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300-Level History: High Middle Ages (Writing-Intensive)
HISTORICAL ANALYSIS AND CRITICAL THINKING
My goal in the writing tasks is to
foster critical thinking skills; then there are the content
objectives. Students should come away with a fairly clear sense of the
Middle Ages and that world view, and how that is the foundation of
Western society and culture. Critical thinking is intimately
intertwined with this content, because students have to struggle
with the content to understand it. If they wrestle with this
and they come to the conclusions, it will stick with them when
they leave the course.-- Professor Karen Jolly
The writing caused me to really analyze
all aspects of medieval history. Trying to look at a medieval text
through a medieval point of view really taught me a lot about
scratching beneath the surface.--Student
COURSE GOALS
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Students are encouraged to practice
critical thinking, since critical thinking is necessary to write,
and writing is necessary to think critically. Acquiring these
analytical skills leads to the ability to perform historical
analysis on primary sources, distinguishing a document's time
period from the contemporary period and interpreting what the
document means in, and reveals about, its own time period.
Students will also have a clear sense of the Middle Ages, the
perspectives of that period, and the contribution of the Middle
Ages to Western society and culture. |
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WRITING ACTIVITIES
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A SEQUENCE
OF WRITING ASSIGNMENTS TO DEVELOP ANALYTICAL THINKING |
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The instructor assigns a sequence
of seven short papers that move students from personal response to
critical analysis of primary and secondary sources. The overall
goal of the writing assignments is to provide students a number of
strategies to develop analytical skills to approach texts as
historians. The instructor first aims to have students deal with
their own reactions and biases toward the texts, which are
products of another historical era and embody perspectives alien
to the students' own perspectives. The personal responses are then
used to direct students to develop historical analyses of the
texts, identifying the "other's" perspectives as
distinct from their own, and interpreting what the texts meant to
the people of that time period and what they reveal about that
period and culture. |
"I realized that my opinions
are important. I could write what I felt, even if I didn't like a
book or a well-known author."--Student |
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The writing serves many purposes.
It provides frequent opportunities for students to practice
writing their ideas; the writing stimulates and sustains class
discussion. Some of the writing provides a way for the instructor
to check on content comprehension and to give students immediate
feedback on their learning.
All of the assignments in the
sequence described below begin with personal responses to
different historical texts then shift to varying
strategies—developing thesis statements, outlines, investigating
a point of view—that emphasize analysis. |
"I
liked the freedom to take the paper in the direction you wanted it
to go. The guidelines are broad enough to take the topic in any
way, but they are also narrow enough to give a focus. The freedom
allows the writer to express her thoughts freely."--Student |
| 1.
RESPONDING PERSONALLY TO A MEDIEVAL TEXT |
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Each student reads an assigned text
— a primary historical document written during the Middle Ages (The
Song of Roland, for example) — and writes a personal
response to it. To help students discover what they think about a
subject and to stimulate discussion, students are asked,
"What do you think of Roland’s actions?" and freewrite
their responses. The instructor acknowledges their personal
reactions to a text, a necessary first step before moving into
various levels of analysis. Students expose their own personal
bias and in the sequence of assignments use their personal
reactions as a tool to explore and develop an analysis. |
"I liked the personal
response papers. These papers allowed us to express our response
to the book. They also made us think about our response and why we
have this response."--Student |
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2. FOCUSING AND REFINING RESPONSES
IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT |
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Once students have openly shared
their initial reactions to a text, the instructor poses questions
that are more focused on the historical context of a document.
Students write responses to two questions:
"If medieval people were
reading it, what would they get out of it? What does it show us
about their environment?"
Students bring their written responses
to class, where the instructor organizes the students into small
groups in which they discuss their written responses. After
small-group discussions, the class as a whole discusses how to
refine a response into a thesis for an analytic essay about the
medieval text. |
"The
assignments taught me how people might actually react to a
situation. They also showed the difference or similarities of my
opinion to the person during the time we studied."--Student |
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3. TOWARD HISTORICAL ANALYSIS:
DEVELOPING THESIS STATEMENTS FROM PERSONAL RESPONSES |
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For homework, students read another
historical text and write their personal responses to it. From
their open-ended responses, students develop thesis statements
that begin to analyze the text. In class, students meet in small
groups, then as a whole class; they discuss how to refine and
organize their responses into an outline of an analytic essay.
