How to DHP

The DHP courses seek to achieve three key learning objectives for the student who participate in them.  First, to engage the students in an immersive learning experience in which they must take initiative, make decisions, and be accountable for results, we took advantage of what D.A. Gruenwald termed the “pedagogical power of place.” By centering the course on a problem “more relevant to the lived experience of students,” and important to the people they meet, “accountability is re-conceptualized so that places matter to … students … in tangible ways” (646). The plan required the successful completion of five tasks: conducting background reading, uncovering archival materials, completing and transcribing oral interviews, writing a history of the complex, and constructing a webpage. The scale of the project, and the public visibility that it will receive, further intensify student commitment. It also necessitates the students work collaboratively, and thus achieves the second learning objective of the course. To achieve their goals the students must work together as a team. The third learning objective of the course was to foster a sense of purposefulness through service in the students by leading them to appreciate the social value and personal meaningfulness of historical research. The goals of writing a history for public consumption on an issue of local importance, and working with civic partners and local interviewees, were designed to produce this end. That said, we saw the development of the website as critical to the realization of the project’s public service dimension. The students’ audio interviews, archival research, and narrative history of the Arcade would be displayed on the website. Placing these on a website transformed the traditional academic work product of a seminar into a resource for the community and contributed to ongoing efforts to improve the public good by supporting redevelopment in the downtown, while spurring in the students an appreciation of professional vocation (Sobel; Moon 18-23).

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Conducting a Group Research Seminar

How to Approach an Immersive Place-Based Research Problem

Students will typically begin such projects by deciding how to subdivide the task of researching and writing a chronological history of the topic. Each teams might then further subdivide their periods so that each would tackle a defined time frame before knitting the findings together to form a single narrative. Together they begin by compiling prior writing about the subject, or historiography. They may discover, as a student in one class wrote, that the “lack of sources available for this subject presented a new challenge” and the “secondary sources were difficult to interpret.” Being forced to rely on primary documents will be a new experience for many of the students. In other classes, said one DHP member, “I usually was reading and researching on a well-known topic for a paper [but] in this case I had to do deeper research as not much is known about the [subject] I had to look at newspapers and archival items to gain a better understanding about the [subject] and it was an interesting and new experience.” To find the material they need, students will need to visit archives. Even with the help of local archivists they will discover it is hard to find useful material.  Indeed, they will learn that they need to be inventive.

At the beginning of each class the students should discuss what they encountered while doing research. This interaction is a critical part of the EL emphasis on reflection that makes it different from other models of “hands-on learning.” In these sessions the students share ways to solve problems and consider the implications of what they had found. Free to express their opinions, a common theme that may arise is was the frustrations surrounding the time-consuming process of sifting through primary materials and finding little to use. A student declared in a class one day, before this experience he did not know how important “stubborn persistence” was when conducting research. However, you will find the students also discuss the joy of discovery. One said, “After searching for what felt like hours, actually finding a piece of writing that directly related to the Arcade was extremely exciting!! It was an almost euphoric feeling knowing that the work you had been doing produced results.” If the students don’t mention the positive of research, it is advisable to prompt them in subtle ways to think about the positives of what they are experiencing.  Once prompted, they typically reflect on what they did and recognize the satisfaction or even happiness they felt while conducing research.

Conducting Oral or Video History Interviews

Another main source of information in community based research projects can be oral history interviews. These can be conducted with the use of audio equipment or video. Conducting oral history involves a number of considerations.  There are the technical issues of equipment. Then there is the logistics of planning interviews. There are many challenges in conducting effective interviews. And finally, there are ethical questions about the use of such materials that must be attended to.  Many of the DHP courses have conducted interviews with people in the local community. Typically this aspect of the class involves consultation and partnering with local institutions. For example, in the Arcade project the DHP courses worked with the Dayton Metro Library, the Cross-Street development company rebuilding the Arcade, and the grassroots civic preservation society called the “Friends of the Arcade,” and local assisted living facilities. Lists of potential interviewees were compiled in consultation with these groups. Interviews can be conducted by students who are broken into teams consisting of an interviewer and support technician. In the weeks leading up to the interviews students should practice using audio recording equipment, conduct practice interviews, and properly preserving the interview recording.  Students can typically be taught to use the equipment in two sessions. In additional classes the students practice assembling the equipment and conducted mock interviews. They will also need to collaboratively fashion procedures for saving the recordings and write an interview script.  Consent forms will also need to be generated. These forms should explicitly explain how the interviews and materials resulting from them will be used and who will have access to them. The interviewees need to retain their own copy of the consent form.

