pedagogy

I wanted to share some work from our graduating seniors that showcases alternatives to the traditional research paper.  

On March 18, Shirin and I introduced our thoughts for the Methods course we are planning to teach this fall and opened up a lively conversation about object-based inquiry vs historiorgraphically based inquiry. Thanks to Annika for these detailed notes of the conversation, which are attached.

Please feel free to join the conversation here and add your own responses and suggestions.

We will be holding a colloquium on this topic on Wed Nov 12 at noon.  In preparation I am posting here a PDF containing some responses to questions I asked of three recent PhDs in HAA who got placed on the job market.  This is not a systematic survey by any means but a starting point for discussion.

I attended an interesting dicussion today on the (controversial) MLA report advocating significant structural changes in humanities PhD programs.  Don Bialostosky, chair of English, moderated, and the two featured speakers were Dennis Looney (now working for MLA) and John Stevenson (Grad Dean, Univ Colorado Boulder).

I took the idea of creating a reading chart exercise from an essay on team-based learning at arthistoryteachingresources.org.  I assigned the first three chapters of Assmann's Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, an accessible but challenging text, for my 1010 course.  I created the chart (attached) and asked them all to fill it out and bring two copies to class.

That past two days I spent geeking out with folks from universities, research institutes, labs, The Getty, art e-commerce ventures, and other misfits. It was amazing. Among other things, I discovered this fun blog, Experiments in Art History, which deals with teaching with digital tools. It was inspired by a previous THATCamp. Read on (warning: medieval reenactment!).