The following excerpt illustrates
the development of a student’s personal response to Caroline
Walker’s Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the
High Middle Ages (1982) to thesis statement. After the student
completes her response, she rereads her writing to find a possible
thesis. The statement in brackets is identified by the student as
her thesis. |
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"I don’t know if I will ever stop
being amazed at the extent to which one’s idea of truth is
influenced by one’s command of language. I remember hearing
before that some sagacious philosopher once declared that there
is no thought without language or something to that extent.
[Assuming this is true, if thought can only be expressed in
words, and one’s ideas of truth can only be expressed in
thought, then it follows, at least to me, that my image of truth
and theirs too, is depended on our abilities to translate that
image into words that we can understand.] This isn’t as simple
as it sounds!
When I say "theirs," I
am referring to the "they" of Jesus as Mother: the
monks and mystics, the Christians of the 12th century. When I
try to comprehend the correlation of language to perception of
truth in Christianity, which ceaselessly speaks in unabashed
metaphor and oxymoron, simile and symbol, I get all caught up in
confusion and excitement at the same time. This is because
figurative language will compress a world of thought into a
word; poets know this, and apparently so did 12th century
Christians . . . ."
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4. PLANNING HISTORICAL ANALYSIS:
USING PERSONAL RESPONSE TO GENERATE ESSAY OUTLINES |
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Students read a third text. In
class, they discuss and write down the point of view of the
primary medieval text. For homework, they begin initial work on an
analytic essay by writing a personal response and thesis statement
and by outlining their essays. Students bring their writings to
class to work on in small groups. They read the essays to each
other, identify the theses, and discuss whether they understand
each other's essays. The class as a whole discusses their
responses which the teacher uses to lead into a discussion about
the text and its relevance in medieval history. |
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5. USING DIALECTIC RESPONSE TO
PROBE ANALYSIS |
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| In class,
students develop a paragraph analyzing a fourth text. At home,
they organize a personal response to their own analysis—a
dialectic response—as a strategy for probing their own thinking
about a text. Using the organizational techniques practiced in the
earlier assignments (developing a thesis statement and
constructing an essay outline), they draft an essay. Their essays
are discussed in small groups and more generally as a class to
focus further discussion about history. |
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6. INCORPORATING MEDIEVAL
PERSPECTIVES THROUGH POINT OF VIEW ANALYSIS |
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In class, students write briefly
the point of view of a fifth text. Explaining a
document’s/author’s point of view forces students to set aside
their own biases and to consider, possibly incorporate, other
perspectives. Their quickwrites serve as the basis for class
discussion. For homework, they write a short essay analyzing the
text and its point of view, then discuss their essays in small
groups and as a class at the next session. The following is an
excerpt from a student’s essay that analyzes The Song of
Roland and its point of view. |
"I
liked the challenge of trying to get the point of view of the
author of the Song of Roland as realistic as
possible."--Student |
". . . The Song of Roland has far
greater significance than is to be seen on first glance. It is
not only an enveloping story of a war that is based on a true
historical event, it is also a parable to reinforce Christianity
and the proper view of Christ.
On the surface, the Song of
Roland is a delightful tale of legendary Emperor Charlemagne and
of the French battles with the Saracen infidels, guts and gore
and hacking about, and a bit of treachery thrown in for effect.
But underneath this glossy veneer is the figure of Christ
portrayed in the character of Roland and the story of his valor
in the battle against Satan and his minions on earth."
The essay continues an allegorical analysis of the poem related to
the medieval social world. |
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7. PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: WRITING
THE ANALYTICAL REVIEW |
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The culminating assignment — the
analytical review of a different medieval primary text —
requires students to apply the strategies learned through the
semester in an historical analytical review. Once again, students
discuss their thinking about the text, the various perspectives
analyzed in their reviews, and their interpretations about the
significance of the primary text in its historical context. |
"I
don't really dislike anything about this assignment, maybe just
that the analysis is so involved that it needs to be thought out
carefully, and sometimes it is time-consuming and
difficult."--Student |
RELATED ACTIVITIES
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1. SMALL COLLABORATIVE-LEARNING
GROUPS |
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When students bring writing
assignments to class, the instructor organizes the students into
pairs or small groups. The students read each other's papers,
identify each other's thesis, explain the other's thesis to the
rest of the class, and explain how their own thesis relates to
their personal response.
