AT&T Fellows Final Report: Joanne Meyerowitz

AT&T Fellows Final Reports

April 2002

Name	Joanne Meyerowitz
Title	Professor of History
Department	History
Campus	IUB
Project Title	U. S. History Scholarship via Online Lesson Plans
Project Goal	Our Web site, now titled “Teaching the Journal of American History,” uses online tools to bridge the gap between the latest scholarly research in U. S. history and the practice of classroom teaching.
Type of Technology Used in the Project	Web technology—including QuickTime technology.

Executive Summary of Results

Three-quarters way through the project, we have now posted three of our four installments online. For each installment, we posted a new article from the Journal of American History (JAH), the nation’s premier journal of U. S. history, and we accompanied it with author’s comments on how to teach the article, primary source documents, lists of further readings, and links to additional Web sites. The best proof of the success of the project is a visit to our “Teaching the JAH” site at www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching. We have recorded more than 13,000 visits to the site already (and thousands of additional page requests). Two weeks after we posted our first installment last March, we were chosen as a Scout Report Selection by the Internet Scout Report, which publicizes the best new Internet resources.

Need for the Project

Briefly explain why you believed there was a need for your project and what teaching approach was used to address this need.

Traditionally, U.S. history instructors rely on textbooks to convey scholarship to their survey-course students. But textbooks fail to include the latest scholarship or to inspire active learning with primary historical sources. Our Web site is designed to help remedy this well-known problem. As our background is in history, not pedagogy, we did not attempt to emulate the kind of lesson plans usually found in materials created for high school teachers. Instead, we provided the resources and guides for professors to create their own lesson plans; that is, to incorporate our materials into their existing U.S. history survey courses.

Use of Technology

Briefly explain how your project used instructional technology in a new or different way.

We designed a Web site in which primary historical sources could be accessed directly and projected into the classroom. But we realized that many classrooms are not yet equipped for online teaching. So we also made it easy for faculty to download documents or print them from our site, and use them as handouts or overhead projections. In our first installment, we posted 17 cartoons, diagrams, and images. In our second installment, we posted 14 primary sources, including four short film clips from the 1943 film Mission to Moscow, as well as archival documents, cartoons, and movie reviews. The film clips required additional technology, so we provide free downloads of QuickTime to anyone who needs it. Teachers can project the clips in class from our Web site, they can send students to our URL for an out-of-class assignment, or at the low-tech end they can print film stills along with printed transcripts of the dialogue, all of which we provide. For our third installment, we posted 11 documents, including maps, cartoons, advertisements, and photographs. In order to facilitate use of the documents, we included for the first time a downloadable PDF package of all the documents together.

Instructional Design Plan

Describe how the use of technology used supported your teaching approach:

What student learning outcomes were expected?
How did your teaching plan encourage active learning, provide feedback, address respective learning styles, and build collaboration?
What resources were used? (campus technology support services, etc.)
Would your project be easily understood and executed by other faculty?

From the start, we made our teaching “packages” freely available nationally (and even internationally). We did not intend them solely for use in our own classrooms. We expected the “packages” to assist professors in encouraging active learning and critical thinking through the joint use of primary historical documents and recent secondary scholarship.

The Ameritech grant allowed us to use (at a discount rate) a technical staff person, most of whose salary is paid by the Organization of American Historians, to design, post, and update the site. Because the staff person is highly skilled, we did not need much additional campus technology support. But when we were figuring out how to compress and “stream” the film clips online, we did consult with the Digital Media Network Services in Telecommunications in UITS.

Potential to Impact Student Learning

Clearly define how your project improved student learning - include specific examples of how your project:

Fostered depth of learning
Supported efforts to improve retention
Fostered the learning of large numbers of students
Has broader applications that will affect learning K-12 or community environments?

Our project is aimed more directly at teachers and professors than at students. We are providing professors and teachers with the tools they need to incorporate visual images and primary texts into their U.S. history survey lectures. Each professor or teacher will tailor the use of these materials to fit his or her classroom goals. For our own classes, we aim to 1) enliven the often dull U.S. history survey lectures—that is, to keep students’ attention and focus, 2) to foster analytical and critical readings of primary historical documents, and 3) to introduce the very latest in historical interpretation into the survey classroom.

