Oh ratemyprofessors.com, how interesting your chili peppers make our lives!
If you have a funny/poignant/thought-provoking/etc. idea for a history cartoon, please send it to Angela.C.Sutton[at]Vanderbilt[dot]edu. If I use your idea I will give you credit here.
|
Students rely on Wikipedia. Professors can pretend that their threats of Fs on assignments matter, but in reality it offers little deterrent. Students can and do weave facts, information, opinions and interpretations that they find online into their papers. If the material seems reasonable, or general, or cited elsewhere, it might not even draw our attention, particularly when we have to grade 50 or 75 or 90 term papers on a weekend. What is the solution?
One answer, probably the most common, is to scold and threaten. We tell our students that Wikipedia is an inappropriate and unacceptable source for historical research and writing. We threaten them with Fs and rewrites. Another answer is to explain to students why Wikipedia is an unreliable source. It lacks appropriate documentation of sources, and is written by individuals with uncertain research skills who base entries largely on sometimes-dubious secondary material. And then we threaten them with Fs and rewrites. But is there a third solution? We know our students use Wikipedia. Can we use this to our advantage? Can we teach them about online sources and how to determine the credibility of what they read and discover? Can we undermine their reliance on Wikipedia, while at the same time use it as a teaching tool?
March is Women’s History Month. Along with uncovering and rethinking images of the woman and her contribution throughout history comes the responsibility to challenge the accepted stereotypes and persistent misinformation already out there.
For example: to this date, no historian has been able to uncover any evidence of bra-burning feminists of the 1960s.
This month, I pledge to use my historian super-powers for good instead of evil. Although women did not create the documents I use to write my dissertation, I will read against the grain to find their voices between the lines. To write a history without women is to write only half the story.
If you’re curious about what it takes to incorporate women in your historical research, I recommend historian Tanya Roth’s blog. Roth is completing a dissertation on the integration of women into the US military (1945-1978) and has written many thought-provoking posts on how she makes sense of the documentation and oral interviews.
If you have a funny/poignant/thought-provoking/etc. idea for a history cartoon, please send it to Angela.C.Sutton[at]Vanderbilt[dot]edu. If I use your idea I will give you credit here.
With the German winter semester drawing to a close, the members of the Graduiertenkolleg Freunde, Gönner, Getreue (Friends, Patrons, Clients) gathered last weekend in the village of Altglashütten along with some guests. The topic of the weekend was ‘Methodological approaches to friendship and patronage’, with the main attention being focused on discourse analysis and network analysis. The variety in the weather (overcast on Friday, sunny on Saturday and a blizzard on Sunday) was matched by the diversity of approaches and perspectives at what proved to be a very worthwhile event.
A snowy Sunday at Altglasshütten (image by author)
The key ingredient here was time.
Paul Deslandes, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Vermont, is a scholar of modern Britain and the history of gender and sexuality. He has published widely on the history of masculinity, male sexuality and British education. Deslandes is the author of Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920. His current research explores the history of male beauty in modern Britain.
In his recent History Compass article “The Male Body, Beauty and Aesthetics in Modern British Culture,” Deslandes explored the historical significance of male beauty. Across studies of sport and physical culture, disability and WWI disfigurement, and queer history, he argues, awareness and understanding of beauty and aesthetics offer insights not only to histories of masculinity but histories of British society as a whole. For this reason, Deslandes argues, historians must pay greater attention to physical appearance, value placed on male beauty, and the adornment and manipulation of the male body to better understand the British past.
I had the opportunity to interview Professor Deslandes about the arguments in his History Compass piece, its broader implications, and place within his current research.
I have always enjoyed wandering through library stacks and inhaling the smell of accumulated books in all their crumbling, moldy, physical glory. In the midst of a long Maine winter 25 miles away from a big bookstore, however, I finally caved in and purchased a Kindle. I intended the e-reader to be my insurance against inhospitable weather, my back-up source for mystery novels and popular fiction. Since getting it, however, I have also downloaded Jstor articles, copy-right expired books in PDF files online, and I recently used it in class instead of printing out a book chapter. In many ways my Kindle has become a professional tool as well as a vehicle for leisure reading. I also noticed that when I read an academic article on my e-reader, I did exactly the same thing that I do with the printed version – I scanned the footnotes as I read. Some thing don’t change regardless of the format I guess.
Well before e-readers, the ancient Chinese heated and cracked cow scapula bones and carved upon them records of divinations.
As I write, I can hear voices coming through the wall. In the coffee room, two postgraduates from the Freunde, Gönner, Getreue Research Group are passionately discussing their work.
