This week I did what I think was quite a successful lesson on class consciousness.  On the first day, I posed four questions to the students, and asked them to work in 4 groups to come up with answers using their minds and their textbooks. (This is related to Craig, et al, Chapter 35).

1.  What is the meaning of “proletarianization” of the common people?

2.  What were living conditions like in 19th century European cities?

3.  What were the ideas of Karl Marx?

4.  Describe the causes of the formation of trade unions and mass political parties.

On the second day, I showed the first 20 minutes or so of a movie titled “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (with John Gielgud, among others) and asked the class to identify class structures as depicted in that movie.

This made the study of class structure, and the development of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in Europe generally, and more specifically in England, both effective and interesting for the students.

I have just been grading some essay questions I assigned in my midterm exam this semester.  The questions I assigned are a new twist for me.  Rather than have students regurgitate information, I was inspired by the AP World History exam to include essays that ask students to process a set of primary sources, then answer a question with reference to them.  So far, this experiment has not been as successful as I had hoped, and I think I may have to abandon this particular type of question on my exams.  I think this for several reasons.  First, the AP Exam assumes that students have had at least a year of training in the context of history and in the process of putting even snippets of documents into that context; but in a first year World History class in college, I don’t have time to include both context and practice with primary sources in class.  Second, Because of the lack of historical context, students can only use the documents that they see – incomplete – and this results in large numbers of interpretations of documents which may in fact be reasonable given only those snippets, but are completely wrong when put in the larger context of the complete documents or of World History itself.  This, I think, encourages students to learn good writing habits, but leaves them in possession of incomplete and inaccurate historical knowledge.   Third, the time required to write this essay in class has been barely sufficient, and given the questionable gains mentioned in the first two points, above, I think that exam time could be better spent on a different kind of writing or content knowledge.  I’ll get to each of these three issues in future posts.