DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

The topic of my eportfolio is my course on Medieval Civilization (HIS 242).  This is a writing intensive course that covers over a thousand years of European history.   Within this overarching topic, I focus on the development of the institutions of Church and secular authority and their relationship with each other.  The focus of my eportfolio is to balance the writing elements of the course with the content.  There is so much content that, in order to achieve that balance, I need to put more emphasis on writing and find ways to cut down on content while still providing the students with the information they need to understand the historical development of the institutions under study.  In order to do that, I am focusing on both diversifying my writing assignments and highlighting particular events and relationships that illustrate change over time with regard to Church and secular authority.

 

My Medieval Civilization course is listed under ‘Historical Studies’ in the Distribution Areas.  It is an elective course, but history majors do take it.  Most of my students, at least this semester, are Upper Freshmen and Sophomores, but I do get a smattering of Junionrs and Seniors.  My course objectives are as follows:

 

  • To demonstrate how historians learn about cultures of the distant past.
  • To explore the ways in which human beings attempt to impose order onto chaos and how that process affects the development of society.
  • To explore the diversity and creativity of the people of the past in order to broaden our view of our own world and its possibilities.
  • To learn how to find meaning in the events, people, trends, and ideas we study.  What does it mean that a particular event occurred in the past?  How does it relate to other events? 
  • To understand the cultural assumptions and priorities of the people of the Middle Ages and how they are revealed in primary sources.
  • To focus on the relationship between church and secular authority and how its development over time affected the development of western culture.
  •  To develop the skills necessary to be able to express what you have learned in writing.
  •  To be able to use both primary and secondary sources to write a coherent, consistent paper that argues and supports a specific point of view on an event or issue from the Middle Ages using proper citations and form.

 

I use students’ writing to gauge how well they are understanding the difficult material in this course.  I also focus on writing as a means of organizing thoughts and exploring the meaning of the events and relationships of the past and how they affect the course of history.  The issue of meaning is important to me and writing is an important part of guiding students to look for meaning in what they are reading and learning.  Finally, I use writing as a way to encourage student to find how bits of information they are gathering from the past relate to each other (i.e. are attached to one of the many story lines that tell us who we are) as well as to similar bits of information from the present.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.