In recent months, I have been fortunate to occupy an office within the research space which is home to Graduiertenkolleg 1288, Friends, Patrons, Clients, at the University of Freiburg. The work of this interdisciplinary PhD group, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, is focused on the ‘practice and semantics of friendship and patronage in historical, anthropological and cross-cultural perspectives’. Within these broad parameters, there is a great deal of varied and exciting work happening. Students sitting side by side investigate issues as far apart, chronologically at least, as ‘Revenge as social practice in Archaic and Classical Greece’ and ‘The Internet and Egyptian concepts of friendship in transition’. If those topics don’t appeal to you, how about the Maori and Pakeha in New Zealand, Seneca, Qing-China, or the punk and hardcore-scene in Buenos Aires? (more…)
This comic was inspired by many long days spent reading 17th century manuscript at the Nationaal Archief in The Hague. I wanted to share with other historians that feeling that comes with your project being at the mercy of questionable handwriting. This one is dedicated to all of you who struggle with paleography.
If you have a funny/poignant/thought-provoking/etc. idea for a history cartoon, please send it to Angela.C.Sutton[at]Vanderbilt[dot]edu. If I use your idea I will give you credit here.
Let's find less need for the red ink in grading. (Wikimedia Commons)
I firmly believe that one of the great benefits of an education in history is the development of writing skills. I strive for that in myself, and encourage it in my students. Writing skills will continue to benefit them beyond my classroom, in other disciplines, and beyond the academy. I’m certainly not alone in this belief, and almost universally I hear from other professors, lecturers, and TAs how important writing skills are to them as well. But what do we really do about it? We mark up papers, we make ourselves available for consultation, and we direct students to university writing centres. Is that really enough?
|
Recently I have noticed a number of news stories focussing on issues of higher education. These have examined topics from the dwindling number of tenure-track positions, states’ decreasing ability to subsidize public education, and the related problem of escalating tuitions at public universities. One would certainly get a sense from the media attention that higher education in the United States is in a state of crisis. Now comes a new study by two sociologists at New York University and the University of Virginia that purports to show American college students study and learn little in their first two years of schooling. Publication of the study led to further debate in the New York Times and an astonishing number of reader comments and responses. If the point is to focus attention on the issue of academic standards and the value of the higher education in the U.S., then mission accomplished.
I found the debate and a number of the comments fascinating. As a young teacher I also found the debate directly related to my experience as someone at the start of her academic career. I am teaching at a highly selective, liberal arts college with high academic standards. My students would definitely not be in the category of those who read less than 40 pages a week and write less than 20 pages a semester. In many respects, then, it would seem that I am in a happy minority of professors at academically rigorous institutions with good and hardworking students. Yet, at the end of the semester, at this school, as at pretty much every college, the tables are turned and students are given the opportunity to evaluate their instructors. The course evaluation commonly ask students to rank (from 1 to 5 or 6, usually) the difficulty of the course, the relevance of the readings, the timeliness of grading, among other questions. The first time I read through the survey, my first reaction was that the questionnaire placed the weight of learning upon the intructor. More reading, more essays, and tougher grading, the laudable markers of stringent academic standards, would also likely result in a lower “grade” for a course. Since course evaluations are taken into account in tenure review, there is then every incentive for instructors to increase the popularity of a class by creating an “easier” syllabus and handing out higher grades.
(more…)
|
Issues related to homosexuality are currently at the forefront of public discourse. Globally, but particularly in the United States, marriage equity, military service, queer youth and bullying are not just matters of policy debate, but have engaged popular concern and action as well. Seattle columnist Dan Savage’s recent ‘It Gets Better Project’, for instance, has captured an extraordinary degree of public interest, using short video clips of ordinary people, celebrities and global figures to help draw attention to bullying and suicides among queer youth.
But it is another short online video, titled ‘{THIS} is Reteaching Gender and Sexuality’, which is in part a criticism of the ‘It Gets Better Project’, that challenges us to reconsider our understandings of sexuality while drawing attention to the plight of queer youth. In the ‘Reteaching’ video, queer youth appear in their own right, speaking for themselves, demanding immediate social and cultural change, not just the promise of something better somewhere down the road. But far more than draw attention to bullying and structures of oppression, they want us instead to recalibrate how we define sexuality and sexual identities. As two speakers put it, ‘I can like boys and girls. … I can be none of the above’.
So how does this relate to history? Well, we can be part of the re-teaching project, in fact, we already are. In our case, it’s not re-teaching, it’s simply telling the histories of our subjects in the context of their own worlds, rather than through the limitations or needs of our own.
|
Latest History Compass Journal Articles
Digital History Feeds Literature Compass Blog Religion Compass Exchanges Sociology Lens
Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference
