Category Archives: teaching

February 12, 2015 · 9:20 pm

Early Modern War Teaching

Today I wrapped up my half of a team-taught third-year course on Early Modern War, 1350-1850. Next week’s our reading week after which my co-instructor, Dave Leeson, takes up where I left off, circa. 1650. We opened the course with a book-end examination of Greece at the start and the end of our periods – I talked about Greece in the Venetian-Turkish Wars and then we jumped forward to the cause of Greek Independence in the early nineteenth century. I tried to frame each class meeting on different historiographic debates or thematic elements and then illustrate those with interesting examples and compelling readings. We wrapped up each class with discussions on the day’s assigned readings: pulling out arguments and assessing our responses to the same. To give you a taste of what the course has been like, I’m sharing parts of our syllabus below:

Course Objectives: Students Soldiers in Peasants' War, 1525will identify the key technological, cultural, tactical, and strategic developments that have shaped pre-modern warfare; demonstrate awareness of the role of political, economic, and social changes that have shaped war in the world through their research, analysis and assessment of key aspects of the history of early modern war and warfare.

My class topics for the first half of term:

January 8; The Military Revolution Debate
Readings: Michael Roberts, “The Military Revolution, 1560-1660” (Rogers); Geoffrey Parker, “In Defense of the Military Revolution” (Rogers)

January 12; The Rules of War & Chivalric Culture
Readings: Anne Curry, “Disciplinary Ordinances for English and Franco-Scottish Armies in 1385: An international code?” (Reader)

January 15; War as Set-Piece: Crécy, Poitiers & Agincourt
Readings: Clifford J. Rogers, “The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years War” (Rogers)

January 19; Siege Warfare & the Early Modern Arms Race
Readings: Thomas F. Arnold, “Fortifications and the Military Revolution: The Gonzaga Experience, 1530-1630” (Rogers)

January 22; The Military Revolution at Sea
Readings: Louis Sicking, “Naval warfare in Europe, c. 1330- c. 1680” (Reader)

January 26; War from Below: Revolts & Riots
Readings: Anthony Fletcher & Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Kett’s Rebellion” (Reader)

January 29; Citizen and Soldier: Early Modern Military Cultures
Readings: Angela McShane, “Recruiting Citizens for Soldiers in Seventeenth-Century English Ballads” (Reader)

February 2; Supply and Demand: The Business of War
Readings: I.A.A. Thompson “’Money, Money, and Yet More Money!’ Finance, the Fiscal-State, and the Military Revolution: Spain, 1500-1650” (Rogers)

February 5; New Models of Armies: Military Command and Discipline
Readings: David A. Parrott, “Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years’ War: The ‘Military Revolution’” (Rogers)

February 9; Commercial and Colonial Wars, 1492-1650
Readings: John F. Guilmartin, Jr. “The Military Revolution: Origins and First Tests Abroad” (Rogers)

February 12; An Age of Atrocity?
Readings: Will Coster, “Massacre and Codes of Conduct in the English Civil War” (Reader)

Texts: Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995) plus additional materials available via D2L and/or on reserve (“Reader”)

Assignments:
Essay Proposal One: 10% (Due January 26, a brief proposal of the topic for Essay One that includes a bibliography.)
Essay One: 25% (Due February 23, an 8-10 page research essay dealing with a topic in the history of war from 1350 through 1650.)
Essay Proposal Two: 10% (Due March 12, a brief proposal of the topic for Essay Two that includes a bibliography.)
Essay Two: 25% (Due April 2, an 8-10 page research essay dealing with a topic in the history of war from 1650 through 1850.)
Final Examination: 30% (All essay cumulative exam scheduled at the end of term.)

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November 28, 2014 · 11:21 pm

Occult Words

Next Tuesday wraps up my team-taught “History of the Occult” course. As I review my slides, running from antiquity through the mid-seventeenth century, I was interested to see what I blathered on the most about. Here’s a word cloud to Wordle: Occult, Ancient to Early Modern provide one perspective on how I taught them in my half of the term. It’s interesting to see that magic dominated occult, at least in what I projected on the screen. I’ll have to ask the students if that was their impression, too, when we review for the final exam.

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September 1, 2014 · 3:42 pm

It Can’t Be September

Because if it’s September I start teaching on the third. I also have article revisions due before mid-month.

Eep!

At least all my syllabi are ready. For those playing along at home, I’m teaching several courses this term beginning with Western Civ. So far there are fifty-five students enrolled. There’s a second-year survey on Early Modern British History with only twenty-five students because it runs at 8:30 in the morning, two days a week. I’m team-teaching a third-year class on The History of the Occult with almost forty students signed-up and then there’s the graduate seminar on historical methods. I’ll also most likely have one Directed Readings grad course running all year.

