My courses provide inquiries into humanistic social sciences that are informed by feminist pedagogies that prioritize diverse primary and secondary texts, inclusive communications, and student-centered learning. In the spirit of helping students integrate historical thinking with their lives and analyses of their lived experiences, I incorporate assignments asking them to make connections explicitly. Below are two examples of assignments I have formulated to achieve this learning goal.
Op-Eds
In my courses on the history of US immigration policy and on human rights history and theory, I ask students to use the course content to write six op-eds for the semester. In their op-eds, students draw from the reading for the week to complete an analysis of ongoing current events that would make course material legible to a non-expert audience. To familiarize themselves with the op-ed form, students identify opinion pieces they find compelling on related topics. Drawing inspiration from the OpEd Project and the guidelines from the New York Times, they then write their own takes.
The form of the op-ed, which is shorter than the typical history paper at 750 to 1000 words, forces students to demonstrate their understanding of course content by developing an original analysis of the present. Rather than using standard academic citations for their op-eds, I ask students to hyperlink to the information they use. By asking them to use hyperlinks, I’ve found that students can directly see the purpose and value of citations. It also has the added benefit of discouraging them from using unnecessary quotes, a difficult habit to break for many undergraduate writers.
After workshopping their op-eds with their classmates, students choose four of their pieces to revise and resubmit. The op-eds can be no more than 750 words for their final submissions, challenging students to identify a single critical point they want to make. I’ve collected and summarized student submissions from Fall 2023 here.
Hot Topics & Currents Events Project
In my course on the history of race and racism, I was inspired by Adrienne Keene’s weekly “hot topics,” which I adopted for my course. At the beginning of each class, I followed Keene’s model and set aside the first five to ten minutes of class to discuss the current events related to our course content and then asked students to explain those connections directly.
Like Keene, I asked students to use these “hot topics” as a basis to complete a current event project. The current event project, which served as their assessment for the class, elaborated on a recent event or phenomena of their choice and situated it within its historical context. I encourage students to use whichever media they think will most effectively convey their points for their final projects.
Students submitted a range of final projects that included a traditional history research paper, a video podcast, an interview series, a long-form non-fiction piece, and this podcast.
Savitri Maya Kunze 