Team-Based Learning in the Liberal Arts: A Large History Survey (a Case Study) 

Penne Restad, Ph.D. and Michael Sweet, Ph.D. – The University of Texas at Austin

Background:  It is our belief that Team-Based Learning has made greater inroads into professional schools than departments in colleges of Liberal Arts for at least two reasons.  First, many professional schools have third-party licensing exams they must help prepare their students to pass (e.g., medical boards, engineering certifications, legal bar exams and so on).  This third-party credentialing can be helpful in building at least some consensus within professional schools about what they are preparing their students to do, and therefore what their curriculum should contain.  For the most part, disciplines in the Liberal Arts have no such outside credentialing exams providing at least some “bottom line” that their curricula must address. 

Second, because of its insistence on action-based instructional objectives (i.e. what you want your students to be able to do as a result of taking your course) and its heavy reliance on the multiple-choice question format, teachers of highly interpretive disciplines can sometimes have difficulty imagining what TBL would look like in their classrooms.  In our case, the question is “What does it look like to have a large lecture class in which students are doing history?”

After receiving a $250,000 grant from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board for the Transformation of Undergraduate Education, our charge is to overhaul completely a required, large-lecture survey history course:  specifically, UT Austin’s HIST 315L, which covers  – American history from the end of the Civil War to the present.  This is one of two classes that satisfies a general education history requirement and therefore must serve thousands of students per year, many of whom have no intention of majoring in History.

Description:

Course materials are in development now, and the first deployment of the class will be Spring of 2010—so we will be in the middle of the first run of the course when the TBL conference occurs.  Currently, three elements of the course are noteworthy:  our approach to textbooks, our vision of a “history bootcamp,” and the critical thinking language we are identifying as useful for implementing TBL in an interpretive discipline.

Textbooks

At its simplest, doing history is making one’s own sense of incomplete and often incompatible source documents.  For this reason, it would be inappropriate to use a single textbook as “the” source of truth about American history.  Therefore, we will be using two textbooks which tell substantially different stories about America:  Johnson’s (1998) A History of the American People and Zinn’s (2005) A People’s History of the United States.  The Johnson text takes a conservative, some might say triumphalist. view of American history, while the Zinn text takes a progressive, some might say Marxist view.  They tell very different stories, indeed.  So in order for students to make their own sense of these two different stories, they must begin learning how to do history using these two text as source documents.  (This idea is drawn with gratitude from Leon Calder, 2006).

History Bootcamp

We have determined that the course will begin with a “history bootcamp” that makes explicit what it means to do history, and provides students with the concepts, vocabulary and skills that they will then spend the rest of the semester practicing upon various events in American History. We are evaluating three different approaches for what that bootcamp might present as the process of doing history.  The final experience will likely pull from all three:

(1)  Leon Calder’s “6 moves of historical mindedness” 

Questioning, Connecting, Sourcing, Making inferences, Considering all perspectives, Recognizing limits of one’s knowledge

(2)  The American Historical Association’s “Five Cs” of Thinking Historically Change over time, Context, Causality, Contingency, Complexity

(3)  Document Analyses of Various Kinds Identifying the document, Analyzing the document, Determining the historical context, Identifying  the vital theme and narrative of the document, Indicating the relationship of the document to the discipline.

Critical Thinking Vocabulary

While not a structural aspect of the course, the critical thinking vocabulary we are identifying in order to structure the bootcamp will have implications for the TBL community beyond our course.  How we operationalize and assess the kinds of activities that we teach during the bootcamp will hopefully be informative for teachers in other interpretive disciplines in the Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.  While it may be too much to expect that our course development might serve as a “model” for other TBL courses in the Liberal Arts, we feel confident that we will emerge equipped with course materials and lessons-learned that will be illuminating for teachers in other interpretive disciplines.

Conclusion

The poster we would like to present will be intended as a “mid-action report” in the sense that the class will be ongoing when the TBL conference occurs.  We will have identified some best-practices and lessons-learned, but the course will only be about half-over.  We are looking forward to not only sharing our experiences and ideas with our colleagues, but also hearing their ideas, insights and suggestions for the remainder of the course.  In our experience this kind of “real-time” troubleshooting and support at previous TBL conferences makes them uniquely vital, creative and productive experiences.