July Research Update

Amici et Amicae!

It is now August!

My heavens, there are (as I write this) more than 260 of you!  I want to thank all of you for the absolutely incredible support you have shown me in this venture.  I never expected to get this kind of response.

One thing of note: I am beginning to get the ball rolling on a new post-type for the blog which I hope you will all appreciate which I think I'll call 'Meet a Historian,' where I'll have more junior academic historians come on the blog to describe what they do, their current research project and a bit about how they do it (sources, methods, etc.).  We're probably still a month out from that being a thing, but I have high hopes for it because I think it would be a good thing for everyone to use the blog platform as a way to highlight the work of particularly *junior* scholars (graduate students, adjuncts, early career academics) who are just getting started.  Early on in a research project, especially the first one, it can be very dispiriting to feel that no one is interested in what you are doing; I recall that feeling myself.  Maybe now I can do something about it.

I am looking to 'curate' the first batch of Meet the Historians myself - reaching out privately to friends and colleagues, but then once it gets rolling I hope to open it up a bit and maybe even get some non-academic historians (public historians, history teachers) to talk a bit about what they do.  More on that as it emerges.

On to the Updates!

First off, my writing is once again out in public, with another piece in Foreign Policy looking at the lessons we might draw from Roman pacification (both successes and failures) when thinking about modern policing: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/20/romans-violence-power-police-military/ .  I have received inconsistent reports on if it is subscriber-walled or not.  I am also (as I mentioned last month) slowly drafting a longer and more detailed piece on much the same topic for a roundtable that I hope to organize with some colleagues.  More on that when I have more details.

I have been told that Article 1 is now in the printing process so I can report that my first article to see the light of day will be Devereaux, B.C. "Strategy and Cost: Carthaginian Naval Strategy in the First Punic War Reappraised" Historia 69.4 (2020): 459-481.  That should mean it'll appear in November, I think -  Historia is up on JSTOR, so any of you at almost any sort of university likely have electronic access when it appears.

And in a completely unconnected note, did I mention that academic publishing standards pretty much always allow for authors to privately provide a PDF of the article to professional colleagues and the like in response to a written request, so long as it isn't systemic distribution (like sending it out on a blog or a Patreon)?

Meanwhile, Article 2 is churning along.  I sent it to some colleagues who are subject matter experts at the beginning of the month.  Most have gotten back to me with very positive comments (and some useful revisions), but I have one still outstanding whose opinion I quite value, so we're waiting on that.  Everyone is moving a bit slow these days because of the dislocation of the normal teaching situation.  Still, that initial feedback is quite promising.  I expect that I'll do my last revisions and get article 2 into peer review this month for sure.  I am aiming very high for my target journal though, so the chance that they pass on it is also high; if that happens I'd probably reformat and resubmit to a different journal, but the turn-around time would mean maybe losing 4 months waiting for the first journal to reject (it is very bad to submit the same paper to two journals at once).

I figure it is worth the risk of a delay since there are unlikely to be very many jobs available this year.

On Pedagogy

Meanwhile, to chat a bit about the other thing I am doing, preparing to teach in the fall, I want to talk about pedagogy, which we might define something like 'teaching strategy.'

As a student, I don't think I thought much at all about this.  It never occurred to me to think of courses as intentionally and strategically designed things; courses just were - a set of tasks, more or less arbitrary, that I had to perform.  I'm willing to grant that wiser students might have seen the strategy behind it, but I didn't and my friends generally didn't either.

But (good) teachers and professors actually put quite a lot of thought into the structure of courses.  What am I teaching?  How do I want to assess those skills?  What is the right kind of test to test the thing I want to teach?

And of course, like military strategy, teaching strategy is constrained by local conditions.  You can get a good sense of my aims from the arguments I put forward on what the humanities are for (https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case-on-why-we-need-the-humanities/).  Ideally, I'd focus very heavily on argumentation and source reading.  Perhaps the 'perfect' sort of class would have no tests and perhaps only one paper and consist mostly of long debates over primary sources and historical arguments we've read together.  This is, by the by, a type of course that absolutely exists, but mostly only at the graduate or very advanced undergraduate level - it demands a lot from the participants in terms of self-direction, discipline and also background knowledge.  It also demands a small course size; it's hard to have a good debate with 15 people, much less 30, never mind 70.  It simply isn't practical except for small groups of very highly motivated students.

For large introductory courses - which is most of what I've had the chance to teach - course design is the art of compromise: what do they need to know in order to even be able to construct useful historical arguments?  What sorts of relatively easy-for-beginners arguments can I ask them to construct in order to practice and develop those skills?  And how can I keep them on-task in all of the distractions of college life?