Students will nonetheless encounter a number of problems. Making contact and scheduling interviews with the elderly subjects can be difficult. Many are reluctant to answer the phone, lack email, and are hesitant to leave their homes or have unknown people visit. Creating good audio recordings in home environments can also be difficult. Making transcripts of the interviews can be done a number of ways. Students can do it themselves, professional transcription services can be hired, or on-line software can be used.

Once again, however, in-class discussion of student experiences conducting interviews is an invaluable part of the process. Students describe the challenges of securing a high-quality recording, creating trust with interviewees, and keeping the interview on task without preventing the subject from raising points that might prove important. The students quickly learn that the subjects are eager to talk about their experiences. “I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to talk to me about Arcade,” said one. They will probably express the belief that they believe “no one cared about [the subject] anymore,” and were happy to find otherwise. Interviews can also yield material history: paintings, photographs, poems, advertisements, and souvenir objects.

Be prepared for the interviews to produce surprises. As one student wrote about conducting interviews related to the Dayton Arcade, “From what people said, … the Arcade was described as neutral ground [for African Americans] from … the outright segregation/racist policies” common in the history of the City of Dayton.” Yet another student wrote that this surprise reinforced the lessons she had been taught regarding “the importance of creating … an unbiased history that included all sides, from the bottom to the top.” Most of all, conducting interviews will bring the past to life for students. “Doing interviews for people who remember the Dayton Arcade,” said Rachel, “helped me see how alive history really could be.”

Challenges in Group Research Projects:  Collaboration and Integration

Some students have never worked in groups on a large project. A good number of students also approach group work with trepidation. About a third of the students in the DHP courses feel this way. These students focus upon a number of well deserved concerns with group work.  In one example, a student complained that some did “not always pull their fair share.” Students frequently observe that this problem ended up “delaying the group’s progress.” The “main challenge with working in teams,” said another, “is ensuring continuity” between sections of the essay written by different people in the group and across groups. Accustomed to what Rachel described as the “rigid” structure of most courses while simultaneously focusing on individual projects, the students felt ill-prepared to assume the level of self-direction and responsibility expected of them when working with others. “A course like this,” wrote yet another student, “has many moving parts that can often be overwhelming and intimidating if you do not have prior experience with them.”

It was for precisely this reason that most students, however, believe the advantages outweighed the shortcomings. “For this project in particular,” wrote one,

there were an endless number of reasons that we benefited from working on a team. Because we had such a large number of tasks, such as creating a research paper, creating a website, and doing oral interviews and transcriptions, it was so important to have teammates that you were able to work with in order to accomplish all of the tasks.

Besides the advantages of dividing the work, providing support, and generating new perspectives, collaborative work forces students to build new skills.  “Working in groups requires constant communication,” said Stacy. “Being assigned group projects helped my planning,” wrote Rachel. For Tom the experience “challenged my soft skills of group communication and task delegation.” Tristan admitted that working in groups not only taught him “how to work better in teams,” “the experience also helped me learn about my individual responsibility.”

Others see the peer teaching component inherent in group work to be its greatest advantage. “Collaboration with peers,” wrote one student, “enabled us to receive feedback and help others that were struggling.” In another instance, a student declared that “I found working in groups beneficial because we bounced writing ideas off of each other, which was a new experience having other ‘history minds,’ if you will, collaborating to produce good history.” Yet another simply said, I “want to thank those in my interview group and website group [because I gained] inspiration from … their commitment to this project.”

Many faculty have encountered the tendency of students to reduce their workload. However, the stakes involved in the DHP courses tends to mitigate this tendency. Students willing accept plan in the DHP courses for them to write six graded drafts of their essays. It is best to platform the draft sequence so that is each graded on an independent scale. Heavy editing may need to be required, with half of the subsequent grade dependent upon the thoroughness with which the students’ respond to the edites. “While I had considered myself a fairly effective writer,” reported Stacy, “this capstone pushed me to become a better writer of history by being more direct in my analysis.” The task was “invaluable in helping me to understand the editing process much more fully,” wrote Julian. “In earlier history courses I had produced two drafts of a paper at maximum, including the final.” Here we “produced at least six distinct essay drafts after receiving revision notes from my professors. This led me to adopt a much more critical approach when drafting my papers.”

Collective work is a central aspect of the DHP courses. This means that student assessment of their peers should be a component in determining individual grades. The use of peer evaluations has many pitfalls. Students are frequently reluctant to assign poor grades and sometimes lack objectivity. In the DHP courses several steps are taken to address these problems. The courses include objective measures. The instructor also emphasizes to the students that the task of evaluating peers is an important managerial skill. It is also key to devise a clear performance scale that measures a number of attributes.  One way of forcing them to recognize distinctions between student performance is by limiting the total number of points they can assign. But it is also advised they you give them a means to circumvent this limit if they thought it unfair. We do this by allowing them to write an argument justifying a higher grade. Student compliance with the peer evaluations will increase if they believe that the score they assign to others is not be the only measure upon which  their peers’ grades will be determined. Finally, ensure the entire process is anonymous.

Other aspects of the class present challenges for the instructors. The EL approaches utilized here require faculty to relinquish a good measure of the control they hold in a traditional classroom. As the student-centered work increases, the instructors gradually take on a supervisory role in which they monitor group progress, advise teams, and troubleshoot problems that arise. Faculty must take the uncomfortable step of relinquishing control even as the increased visibility of the class enhances pressure upon instructors who must be concerned with a number of outcomes: students’ success, satisfying the expectations of external partners, and that of fellow faculty members. One response is to work more closely with the students, a result consistent with EL research that shows that “less teacher talk requires more teacher time” (Cornell & Clark 94).

Teaching DHP style course is, at times, unsettling for both the students and faculty accustomed to the privatized educational experience of the traditional classroom. It has been argued, however, that it is precisely in such an unpredictable environment in which the students learn from mistakes and successes, that they develop initiative and responsibility. In sum, the process of developing these skills requires that both students and instructors to venture out of the “safe harbor” of the traditional teaching model (Roberts 67).

Building Websites

Building website is one of the boldest moves beyond the educational anchorage of the traditional course structure for a history class. To be successful, the student’s introduction to the skills needed, requires careful planning. Early in the course the students should begin to undertaking a series of exercises designed to quickly and efficiently teach them how to build a website. In the DHP, we do this by having the students complete a series of modules focused on constructing a personal webpage. These pages later become part of the overall site. In-class discussions about building the website initially revolves around the writing groups’ efforts to transfer their essays to the website. In these meetings, however, the students also decide if they want to build additional pages: a quiz, a timeline, a photo collection, a gallery of related links, as well as pages devoted to the contributors and acknowledgements. Gradually, the students will divide into web building crews to plan and construct these pages.

Not surprisingly, building the website will prove challenging but also highly rewarding. Not having previously learned the skills needed, the students are often nervous. About a third of the students’ reflection exercises done after the end of each DHP contain negative remarks about producing the website. The good news is that this number has declined over time as the methods to teach the skills needed have improved. The complaints tend focus on the belief that constructing a website is an unfair burden. If at all possible, it is best if the students are introduced to the skills in previous core history classes. The majority of students, even those who had critical responses, emphasize the advantages of building a website. One student observed it helped “to distribute our work to a wider audience.” While building the website was “frustrating” at times, “in the end, it was very rewarding as I got to actually publish my work (while not officially) to a potentially large audience, exhilarating!” Many express the positive belief that they ar “actually putting the work into creating something that others are going to see and, hopefully, learn from.” “While building the website was challenging,” This leads a good number to say, “it was my favorite element of the course because it makes our research project meaningful.”

