Course Evolution
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My teaching philosophy has shifted away from traditional lecture/discussion formatting. I want to move towards more active learning strategies focusing on contextualization and problem-setting on Mondays, Skills workshops/interactive labs on Wednesdays, and discussion sessions on Fridays.
Students prompt an LLM to produce a scholarly bibliography on their research paper topic, then systematically verify and evaluate each entry. The idea is that this would teach bibliographic literacy, source evaluation, and critical engagement with AI--and it does so in direct service of a primary-source-grounded research project developed over the course of the semester.
These diverse exercises (fabricated source, AI translation and interpretation, competing narratives, AI-as-historical-actor simulation, and its failure) introduce AI literacy and skills into a notoriously difficult course. It builds on the skills we want our History majors to obtain before reaching the capstone project.
The French Revolution and Napoleon upper-division survey course explores the most pivotal and formative periods in European (and perhaps World) history through a variety of perspectives and ways of practicing history.
This was my first attempt at teaching this course. I was excited to put into practice so much of what I learned during my Ph.D. program. It was the first time the course had been taught at VMI in at least a decade.