Non-Traditional Assignments in Military History Courses
This month’s feature in our Military History and Pedagogy series consists of two essays written by Sarah Myers (Messiah University) and James Sandy (University of Texas at Arlington), who reflect on the ways non-traditional assignments can enhance a military history course.
Not only are such assignments a great way to spark interest in history among students taking a mandatory survey course, as Sandy demonstrates, un-essays can also be an opportunity to introduce undergraduates to digital and public history. Myers uses podcasts and digital museum exhibits—which fit well in both in-person and online classes—to encourage students to develop career-oriented skills. Meanwhile, Sandy relies on social media posts created by students to build connections between his classes and create a vibrant online learning community. Their essays will certainly spark inspiration for your next course and, if you wish to adopt some of their ideas, provide a blueprint.
Stretching the Field: Using Social Media & the Un-Essay in the American Military History Survey
by James Sandy
On college campuses across the United States, courses in Military History continue to enjoy robust enrollments, drawing students from a wide variety of backgrounds and interests. Some of these students have a family history of military service. Others are drawn to the history of warfare and its consequences. And others, of course, are simply filling general humanities course requirements for their degrees. For a variety of reasons, courses in Military History are often the most diversely enrolled courses a department offers, and thus raise a unique set of challenges for those standing at the lectern. Professors must maintain the principles of the historical classroom while making sure to include and reach students coming from outside disciplines.
I took over my university’s single-semester US Military History course in 2019. History 3337: Military History of the United States is offered each Fall, largely because it is a commissioning requirement for ROTC cadets. The course also is a mainstay for students pursuing a minor in Military History, and a regularly offered and “easy” introduction to the discipline of history for students completely outside the department. These three groups—history majors & minors, ROTC cadets, and non-historians—combine in creating one of the most diverse classroom audiences outside the general U.S. History surveys. In my efforts to crack this course open and reach these diverse groups while building an effective and inclusive experience, I installed two new assignments.
Social Media Assignment
In a shameless plug, I designed this assignment to benefit my newly created professional Instagram page (@DrSandyTravelsThroughTime), which I use to post informative material, host impromptu exam/assignment reviews, and generally interact with my large US History survey courses. After creating a series of well researched posts connected to that class, I decided that creating such posts could be a useful exercise for my upper-level students.
The assignment boiled down to a short research paper with a cap at 350 words. Students were to select an individual, moment, or concept from that week’s material (For example: American Revolution) and prepare a social media post built upon a solid base of research. Students also had to provide a series of properly sourced and cited photos or videos to accompany their caption.
The goal of their post was three-fold: First, the post had to introduce and provide a brief summation of their topic. Second, the post had to detail the result of their chosen topic’s actions/events. Finally, the post needed to summarize the significance of their choice. Essentially: Why should we care? All in 350 words or less.
The results were interesting, to say the least. The students were wary at first, initially viewing it as a simple assignment that didn’t require much of them. Yet as the semester went along, I received a series of fascinating, eye-catching, and all together unexpectedly good submissions. While I had a fair share of students who focused on well-worn topics such as the Battle of Yorktown and George C. Marshall, most of my students reached past the popular to define unique and cutting-edge subjects in the field. I had students focus on minority representation in the Vietnam War, on gender issues affecting women serving in World War II, and on the power of U.S.C.T. (United States Colored Troops) soldiers and their fight during the Civil War. All in an assignment that forced them to focus on their writing skills. Economy of words is paramount when you only have 350 to work with.
I created a series out of the posts on my Instagram account, giving credit to the students if they gave their consent. This material was then available to the more than 500 followers, mainly 1st year undergrads, and served to both educate and entice them to take upper-level history courses. The assignment was a rousing success and allowed the class to dig into a wider swathe of materials and stories, work on their writing skills in a fresh way, and present their work in a more culturally relevant manner to their undergraduate peers. I have continued to use the assignment in every semester since.
The Un-Essay
In lieu of a final exam in my U.S. Military History course, I elected to take a new spin on the traditional research paper assignment: the Un-Essay. Hardly an original idea on my part, the Un-Essay has been making inroads into higher learning for nearly a decade.[1] The concept is simple: take the research elements of a traditional paper and change the shape and manner of its final delivery. I assigned students to choose some element of American Military History and craft a well-researched and argumentative piece. The final form is up to the student, so long as the final project is built upon a solid base of sources and speaks to some element of the course and its subject matter.
This was another first for me in the Fall of 2019, but proved another success. While more than a few students elected to write traditional research papers, most of the class reached outside the norm and presented some truly unique work. I had several students team up and create narrative podcasts and video presentations, while the more artistically-inclined put together dioramas and art pieces. Several students created board games and trading cards. I still have an impressively complex COIN board game built around winning the “Hearts & Minds” of Afghanistan in my office. I heard it was a major hit at the Veterans Affairs office the student worked with.
Another outstanding student created a series of letters between a Confederate soldier and his wife during the 1864 Overland Campaign. The fictitious Jebediah Houston writes about the allure of General Robert E Lee’s command while struggling with the ideological underpinnings of the Confederacy itself. The student even tempered the paper and envelopes to make them appear aged. Each of these projects was built on real sources and a rigorous research process.
While there were obvious examples of students trying to mail it in, those cases were, well, obvious. Each student or team of students was required to meet with me in advance to vet their idea; I made sure they had defined an appropriate topic, offered constructive feedback on narrowing and focusing their scope, and suggested source materials. Along the way I required several “scaffolding” assignments to measure their progress: an abstract, annotated bibliography, and personal reflections. All in all, the students were more enthusiastic about these projects than about yet another research paper, especially when they presented them to the class and everyone got to see the fruits of their labors, ask questions, and offer comments.
