Detailed Instructions About Session Leading

Leading a Discussion

There is an enormous volume of materials pertinent to our work in this class. I have assigned readings for a given week that I expect will broaden our understanding, providing more context, or perhaps alternative critical views.

But part of the point of a seminar is that we generate understanding through a robust discussion. In which case, you do not necessarily want me to be providing an authoritative read on everything. My job is to set the table, as it were.

In which case, everyone will have the opportunity to study some of the readings in greater depth. We will work out who will take responsibility for what early on in the term. Some readings are longer, denser, and more complex; some are shorter and meant for a more general audience. We will try to balance the assignment of the readings so that the time and labour is roughly equitable.

What to do

With weeks where there are readings, there will be designated students to take us through them. When it is your turn, use the guidance under Reading Like A Predator to direct your attention. Use this to build up your general summary of a piece. Your job will be to contextualize the main ideas in the reading given the discussions we have already had up to this point. What does the reading offer us that is new? What is troubling? What elements seem to require a greater examination?

Everyone will have already read the piece, so you shouldn’t need to go into overly deep detail for your summary. Everyone will have highlighted the piece using Hypothesis or otherwise made their own notes; you can pay attention to these to help you direct attention to the parts of a piece that others have been avoiding, for instance. You can also, as you develop your thoughts, add more annotations of your own, of course. The reading group is here.

Your job is to draw connections for us to other things you have read/experienced (whether in this class or elsewhere) to highlight the critical elements in your view. Your job is to tell us the questions that occurred to you, the things that didn’t make sense to you, the things you think we need to explore as a group. Never say, ‘What do you guys think?’ Rather, tie the critical elements expressly to the doing of history. For instance: “When person X discusses the problem of ‘hallucination’, how does this challenge the authority of a historian? Where are the sources of authority in this context?”.

I don’t normally share materials from the pedagogy world, but it’s worth taking a moment here to look at this taxonomy of questions that one might ask:

Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching

Notice that the bottom of this pyramid is the recollection of basic facts and concepts. The first year of your university training probably involved this kind of work. Your second year probably involved a lot of the ‘understanding’ level, while your third probably (ought to have) involved the application or analysis levels. As we go through the readings, I want you to try to generate questions or observations for us that address the ‘apply’, ‘analyze’, or ‘evaluate’ levels. (By the end of this course, you’ll be working on hands-on exercises or project development that will approach the ‘evaluate’ and ‘create’ levels.)

I do not want ‘opinions’ or ‘criticism’ in the sense of making negative comments. I am looking for you to read like a predator, and engage with the substance of a piece.

You should aim to hold the spotlight on your reading for 20 to 25 minutes or so.

You can collaborate with other students in a given week to do joint session leading, so long as the work is equitably distributed (that is to say, appropriately. ‘Equitably’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘the same sized chunk’.) You can make a quick presentation or slide deck if that helps you, but you are not obliged to do that.

Photo by Matteo Vistocco on Unsplash