If my syllabi are ready, I’m certainly not. Time to get back to polishing the opening lecture notes and slides for Occult and to ensure I have something fun for the first class which I’ll meet on Wednesday which is the British history course. And there was that additional article which I’d hoped to complete. . . .

Push back the clock!

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July 18, 2014 · 3:35 pm

Fun with Pedagogy

Now that I’m past the halfway point of summer, I’m permitting myself some thoughts and work in teaching preparation: even if it’s just one day a week. Late August, as our term start looms, I’ll shift that to two and then three days a week in the final crunch of syllabus-setting and online teaching preps. The upcoming term will be crazily busy with four classes and, possibly, a senior student supervision. One of the courses is a brand new preparation, “The Occult in History”, requiring all sorts of background reading. I’ve chosen cool supplementary texts for my western civ and early modern British history surveys (the great Portuguese national epic, The Lusiads, for the former and Games’ enthralling reconsideration of the Elizabethan and Stuart experience of the wider world, The Web of Empire, for the latter) and been busy reading through those with an eye towards integrating them into our classroom experience.

Always Women Reading in School, 1899 reading, always reading. Who doesn’t love to read? Don’t tell me! My real pedagogical fun for the summer has been reading about teaching and learning. Every summer I reread Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do to get me excited about stepping back in front of the classroom. I also try to read two or three other new-to-me works in pedagogy. To this end, and with some inspiration from The Chronicle’s Top 10 Books on Teaching I picked up How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching by Ambrose et al. from my library and I also grabbed a copy of Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning on my ereader. Reading these books has gotten me thinking about how I employ reflective responses and discussion segments in my classes, and that’s just a few chapters in with each of them.

I don’t want to reninvent my wheel when it comes to teaching but I do want to refine my craft while continuing to fold new discoveries and interpretations into the content that I teach. Creating new courses, choosing new supplementary texts and boning upon the latest insights into pedagogy are all ways that I can keep my teaching fresh for me and, hopefully, the students. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot more reading to do before it’s suppertime.

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March 22, 2014 · 8:30 pm

Short and Long Cycles (of Courses)

Publisher’s reps are emailing me with increasing frequency, asking what I’m teaching next year and what textbooks I’m going to adopt. I’ve had to consult some documentation to see what that will be because I am teaching a metric whackload of new courses – three brand new ones, to be exact, two of which I’m team-teaching so that means they’re set aside three familiar classes (and one new distance course that I’ll offer online for the first time next January).

There are some courses that I always teach – Western Civ is a historian’s version of Freshman Comp (and just about as much fun as a course concept even though I try to liven it up each year). I taught Renaissance Italy for eleven years running before I ran screaming from what had once been a favourite subject. I give graduate level historiography and methods a serious side-eye having taught it all but three years in this millennium.

Repetition can wear me down. In fact, the major reason that I’m preparing a distance course is to relieve pressure from an over-popular course in Ancient Near Eastern history which can be offered more often online (with another academic taking over the instructor’s duties) than I want to do in the classroom.

I know some academics advise a tight rotation of select courses – come up with a two-year rotation and stick to it. I tend towards the other extreme: I prefer a three or four year plan of teaching that allows me to get a break from a subject and turn towards other interests. I also am always game for a neat new course concept (which is how I ended up co-teaching a course on the history of the occult next year).

I suppose this is also my way of coping with the necessary repetition. I may have to teach the first half of Western Civ every year from now until retirement, but I have fun new courses on the history of war and on the history of crime to leaven the boredom, at least for next year.

What about you? Are you drawn to new course concepts or options (even new themes in a core course would count) or do you prefer to keep your teaching to a tight set of regular-repeated topics?

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February 7, 2014 · 2:10 pm

What I Learn Teaching Women’s History

This term I’m revisiting a course on pre-industrial western women’s history. The last time I taught it, I was pregnant with my eldest child who’s now university age. Yes, I am that old.

Obviously, the course has been completely revised for the new millennium. No dragging out reams of yellowed lecture texts. A lot has changed in history in the intervening years and I wanted to take advantage of those advances in scholarship while also implementing a more appropriate model of assignments than “some essays, maybe a midterm, and a final exam.”

It’s working wonders, no doubt aided by choosing one of my favourite recent books in women’s history as a course textbook: Judith Bennett’s History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. Every few weeks, students write a short response paper analyzing one part Bennett’s argument in light of another reading of their choice and we have a discussion based upon the material. Sometimes the discussions are pretty fabulous as when we tackled how history textbooks they know have (or have not) incorporated women’s history. This sparked a lot of passionate discussion about what should be and why it isn’t always in the master narratives of our discipline. I’m happily anticipating their response to her chapter on economic history “Less Money Than a Man Would Take”. Nothing ferrets out faulty assumptions and presumptions like taking your argument down to the building blocks and essential concepts – women’s history critiques of the status quo consistently makes that happen.

