Course Evolution
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I spent too much time on the first half of the course, and some of the material felt repetitive. In the future, I will place more weight on the second half of the semester. I want to include more discussion of the Spanish Civil War, for example.
AI is not going away, and if used properly, it opens up new avenues of research previously unthinkable. However, there are pitfalls to using AI. I use a scaffolded approach to research as it eases some of the stress of writing a research paper for young researchers. At each stage, students must submit an AI Audit Entry. Each audit asks students to do four things: evaluate what they asked for and received, explore where AI was useful and where it fell short, and identify where they revised or departed from the AI output. The goal is to build AI literacy, but in a way that rewards critical thinking and analysis. Essentially, I am asking them to treat AI as a source, much like they would a letter or newspaper article.
I want to explore how we can diversify my traditional Friday discussion sessions by pairing a reading assignment with a critique of AI-generated output on the same topic. I see this as a useful way to show how AI reliably flattens the historiography, privileges simple explanations to complex problems, and generally lacks nuance.
Europe: 1919-1939 explores two of the most consequential decades in Modern European history examining European attempts to respond to the twin traumas of World War I and the Russian Revolution.
This was my first attempt at teaching an upper-division course having previously only taught the World and U.S. Survey courses. I was excited about the challenge and the opportunity to work with primarily History and International Studies majors.