At a roundtable in Milwaukee (the day after the HU IG meeting), a few us of agreed to create a bibliography of good examples of SoTL work in the Humanities. Please add to this page a citation for a article or book (with a link to the full text, if possible) that offers a good model or significant insights, and please also provide a brief description and some comments about why you recommend that piece as humanities-based SoTL.
Chick, Nancy, Holly Hassel, and Aeron Haynie. "Pressing an Ear Against the Hive: Reading Literature for Complexity." Pedagogy 9:3 (Fall 2009), 399-422.
In this article, the authors describe strategies for encouraging students to engage with the complexity of literary texts, focusing on a single lesson, and identify several insights based on their analysis of students' responses to those strategies, including comments on what happens when students work in small groups, the value of making the complexity of texts literally visible, and the limitations of a single lesson in transforming students' learning . The essay does three things that make it an especially strong model for SoTL. First, the authors position their case in the context of an ongoing conversation among English professors about how to help students embrace rather than resist complexity. Second, they not only describe what they did and how students responded, they also show and analyze students' responses. This is part of what makes this article an example of SoTL, not just an example of literature professors writing about how they teach. Finally, they are explicit about using the methods of literary study to analyze student learning. As they write, "Consistent with our disciplinary values, then, our methodology of close reading, textual interpretation, and critique is also consistent with the goals of this project regarding reading complex texts for complex meanings." They thus demonstrate something that I keep saying: it is absolutely possible for humanities scholars to do research on student learning without having to become pseudo-social scientists. -- Sherry Linkon
Ciccone, Anthony A., Renee A. Meyers, and Stephanie Waldmann. "What's So Funny? Moving Students Toward Complex Thinking in a Course on Comedy and Laughter." Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 7 (2008), 308-322.
Abstract: This case study involves investigation of freshman students' abilities to engage in the pursuit and appreciation of complex thinking though their study of comedy and laughter in a Freshman Seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We offer an analysis of students' reflections on their confrontation with complexity as they attempt to formulate theories of these phenomena, and describe how this confrontation changes the students' understanding of both the subject matter and their learning process. In investigating these changes systematically, we demonstrate the value of a methodology of close reading supported by theories of learning (e.g. John Dewey's) for course design and evaluation, and seek to add to our growing understanding of the place of theory in the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Pat's comments: Process is the key here. Ciccone et al focus not only on the process of student learning, but (perhaps even more importantly at this early stage in the development of SOTL in the humanities) on their own process of finding analytical tools to make sense of the evidence. Working primarily with a corpus of students' reflections on their own learning, the authors develop a taxonomy of complex thinking, from "recognition of one level of meaning" to "starting to think like a humanist." It is also interesting that the authors find Dewey's 1934 framework the most useful for their work; it suggests that humanists may not be well served by more recent, more "social-sciency" education research. --Pat Michaelson
Hassel, Holly, and Joanne Giordano. "Transfer Institutions, Transfer of Knowledge: The Development of Rhetorical Adaptability and Underprepared Writers." Teaching English in the Two-Year College (2009): 24-40.Abstract: “This essay describes the results of a scholarship of teaching and learning project examining the transition of underprepared first-year writers at an open admission institution as they struggled to translate their first-semester instruction into second-semester success.” Nancy's analysis: I like this article as an example of humanities-based SoTL, even though it comes out of composition, which is often something less like the humanities and more like the social sciences. Part of its humanities influence is from Hassel, who is also a literary scholar and has heard me talk often about using our disciplinary approaches to research, evidence, and knowledge-construction. (She was also a co-author on the article above.) While Hassel and Giordano are explicit about their disciplinary approaches to their research (pages 26-28), I selected this essay for how they handle their students and the students' evidence of learning (or mislearning) through these careful case studies (pages 29-35). In these sections, Hassel and Giordano select specific passages from the student texts--without worrying about achieving a "large N," demonstrating number patterns, and showing charts/graphs--and closely read them for their notion of "rhetorical adaptability," dwelling on the students' language and syntax as meaningful. They also draw significant and useful conclusions from the students' work (36) without claiming pure generalizability (28). --Nancy Chick
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Pace, David. "Assessment in History: The Case for 'Decoding' the Discipline." JSoTL 11.3 (2011): 107-119.
Abstract: In this reflective essay, Pace identifies the difficulty in coming to consensus about assessment in a humanities discipline like history. He argues that rather than mimicking social science methodologies, historians should consider how to decode their disciplinary skills and attitudes for novices. He uses a freshman seminar as an example and describes the different class assignments designed to foster particular skills. He describes how he assessed their disciplinary skills but also questions the meaning of those assessments.
Karen's analysis: I like this article in part because it is a reflective essay. It recognizes the difficulty of reducing the complexities of assessment to a single measure. Although I am not a historian, this article provided me with a lot to think about in terms of my own discipline.
--Karen Manarin