The small group discussions always
contribute to class discussions. |
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PURPOSE: Collaborative
learning helps students focus on their topics and hone their
analytical skills. Other students' responses help students gauge
whether they are expressing themselves clearly. Discussing how
one's thesis is related to one's personal response illustrates to
students how personal response and bias must be recognized before
one can contribute to historical analysis. Small group discussions
also alleviate student fears about speaking in larger groups by
familiarizing the student with the rest of the students in class. |
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2. IN-CLASS WRITING EXERCISES |
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Every week, students write in class
a paragraph related to each of the assigned primary and secondary
texts. Many of the in-class writings deal with the issue of the
medieval author and audience, and what author, audience, and text
reveal about the culture and environment of that time. Students
discuss what they wrote in pairs, small and large groups. The
instructor collects all the paragraphs and returns them with
extensive comments. |
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The variants of these activities
are described by the instructor as:
1. Clustering — "designed to
get your thoughts concerning a topic on paper without worrying
about writing structure."
2. Personal Response Paragraph —
"allows you to express your immediate reaction to a reading,
with the aim of helping you discover what you think about that
subject."
3. Point of View Paragraph —
"forces you to try to explain the document's point of view by
setting aside your own."
4. Analysis Paragraph — "the
culmination of the previous exercises, developing the ability to
make concrete generalizations about a subject based on your
thoughts about the reading."
5. Review
paragraph—"analyzes what the main point of a text was and
how well it was communicated."
These writing exercises are
sometimes incorporated into the process of writing short papers. |
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PURPOSE: The in-class
paragraphs give students the opportunity to work on writing skills
and get feedback from the instructor on a weekly basis. The
instructor begins the semester by assigning several of
personal-response paragraphs, then points out the aspect of the
audience to whom the paragraphs are written. In-class writings
help students get started on their essays, build their writing
skills, and contribute to class discussion. Since they don't know
what day in-class paragraphs will be done, students are encouraged
to keep up with the reading. |
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Professor Jolly
comments on her class (excerpts from an interview):
Two things distinguish history
writing. One is primary sources. When we're reading primary
sources, we're talking about a very different "other"
that's the subject matter, and we're trying to understand that
thing. The second is that history as a discipline wants to
interpret and analyze, which is hard for undergraduates in
particular because they're used to having someone tell them
"this is what it all means" and "these are the
facts." History's not like that. It's "What do you
choose and how do you choose factors?, How are you going to
interpret and put it together?" That's a very hard skill to
learn. I think that it comes by a lot of writing, and that's why I
like to keep the course writing-intensive. That kind of analysis
of primary sources distinguishes the writing of history from other
writing.
Students themselves become
practicing historians by reading primary sources and interpreting
them, so they're constantly exploring what it is that a historian
does to reconstruct the past.
One objective reached through
writing is that it helps me find out how well they're doing; and I
can grade them so they'll know how well they're doing. It's also
part of the way they learn. Unless you write things down or say
something out loud, you don't really know what you're learning.
Writing is part of what's going on in the classroom. I have them
write in the class and use their writing to form the basis for
discussion. I've discovered in most places, particularly in
Hawai‘i, there is a reticence in the classroom, and if they're
allowed to write their ideas down first, they're a little more
comfortable in expressing what they think. They're learning in the
process of writing and they ARE able to express themselves better
orally. They become much more verbal over the semester.
I assume that no matter how good
they are or how poor they are at writing, they can all benefit
from starting at square one and breaking the writing task down to
its stages. Some of the graduate students initially resent that
because they can jump straight to analysis. Nonetheless, even I
benefit from stopping and asking myself "How did I get there?
By what four or five stages did I get from reading this thing to
analyzing it?" So I try to encourage even the "expert
writers" in the course to go along with this, because it will
always be a benefit to any writer to break the task down into its
component parts. So it's not that I'm going for the lowest common
denominator; it's just that I think writing is a hard process for
anybody, and it behooves us to stop and take a look at it .
Initially I always get a couple of students who start out saying,
"Well, I don't have anything to say, I don't have a thesis, I
don't have a personal response." Well, they do; and once they
find it, and they see that it can be useful, I've gotten some
excellent analysis from them. But it took the first three papers
to find that.
I want them to think on their own
and to do that I'm teaching them a writing strategy. |
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