Alongside and in addition to more traditional assessments these assignments work well in a U.S. Military History Survey that attracts a diverse array of students and majors. Not only did they allow students to research and write in new ways, they also introduced the class to a deeper and more diverse array of materials than traditional assessments ever could. As military history courses like these entice more and more students, I think it is essential that professors push the envelope in the way we introduce new material, assess our students’ understanding, and ultimately foster interest in the discipline.
[1] Many sources point to Daniel Paul O’ Donnell, English professor at the University of Lethbridge, as one of the early pioneers of the Un-Essay concept and its employment in the college classroom. More here: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Teaching/the-unessay . For further discussions on the Un-Essay concept, see: Mader, Jodie. “The Unessay Experiment: Moving Beyond the Traditional Paper.” Faculty Focus. July 22, 2020. https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/course-design-ideas/the-unessay-experiment-moving-beyond-the-traditional-paper/ and Jones, Christopher. “Assigning the Unessay in the U.S. Survey” The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History. June 26, 2018. https://earlyamericanists.com/2018/06/26/assigning-the-unessay-in-the-u-s-survey/
Teaching Military History through the Unessay: Podcasts and Digital Museum Exhibits
by Sarah Myers
As a professor of military history and public history, I incorporate creative, semester-long projects instead of a final paper in many of my upper-level university courses. These “unessays” are practical, hands-on, and/or career-oriented, and they help students build skills for their resumes and find new ways of presenting historical analysis. Students find these projects engaging and worth investing their time, which matters because unessays often require more time and effort than the traditional research paper.
Fortunately, given how many of us moved to online or hybrid teaching in recent semesters, these projects work for in-person and remote students. My students have produced podcast episodes and digital museum exhibits, although this is just a starting place for the range of assignments possible. Descriptions of these projects are available in my syllabi. This article will outline the basic structure of assignments that can be adapted to your courses, including student preparation, rubrics for grading, assessment, and general advice.
Since students often have little experience with unessay assignments, I prepare them by offering general tips for the medium they will be creating, along with software/program advice. For example, when designing digital projects, I give students tutorials on utilizing free programs available online. For podcast episodes, my students utilized Audacity and for digital museum exhibits, Wix. There are numerous YouTube tutorials for both Audacity and Wix, and many institutions have IT support staff who can provide tutorials or digital programs to support such programs. Students need only limited equipment for podcasts: headphones, a cell phone, and a laptop. (Often, IT Departments or Libraries have laptops for students to borrow if needed.) To prepare students for podcast production, I provided tips for both production and content: tips on recording techniques to keep background noise minimal and maintain quality audio, as well as advice for interviewing guests. For the digital museum exhibit, I discussed the basics of web design, including utilizing consistent layout, color scheme, and font. I provided examples of websites created by students at other universities that were available online, such as https://revolution.berkeley.edu/ and https://lmgrady.wixsite.com/governmentoractivist.
Scaffolding assignments kept students on track throughout the semester and made it much more likely students would produce high-quality projects. For each type of project, I encouraged students to reflect on the construction of the histories they were telling and how they could make them accessible to the general public, and required them to turn in the assignments in stages: a Topic Proposal and Annotated Bibliography, Working Thesis + Outline of Podcast Script/Museum Exhibit, Social Media Post (to promote their project), a Rough Draft, and a Final Draft. Students had the option of working individually or in a group of 2-3 classmates. If they selected the latter, there were additional requirements for the project, including more sources and higher word count or longer episode length. Another method to motivate students to invest in the assignment was requiring a peer review of rough drafts.
Rubrics I created for the podcast episode and digital museum exhibit offered clear guidelines for the project’s parameters while also granting students creative liberties.[1] Sample rubrics assess thesis, narration, design (professional appearance/sound), organization, sources, and grammar.
The unessay is valuable because it allows students to exercise creativity while finding new ways of analyzing, as historians, beyond the traditional research paper. Their projects give them digital skills which are transferrable to future careers, and students can save their projects in professional portfolios. For example, to preserve their digital museum exhibits, students recorded a tour of their site on Zoom. In assessment, students frequently commended the “challenging” nature of the project and said that they appreciated learning a new set of skills. Many found the unessay to be “a fun and creative alternative to a paper” and a refreshing “change of pace” from final paper assignments. Others argued that it was more “time-consuming” and that they preferred to produce research papers.
I want to end with some advice for those considering incorporating the unessay into your courses—advice based on my experiences. It is essential to allow plenty of time at the beginning of the semester for students to brainstorm ideas and to carve out time at the end of one class period for students to discuss their ideas with others in the course. It is imperative that each student finds a topic they are excited about so that they are willing to invest their time. In the past I suggested students listen to different types of podcasts for the podcast project, but in the future, I will require them to listen to specific episodes and to analyze interview and format styles. Also, while I offered students open-source resources to find sound effects and musical scores, some students incorporated excerpts of copyrighted music that required editing later. One of the best resources for copyright-safe music and sound effects is YouTube’s Audio Library, which filters searches by mood or genre. In my classes, students “borrowed” artifacts from digital archives to use in their digital museum exhibits, but if you want to incorporate community engagement, students could take pictures of artifacts at local institutions. Finally, I recommend integrating accessibility into these projects – requiring transcripts for podcast episodes and written descriptions of images in digital museum exhibits.
Although at first I hesitated to assign an unessay because of the additional time commitment it demands, I discovered how much I enjoyed working with the students on these projects, and I now plan to incorporate unessays in my future public history courses.
[1] For these rubrics, I drew inspiration from military historians Drs. Amy Rutenberg and Amber Batura who also have experiences with the unessay project assignment.