In May of 2022, members of the History department gathered to discuss our curriculum for an entire day. Thanks to the support of a small grant from the Center for Teaching, we were able to have the event catered by henofthewoods so that we could all simply focus on making the most of this rare opportunity for us all to eat –and, importantly, eat and be well–together in person again. Given all of the pandemic-related challenges of the past couple of years, combined with packed commuting schedules and a host of other obligations that the members of our department shoulder on a regular basis, including co-directing the Roberson project, chairing Women’s and Gender Studies and chairing the college’s International and Global Studies program, it felt like a major accomplishment simply to have so many of us able to come together to talk in the same space for an extended period of time.
The main goal of our workshop was to reflect on what we had learned from the college’s ongoing curriculum renewal process and to identify a variety of broader, longer range goals for our program, including some possible changes to our capstone curriculum. As chair, myself returning to the States after two years abroad, I wanted to take the time to consider simply how we were all doing along with some of the options available to us both in the long and short term. But thinking big and thinking small – as in, juggling the tension between what we want to do and what we are actually in a position to do right now– can be tricky, as we all know. It became immediately clear to me in our conversations that we had a wide variety of “big picture” ideas about how to improve our curriculum in the long term and that we were not going to be able to reach a consensus about these by the end of our still very limited time together. We needed time and a chance to get to know each other again. What we decided we could do was focus on making an arguably minor, yet substantial and meaningful change that would prompt us to make other smaller changes and contribute to the realization of larger goals in the longer term.
Here is what we decided: History has long offered a course focused on historical methods and interpretation (HIST 352) that our majors take as juniors, prior to developing a creative, independent (but with lots of coaching) senior thesis project in the Fall of their senior year. It has been a mainstay of our program in many ways, a course that we all have tended to feel is very important because, in short, how one does history–i.e. the kinds of sources and perspectives one privileges, the questions one asks of them, the scholarly conversations one engages with while reading those sources etc.–matter a great deal. Yet for various reasons we have been finding it difficult to staff this particular course recently and many of us had other ideas about how best to position our majors for success with their senior capstone projects. We have also been finding our students are interested in more flexibility, particularly in the junior year, and are perhaps better positioned to benefit from a course focused on methods, archives and the varieties of history–including digital and public history–as sophomores, around the time they are declaring their majors.
We began discussing a variety of other things during the retreat as well, including the chair’s “job description,” service to the department and equity, our CRI report and our Fulbright “Scholar-in-Residence” application “in progress.” This application was ultimately successful and (we hope) will result in an opportunity to collaborate with a Taiwanese or South Korean historian – recruited with the help of the U.S. State department – here in Sewanee. It is a very exciting opportunity for us to continue enhancing our curriculum and course options for Sewanee students interested in the history of East Asia. While I wished we could have met and talked for longer or that we could do a reprise of this retreat again this term, I am glad we made this happen and think we all benefited from the chance to be–and to eat–well together as a program again. Many of the conversations we began in this peaceful space have continued into the new academic year and I am hopeful they will help us move in some new and exciting directions as a program.
Kelly Whitmer, Department of History