I’m also pleased with the way students have embraced a presentation-heavy course model. Each student makes three presentations over the term on individuals, concepts or events that were important to pre-modern women’s history. Most days we have three to five presentations at the start of class, which are worth every minute of class time that they fill as the audience listens attentively (presentation subjects are fodder for the final exam) and ask questions thoughtfully as well as answering questions posed by the presenter. I’m learning that even in a third-year course, we can set a pretty high standard for formal participation, “ownership of the course” by students, if you will, where they craft mini-lessons on the subjects they’ve chosen. It’s helped me direct the rest of the class much more usefully as I take up the reins after their presentations and can use that time to fill in the gaps or build upon their insights.

It continues to be a pleasure to teach this class, to introduce them to a wealth of fascinating history and learn from the classroom experience how invigorating a clean sweep can be from the professor’s perspective. My only regret is that it will likely be many years before I teach this particular course on campus again (for complicated issues of workload and curriculum) but I’m certain that the lessons I’ve learn here won’t go to waste.

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December 17, 2013 · 10:24 pm

Reading London

I’m simultaneously shocked and tickled pink to be teaching a course relating to my research specialty at the graduate level. After more than a decade teaching historical methods and years before that teaching nineteenth century European social history (don’t ask), teaching “Topics in British History” will be a positive pleasure.

The course theme is London, 1550-1950. Do you want to read along with my M.A. students? Here’s our reading list:

I’m also steering them towards many outstanding websites, including the following:

Am I missing anything great? Suggestions are eagerly welcomed in the comments. Classes begin January 6th with the first three articles on the list and we’ll wrap up the meetings in early April.

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May 7, 2013 · 7:30 pm

Another Crop of Students Done

Yesterday I participated in an excellent graduate student’s M.A. thesis defense (in French – now that kept me on my passively-bilingual toes). This is the third student in nine months to complete an M.A. under my direction or co-direction. It’s been an anomalous last two years with multiple students on the go, pursuing feasible and fabulous projects related to my own early modern specialty. Usually I’ll supervise one grad student every few years as more of our students are interested in modern Canadian history which definitely isn’t my strength.

Right now, I have no grad students lined up for next year and that’s all right with me. First off, most people don’t need a graduate degree in history. Second? Well, let’s just say that graduate students require a lot of work. It’s all the good kind of work: the real exercise of scholarship for which we all entered our fields. Still, I look forward to focusing on my own research and writing in the next while.

I pride myself on the fact that these three received excellent support, not just from myself but from our program!, and a chance to develop as researchers and writers. They can apply these skills inside and outside academia. That’s a vital consideration these days. Only one of the three is going on to doctoral work at the present and that’s because this student received full funding. Without that support, it’s really hard to justify the endeavour.

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December 10, 2012 · 9:41 pm

Assignment Policies: They Matter

I opened up my email this evening to see yet another student email with the familiar attachment icon. Oh, joy: another unwanted emailed assignment.

You’d think I wouldn’t receive those since I have an across-the-board policy in all of my undergraduate classes that I do not accept assignments via email. Students may hand in a hard-copy at any time (there’s a late penalty that starts to accrue after the due date) or submit an electronic copy through our university’s online dropbox up to the due date. I will even, if there are special circumstances, open the dropbox to a later date for a student. I don’t want emailed assignments. I have a policy that clearly says that and, yet, every term, every year? I get emailed assignments.

Augh!

Emailed assignments are the hangnails of my academic life. They disrupt my well-oiled system to track and respond to assignments. They irk me enormously.

I can’t integrate emailed assignments into our dropbox. It only permits feedback for assignments submitted through the system. In fact, recent upgrades present me only those students who submitted online when I go into the grading mode for any given group of papers. That’s efficient but not adaptable to these emailed drop-ins.

I can’t integrate emailed assignments into my hard-copy marking unless I print them out. So now I have to track the student email until I’m able to print the paper. Considering how much I work on the road, that could be a good day or two. It’s really annoying to think at 11pm “Oh, yeah, now I have that paper to print that I didn’t ask to get via email” and go traipsing down the stairs to fire up the old printer.

How about I do it all on email? Now you’re asking me to set up a third system that I’ll have to manage. I have to make sure to save the emails, download the assignments, unzip the files, track them until I have time to mark them, mark them up as well as recording my additional comments, then save the lot. After that, I have to log back into email (let’s hope it’s up!), make sure I’m emailing the right student (which is a challenge in and of itself), and finally send them their marked-up assignment and the additional comments.