We designed the site for college-level history courses, but we are delighted to discover that a number of high school history teachers are using (and praising) the site.

Assessment Plan

Briefly explain the effectiveness of your assessment plan:

What measure of assessment was used?
How did your approach obtain measures of performance?
Did you feel your measurement was accurate and effective?

We performed two in-class assessments here at IU in a U.S. history survey course. In the first assessment, we tested students before and after the lecture incorporating the teaching package, thus demonstrating that students had indeed learned how to interpret images they could not interpret earlier. In the second assessment, we tested the students afterwards only and had them compare a document (a film clip) from our site to another film clip also shown in class, demonstrating in this case that the students could (and did) use the documents as evidence of a larger shift in WWII propaganda. The instructor who worked with us to conduct these assessments in his classroom gave us valuable feedback on both the “challenges and benefits of incorporating technology into the classroom.” He concluded: “I would definitely use both [packages] again in the U.S. survey….Students’ comprehension of the images (and the political/intellectual context) improved sharply.”

In addition, we are also getting feedback from users across the nation. We have a feedback form on our site, and we have gotten a few good suggestions, which we incorporated, and lots of praise.

A few representative comments from users of the site:

I’m going to use the ‘Mission to Moscow’ site in the [Teaching the JAH] next semester for my U. S. history survey….This is a wonderful idea, and I hope you will communicate my praise to those responsible for putting it together.
Professor Jonathan Bryant, Georgia Southern University

This is really a terrific endeavor. Thanks to the author and your editorial staff for selecting this very interesting issue and for providing such useful material for teaching it.
Professor Julia E. Liss, Scripps College

Are there any other lesson plans on other articles incorporating the Journal of American History? I teach A. P. American history to 11th grade students and I am always interested in new ways of exploring materials.
Terri Khouri, Grosse Pointe North High School

Excellent site. Please continue this effort.
Sharon K. Anderson, Cookeville High School

What a brilliant 4 May, 2007tarting something similar for the AJA [American Journal of Archaeology]…. Would you have time to discuss this with me sometime?
Professor Kevin Glowacki, Indiana University

Plan for Colleague Development

Describe your role and activities as a mentor:

What mentoring activities were implemented to assist colleagues?
How did you help to develop colleague's instructional technology skills?
How do you think your contributions to the Knowledge Base will help colleagues planning similar projects?
Is your project approach potentially applicable to other contexts or disciplines?
What tips would you offer?

We worked directly (ongoing face-to-face exchanges) with the IU colleague who used and assessed the teaching installments in his current U.S. history survey course. But most of our mentoring work has taken place nationally. We have publicized our Web site widely—with print excerpts in the Organization of American Historians Magazine of Historyand online links at H-Net (History Net), History Matters, and the History Cooperative Web sites. And we offer technical guidance from the Journal of American Historyoffice (here at IUB) for any users who run into technical difficulties accessing or downloading materials.

From the start, we saw this as a national project, bringing nationwide attention to IU’s technology endeavors, rather than a local project primarily for IU classrooms. (We have found our site publicized in a number of publications and Web sites, ranging from the California History Action newsletter to the Web site of the National Austrian Radio and Broadcasting Corporation.)

Our project is available internationally, and it offers a sophisticated template that could be easily used in other disciplines or other areas of history. I recently had a conversation with the editor of the Journal of Hate Studies, who plans to copy our template. And I just got an email from someone at the American Journal of Archaeology who wants to do the same. To encourage such projects, I also presented our project at the Conference of Historical Journals meeting in San Francisco last January.

Final Comments on Project Results

Do you think you met the goals of your project?
What, if anything,would you do differently?
Did you have any unexpected outcomes? (positive or negative)
Would you recommend this teaching approach to colleagues?
What other comments or suggestions would you offer to complete this report?

We still have one more installment (September 2002) to design and implement before we have met our goals. (We are already planning the final feature.)

So far we are altogether pleased with the results. We have gotten wider use, more praise from users, and more national and international attention than we ever expected. So far (as of the end of March) we have had more than 13,000 requests for our site [this number does not count all page hits, only unique visits], mostly from the U. S. and Canada, but also from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Given the success of the project and our existing template already online, we plan to continue the project and create additional installments after our grant ends. Many thanks to the Ameritech Fellowship Program.

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