilities to understand both the hands-on archival and the extra-classroom componenets of the course.

Start date: Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Finish date: Monday, May 15, 2017