PROPOSAL TYPE
Working Group
SEEKING
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
- Seeking Specific Expertise
- Seeking Additional Presenters
RELATED TOPICS
- Museums/Exhibits
- Reflections on the Field
- Teaching and Training
ABSTRACT
Many public history educators promote experiential learning in their classes by having students participate in a public-facing class project. But what constitutes best practices for these projects? What types of external support do public history instructors need to ensure the quality of both the project and learning experience? What about more practical matters–how should student work, which will be seen and experienced by public audience, be evaluated and graded? Students often expect a learning experience to be well-scaffolded and organized. Yet public history projects often come with an element of creative chaos. How can we help students prepare to embrace this aspect of public history practice?
DESCRIPTION
I am a Senior Lecturer at Utah State University where I regularly teach undergraduate and graduate classes in public history. As part of their coursework, my students complete a class project, ideally for an outside client. As I refine my own approach to public history pedagogy, I am interested in hearing how other public history instructors and professors situate experiential learning in their curriculum. What, for instance, constitutes a well-though-out class project, one that can be completed in a 15-week semester? I’d like to convene a working group to frankly share both what has and has not worked in teaching public history through class projects. How do you evaluate student work? What makes for a suitable class project? What support from your library or department have you found is essential for success? I would like each member of the working group to be prepared to thoughtfully share their experiences teaching public history using a class project prior to meeting in Salt Lake City. Then, during the working group session, we can sit down together and create a list of best practices for planning public history class projects that can be shared with other NCPH members.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Rebecca Andersen, Utah State University, [email protected]
ALL FEEDBACK AND OFFERS OF ASSISTANCE SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY JULY 7, 2023. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
I will look forward to attending this session. I’d like to learn more about successful approaches for freshmen level U.S. History survey courses and in particular, Asian American history.
I love this idea for a session. I also want to learn more successful ways to integrate public history projects into my courses and would love to contribute to the working group discussions.
I taught a couple of public history classes and an art class about a Black cemetery in town. I would love to be a part of this panel and share what worked and what absolutely did not. Each of the students in the history classes agreed that this class was instrumental in their desire to continue in the public history field and that more classes were needed.
I coordinate an internship program + course in a university history dept that regularly assigns PH projects to students. I would be very interested in participating in this group to share the type of projects we have created and learn from others’ experiences.
This sounds like an incredible topic. I think that bringing in a partner organization to share how they were able to best incorporate the students into their work would be a strong sell as well. I know many institutions I have worked with in the past have had reservations about having these kinds of projects because of the amount of work that goes into managing and overseeing all of the components. If you had a partner would could speak to a successful integration into their workflow, this would be an super resourceful session.
Hi Rebecca, I love that you are thinking so methodically about this. One of the comments above echoes my thought that bringing in a partner to give perspective on the experience from the non-academic side would be important. Knowing you’ve done a couple of such projects locally, I suspect that will be possible!
Hi again Rebecca, another avenue may be to use the student hook to connect with other presenters. I’m thinking specifically the BYU special collections proposal here:
https://ncph.org/phc/2024-topic-proposals/learning-through-the-act-of-creation-students-small-case-exhibits-and-the-power-of-historical-thinking/
I am a huge fan of experiential learning and have been training students to complete oral histories in my US Latino Diaspora course for the past two years. I am relatively new to public history as a field and would like to be part of this working group.
The Utah Historical Society could speak to this in the context of working with a college course on design and rebranding–it’s not necessarily a public history course but it was a signifigant and successful experience for both parties.