Worst of all is that these emailed assignments only come because the student missed the deadline. That’s the deadline they’ve had on the syllabus since the very first day of the term. These emails almost never are accompanied by an acknowledgement of that except a comment to the effect that “the dropbox was closed so here’s my assignment”. A student who emails me with an honest query “I tried to submit my paper online but the dropbox closed” will get a chance at sympathy and a link to the newly reopened dropbox. A student who emails the assignment? Gets my eternal irk. And is that what anyone wants at marking time? I think not.

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October 12, 2012 · 5:49 pm

In the Restricted Section

Over the summer and unbeknownst to me, my university library moved all the U, V and Z (Library of Congress classifications) books out of the general circulations stacks and into storage. Err, the first floor depository, they say. I call it “The Restricted Section”.

Harry wandered over to the Restricted Section. He had been wondering for a while if Flamel wasn’t somewhere in there. Unfortunately, you needed a specially signed note from one of the teachers to look in any of the restricted books, and he knew he’d never get one. These were the books containing powerful Dark Magic never taught at Hogwarts, and only read by older students studying advanced Defence Against the Dark Arts. (J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone)

Just imagine, wandering innocently into your library, in search of five books you need to check out for your class. You know they’re there. You check them out every year (it’s a small class of grad students – they can share the books over the last half of the term). But the books aren’t there. The whole circulating collection seemingly ends with the T classification for technology topics. But wander farther afield and there’s nothing. Not even a sign. I stumbled about the third floor for ten minutes, looking for where the books had gone to – I knew we had hundreds, if not thousands of titles in that range that had seemingly disappeared.

Only when I headed down to the circulation desk did I get an explanation – those books had been moved to the first floor, off limits to users – I’d have to ask a librarian to retrieve them for me. I presume (but I wasn’t told explicitly), that this was done to free up room upstairs in the circulating collection or ‘stacks’ – as new books are added, and a few are every year, they fill up the current ranges and threaten to overflow. Plus, goodness knows!, we can’t cut back on the study desks and comfy chairs that have filled in around the circulating books over the years.

Still, just wrap your heads around the situation with the books for a bit. Entire classifications of library books are gone. Sure, if you look at each individual catalogue listing, as I did later, you see a note after the call number that explains the book is located at the 1st Floor Depository. But imagine you’re an undergraduate – what does that mean? There’s no word of where that is or what you’ll need to do to see the book. How likely are you to go and ask for that? There’s not even a sign at the end of the range of books still available indicating that you need to go elsewhere and speak to someone. Even better: maybe you committed the call number to memory when you trotted off on your quick search after getting the information from the first page of the catalogue entries? If so, I bet you’ve forgotten it after a few minutes of fruitless searching.

Will you ask? will you wait? Or will you just give up? Remember, you’ve got to intuit that you have to ask someone specially for these books and then you have to wait for them to get them. We aren’t blessed with an overabundance of librarians – on weekends and into the evening, who’s going to be around to fulfil requests? Who’s going to ask if it seems even slightly daunting.

Now consider the role of shelf-browsing? How many of you have found wonderfully useful books just by running your fingers along the shelves, to see what’s there beside the book you came to get? How can you do that now that entire swathes of the library are off in storage. I’ll give you a hint – our catalogue doesn’t have that function anymore to browse a range of call numbers so you won’t.

90% of my students will give up if they think they might want one of these books. They’ll change their topic, make do with what’s online or simply pass the material by. And so the usage stats will drop even more and the library will feel justified in carting these and other books off to our local equivalent of the Restricted Section.

So much for consulting the bibliographies to direct you to other works in particular. Pay no attention to the vast scholarship in print on authorship, reading and publishing that also sits in this range – they’re all getting condemned to near uselessness by such a decision. So much for the many classic and current works of military history and scholarship – if they’re in the U category as opposed to particular national histories, they’re out of reach for ordinary library patrons at my institution.

I’m also afraid of what’s next – in any given year, for my teaching and research, I check out books from many different Library of Congress areas, particularly B, D, H, J, P and Z. What if they decide to shave off those lightly used A & B classifications into the depository next? How am I going to get my students to engage with the works of religious thinkers and the abundant scholarship we own in print of the same if the books are tucked away elsewhere.

Yes, this is a first world problem but it really irked me. I work hard enough to get our students to appreciate the range of books we have available at our library. When something like this happens, I’m filled with despair. What’s the point if our books are going to be consigned to the Restricted Section, willy-nilly?

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