As these examples suggest, with the DHP projects students’ often believe they are contributing to the community. This clearly positively impacts their views of what they had done. Echoing the sentiments of most others, a student who worked on the Arcade project argued that “being able to do this project has made me feel as though I was able to not only contribute to the UD’s community, but also to the community and city of Dayton.” Another on that project explained that although:

our research, writing, and website was on the Arcade, it was also about the city of Dayton. Working on the Arcade project taught me about the mutualistic relationship that a historical structure, like the Arcade, has with a city like Dayton. … In preserving the history of the Arcade, we are also preserving the hard work and memories of people across the city that have come and gone.

On the most basic level, many were excited that their work was connecting them to the world. “As a Dayton native,” wrote another,

I really enjoyed researching the Arcade and learning about the history of Dayton. I loved calling up my dad and telling him about the crazy things I learned about the city and hearing how excited he got about it! Both of my parents have experienced the Arcade when it was open, so they always wanted to stay up to date on what I was researching and what people I was interviewing.

“The research project,” said yet another student, “taught me the importance of public history. It taught me the important role historians have as public educators, to craft histories that serve the public good.” The benefits are clear to many of the students. One said,  “this class made me realize that I could make a difference in important issues with my own historical research.” In the past he had often felt “down about the major I chose” because what he did seemed disconnected and unimportant. “However, this class made me realize the potential importance I can have in my own community if I am committed to preserving its history, I can actually make a difference.”

Without a doubt, one of the key factors in these responses was Gruenwald’s “pedagogical power of place.” After studying the Arcade, said one student, “What seemed to me like just a mall at first was actually a social issue for a lot of people.” 

By getting to do interviews and research on the Arcade, I got to see why people loved it so much and think its re-opening will help revitalize the city. As such, this experience helped me see that as a history major talking about this Arcade, it was my social responsibility to show the Arcade as it once was to the people of Dayton. This also lets other people who don’t know or support the re-opening of the Arcade realize the potential of what it could be.

Both the Arena and Arcade projects led students to care about Dayton. Both also led them to see how their actions mattered. Students expressed their growing awareness that the vocation of history did something much bigger than what they previously understood. Learning how much it meant to Daytonians, wrote one, “I could not help but feel some sense of social responsibility to put my skills—the historian’s craft—to use to preserve something of this history. If the Arcade renovation plans had failed, then the website that my classmates and I helped create would have been the only remnant of the Arcade left.” It had a similar impact on Stacy’s appreciation for historians and historical investigation.

This capstone class has truly enlightened me to how complex, rewarding, and at times difficult, being a historian can be. Specifically, I learned how flexible historians are and how dedicated they are to preserving [sic] and encapsulating our lives. During the preliminary stages of research and writing, I was thinking very narrowly and with a goal in mind to what the history of the Arcade would be. However, as I learned, often times history surprises us and we do not find what we had expected, but good historians will still find a way to tell or preserve a story with the resources they have.

In both the Arena and Arcade projects, the enthusiasm of students was shared by the community partners with whom they worked. As anticipated, completing the website made what the students had done immediately accessible to others. An archivist at the public library was amazed by collection of images the students had put together, a declared her intention to recommend it to K12 student doing research on Dayton. After seeing the Arcade site one of the city’s leading conservationist declared it “the best study of the Arcade that has been done.” The coalition rebuilding the Arcade thought so highly of the results, they are planning to construct a display on the inside of the renovated complex featuring the students research.  Similarly, the Arena has garnered a good deal of attention by the community.  Visits will soon surpass the 5,000 mark and it has not yet begun to be used by teachers. The success of the Arena site is what caught the attention of those related to the Arcade.

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