The assignment
Write a letter, addressed to Dr. Madsen and Noah, in which you reflect on your use of the digital scrapbook from January 22 to February 10.
Purpose
This assignment is an opportunity for you to reflect on your early work in this course, evaluate whether you are making progress toward the course learning outcomes, and plan your approach to the scrapbook for the rest of the semester.
Your digital scrapbook and your reflections on it constitute 40% of your grade in this course, so please take your time with this assignment.
Content
This first check-in letter should accomplish three goals:
1. Reflect on your work to date.
The majority of your letter should reflect on your History 111 work to date, explaining how that work is made visible in the digital scrapbook.
Recall that the instructions for the digital scrapbook explain that it is a space to undertake these important learning tasks:
- Make connections:
- among items in a single chapter
- across chapters
- across course materials
- across courses
- among course materials and current events/cultural phenomena
- Practice critical thinking.
- Raise big questions you wish to answer—and start to answer them with evidence from course materials.
- Identify patterns or discontinuities among people/events/phenomena.
- Challenge an author’s or historical figure’s assumptions or premises.
- Evaluate competing claims about cause and effect.
- Connect what we’re reading in class to your selected theme.
- Analyze images, songs, texts, or artifacts.
- Reflect.
- Pause to consider how learning about the past (or a new interpretation of it) makes you feel, especially if that knowledge disrupts your previous understanding or triggers strong emotions for another reason.
- Consider how your ancestors (wherever in the world they may have been, but especially if they were in the U.S.) might have reacted to the events we’re learning about in class.
- Consider how events in the past may connect to your own life experiences—for example, because those events may have influenced the opportunities available to you, or maybe you see similarities between public unrest then and now.
- Prepare for your final project.
- Draft research questions.
- Note links or sections of course materials to revisit later.
- Copy/paste from the textbook and add your own thoughts/commentary.
- Collect links to primary and secondary sources.
Your letter should therefore include commentary on how you have been undertaking some of these tasks and how they are advancing your pursuit of the course learning outcomes, as stated in the syllabus:
By the end of the course, students will:
- ask thoughtful, meaningful questions—and seek answers to them by carefully reading and interpreting primary and secondary sources.
- articulate how the history of chattel slavery has influenced the political, economic, and cultural development of the U.S.
- explain why and how settlers systematically targeted North America’s indigenous peoples for displacement and genocide—and how Native Americans preserved cultural identity despite these threats.
- identify some methods by which history is retold and deployed in contemporary political rhetoric.
- develop sufficient historical literacy to become informed participants in contemporary U.S. cultural and political life.
Of course, we’re only a month into the course, so I don’t expect you to have achieved these learning outcomes. In fact, the guiding questions in the digital scrapbook are not yet focusing on some of those outcomes (but they will soon). Do your best to reflect on what you have accomplished to date and how they contribute to your overall learning in this course.
2. Reflect on work yet to come.
You may have noticed that the digital scrapbook is highly flexible. Each student is using it differently, in ways that make sense to them. Some take notes there; some save images and links; others focus on responding to the questions and prompts in parts I and II. Some students respond with full sentences, while others use bullets.
Any way you use the scrapbook is fine, as long as you’re keeping those learning tasks listed above in mind and working toward the course learning outcomes. However, you need to use it mindfully, lest it become merely busywork.
Demonstrate that mindful approach near the end of your letter. Once you have reflected on the work you have accomplished thus far, include a paragraph on where you’d like to focus your digital scrapbook efforts in the coming months.
3. Assign yourself a grade.
At the end of your letter, you should assign yourself a course grade based on the Digital Scrapbook First Check-in Rubric (.docx). Note that the rubric emphasizes achievement and outcomes over effort or time spent on the scrapbook. Accordingly, your grading should reflect what you have accomplished rather than the amount of effort you have put into the scrapbook.[1]
Additional details
- Your letter should be between 500 and 750 words. For many students, that’s going to feel very short. Rather than stopping short at 750 words, I recommend you write as much as you need, then revise carefully, keeping only the most vital content.
- You may choose to write your letter in whatever voice and tone you prefer, but the letter should be polished and largely free of grammar and spelling errors. (Tip: Have someone you trust read it and offer suggestions for revision.)
- This letter, plus the work on which it reflects, constitutes 15% of your course grade. Give yourself sufficient time to write and revise it.
- Your letter, titled “Digital Scrapbook Check-In #1,” should be uploaded to your student folder in Google drive by noon on Wednesday, February 12.
[1] Dr. Madsen and Noah reserve the right to change this grade for the purpose of equitable grading across the course, but we don’t anticipate changing many grades (if any). Please do the important work of evaluating your own achievement thus far so that we can keep your self-assigned grade unchanged.