That last question has more influence on course structure than many students realize.  If you ever wondered why a class you took had a bunch of small assignments that were all worth only a small part of the grade, I almost guarantee you that they were put in to keep everyone honest in terms of the coursework (in a history class, that generally means keeping everyone honest with the reading).  I know there is a sort of person who rebels against that kind of 'nannying,' but speaking from experience: if you take those assignments out, course performance collapses.  In the end, it's my job to teach as much as I can to the students I have, not the students I wish I had.  There's no use giving a designed-for-highly-motivated-graduate-students course to unmotivated undergraduates; they won't learn as much.

So I have some assignments which are assessments - "figure out if the student learned to perform the skill/acquired the knowledge I am trying to teach" - and then some assignments which are performative, designed to get a student to do something but where I am less concerned if they succeed or not, merely that they do it.  Don't tell my students, but many times that second set of assignments isn't even really graded beyond 'did you do it or not.'  While I never lie about course structure, flat out telling students "this quiz doesn't matter, it's just to make sure you do the reading" defeats the purpose of the quiz.  It's explaining the placebo.  But often, if they look closely at the syllabus, they may realize that the half-dozen small assignments which add up to 10% or so of the course grade and feature generous conditions (like 'lowest score drops') aren't all that important.

That's then layered on top of the question of how to deliver the knowledge and skills.  For large classes, that typically means lecturing.  There are hard limits to what you can do with reading because students won't do the reading - but you can get better results from an engaging lecture (engaging being a key word - I will shout, joke, move around, dance and make a fool of myself if it improves student learning outcomes).  But then the question becomes structure: what to teach, what to leave out (the cutting room floor is packed with any introductory course - there is so much you have no time for) and in what order.

I've tended to settle on a system where almost every lecture is presented as an explicit argument, with a pre-writing style outline on the board (remember my outlines from a few posts ago) and I'm pretty open with students that I want them to watch not only what I teach but how I argue a historical point to them.  Then, for an introductory course, I'll tend to do short (2-5 pages) papers restricted to narrow set of primary sources I have chosen because I know they have the material needed to generate a good paper (I typically save original research assignments for the 200-level and up; my Global History of Warfare Course, which is a 200, has a research paper instead of these training-wheels-attached primary-source-analysis papers).

My tests might contain 'recall' questions (like identifications - 'write a short paragraph telling me what X is and why it is important' - or map questions), but the bulk of the points are on one or two essay questions which repeat the paper-writing exercise: construct an argument using the historical data you have (whereas in the papers this would be a primary source, for the tests it is the whole of the course material).  In both papers and tests, I stress that clarity, not eloquence or style, is the goal.  I want workmanlike, functional prose; students that go for 'purple prose' often lose points on clarity (I signal this to students early; my rule is that there ought to be no surprises in grading).

In theory, this means that every part of the course at the introductory level, bends towards teaching logical argumentation, source analysis and clear writing (because I think, for the non-major, these are the most applicable skills in the 'real world.')  It's only at the higher levels that we start talking in more depth about doing historical research or developing very complex historical arguments (and no one really talks about historical theory until the graduate level.  As far as I'm concerned, a student ought not hear much about 'Foucault' or "Heidegger" or "Whig history" before graduate school - that sort of arcana simply isn't useful unless you are making a career of history at a fairly high level.  Sometimes even then it isn't very useful).

I say all of this because, as you will note, that pedagogical strategy - which I have honed over a some years teaching - is conditioned on the assumption that I teach in person.  Which is very much not happening in the fall.  So I am now hard at work refitting my method and strategies for an online environment and trying to make sure I offer the best learning experience (without overworking myself) in that context.  Mostly that means small changes - reading quizzes don't work much online, so I'm substituting short discussion responses in small 10-student forums (splitting the class into a bunch of groups of 10 to facilitate that; I think I'll name each group after a historical Roman legion) and shifting the grade emphasis a bit from the tests (which are more vulnerable to shenanigans in an online environment) to the prepared papers.

Looking at my plans, I think the biggest loss is actually a bit of 'student learning style balance.'  One reason I like to split the grade weight between quizzes (testing recall), tests (testing a bit of recall and a lot of analysis) and papers (testing analysis and writing polish and clarity) is that often good students will vary in what they do better or worse.  The online setting makes it very hard for me to give students credit for solid recall (because it is so easily faked online); that's going to unavoidably hurt students who are stronger in recall and weaker in other skills.  But I see no solution to that - at least I can content myself that recall is emphatically not the most important historical skill.  But the recall questions often help students who are very dedicated and disciplined, but just not very practiced or skilled at argumentation - which is a fairly common sort of student.

Well, that's all for this update.  Hopefully everyone is enjoying farming on the blog!