Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

This page contains descriptions and links to American Studies projects and course portfolios at the University level, with particular concentration on courses which use digital tools, and/or evaluate the role these tools play in student research and scholarship. Links to students' final electronic projects demonstrate the exciting results of the inclusion of new media technologies in American cultural studies at university level.

Click here for a brief introduction to the Scholarship of Teaching and related resources...

The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem? - Randy Bass
Inventio Vol. I No. 1.1998. George Mason University.

Web Modules for Teaching American History - David Huehner
The project entitled "Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age" at its core was envisaged as returning the craft of history to the survey course through an emphasis on students working directly with historical documents. Primary emphasis in this project was placed on activities that were student centered and taught cognitive skills appropriate for the analysis of a wide variety of primary materials.

Discovering American Social History on the Web - Dan Kallgren
"I designed these web projects with two goals in mind. First, I wanted to locate American social history primary materials that my students would not otherwise have access to. I wanted these sources to be varied, including pictures, text and sound. I also wanted these sources to be of sufficient quantity that the students would have a lot to work with. This fits into my second goal, I wanted the students to use the sources to engage in their own research. As such I have tried to find sources that are open-ended, that allow the students to draw their own conclusions after going through the 'sifting and winnowing' process of research."

Teaching Difficult Legal or Political Concepts: Using Online Primary Sources in Writing Assignments - Sue C. Patrick
"This project had two distinct parts. One was to require students to use online primary sources (in addition to their main textbook) to write out-of-class essays in my Western Civilization and U.S. Survey courses. In essence, the online sources replaced the primary source 'readers' I had previously used in class. See my Reflective Essay for the results. The second part was to write several Internet site reviews that would be useful to teachers who wished to take the same approach but with different or additional primary sources."

Western Civilization Course Portfolio (2001)
This portfolio documents the teaching in a Western Civilization survey course at Texas Tech that took a thematic approach to investigate a number of the most important developments from the 17th Century to the Fall of Communism. The portfolio focuses on the impact of hypermedia on student learning and includes samples of student work, student evaluations and peer comments.

History 67, The United States to 1877, A Course Portfolio 1996 and 1997 - William Cutler
"This course portfolio describes and analyzes an introductory course in American history that was taught at the Ambler campus of Temple University in the fall of 1996... I prepared the following document to show other historians how we made the course intellectually engaging."

Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age: Reconceptualising the Introductory Survey Course
This web project offers historians models for how to use digitized primary sources in survey courses in World History and the History of the Americas.

Liberal Learning and the History Major
The American Historical Association (AHA) was one of twelve learned societies contributing to this review. Each participating learned society convened a taskforce charged to address a common set of questions about purposes and practices in liberal arts majors; individual task forces further explored issues important in their particular fields.

Power Tools for Teaching and Learning at an Urban-Access University
"All of us who teach in the classroom are acquainted to one degree or another with the issues of student consciousness, preparedness, and motivation that I address in this Web guide. We teach courses in which a large majority of the students are nonmajors who do not fully appreciate where history fits into the mission of our universities or into the schemes of their livesÉ We are confronted with a present and a future in which we are increasingly challenged to teach our students how to learn, and even why to learn, in a university context and environment."

Learning Interdisciplinarity: A Course Portfolio (2002)
Sherry Linkon's research focused on evaluating the effectiveness of her incremental learning assignments in an interdisciplinary course. The website is framed around a series of key questions:

Peer Review of Teaching Project
A portfolio evaluating a first-year writing program in the English Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which documents the teaching and reviews the curriculum.

Center for History and New Media at George Mason University
Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies - Four Digital Essays

English/American Studies at the University of Virginia
The M.A. in English with a concentration in American Studies is an interdisciplinary program sponsored by the English Department in cooperation with faculty from the departments of Anthropology, Art, Drama, Economics, History, Music, Religious Studies, and Sociology, as well as from the Schools of Architecture and Law. Limited to twelve students a year working together under the supervision of the American Area faculty, this program provides a multidisciplinary perspective on the culture of the United States. In addition, the program provides training and experience using computer technology for the acquisition, analysis and presentation of materials in American Studies. Its goal is to prepare students for work or study in a number of venues including further graduate work in American Studies or related traditional disciplines, teaching, law, politics, business, and journalism.
Link to M.A. students' final electronic projects
Cultural objects: The Electronic Journal for American Studies at Virginia

Interrogating the Question: How do Undergraduates Initiate Research? - Jo B. Paoletti
"In this presentation I focus on how undergraduates approach research, by investigating only a single step in that process - formulating the question. I am interested in developing ways to introduce students to scholarly inquiry by creating assignments that revolve around their own questions, without necessarily leading to a formal term paper or report."