Finding New Things

Intro classes, survey class, whatever your particular discipline has--they can be a grind. At the community college, these courses are our bread and butter; they're why students come to CCs. New college students get their feet wet with introductory knowledge, transferring to four-year schools after a while. Four year students drop in during Summer sessions to fill in gaps in their degree program at a lower cost. We're not going to get away from them--and no faculty member would ever want to give up teaching them. Survey classes are where we recruit history majors. Your future colleague may be sitting there in your four hour world history class. It's an exciting feeling, trying to find those topics and ideas which might spark some interest.

Of course, that's not to say that we can't do other stuff. The history area at my institution has been fortunate that our 200-level specialized courses have been popular and enrollment has been high. I've developed courses on the Cold War and American Military History and have revamped an abandoned Modern East Asia course. Our courses in African American, Holocaust, Labor and state history are consistently popular. My colleagues and I often joke that we could develop just about anything and people might sign up. It's a good feeling.

Of course, we have a responsibility to our students to offer courses that will be useful in their education, which has recently gotten me thinking about what might be next for me with my specialty teaching. This is a long term thing--what with administrative procedures for new courses and schedule lead time--probably next winter, January of 2010. Here's a breakdown of my thought process thus far:

• What's my knowledge base? My primary area of study in grad school was modern US history, but my non-US area was medieval Europe and, additionally, I had a strong undergrad background in that as well. So...


• What are we lacking? Our 200-level courses contain only one European topic--History of the Holocaust. So, clearly there's room for? a European class. Put these two things together...


• I've been working on a rough outline of an overview course of Medieval Europe, say 400-1500. It's daunting: even though I cover prehistory to 1500 in World History, I'm having trouble fitting everything in a Medieval course. So, even though this course sounds like a good idea, it leads me to some questions:


• Are 200-level-appropriate materials available and affordable?


• Might there be interest?


• How and where will this course fit into the schedule? Will it reduce my ability to teach adequate numbers of survey courses? Another way to ask the question: am I indulging myself at the expense of the discipline?


So--stay tuned as I work through this process...

Next time: technology