Tuned and Flipped: New Approaches to the US History Survey

How can History be tuned when Department offerings serve the general education program? 

That’s the question the history faculty at Millersville University is grappling with under the twin pressures of falling enrollments and a newly implemented strategic plan trumpeting career-ready skills.  With only two classes reserved specifically for our majors, History courses at Millersville instead meet the broad University-mandated distribution, writing, cultural diversity, and multi-disciplinary perspective credits required for graduation.  Our students thus come into nearly all classes having little familiarity with the material and even less experience with the tools of the discipline.

Adding to the challenge of teaching an inexperienced gen ed population is the anomalous nature of our gateway class, the introductory U.S. survey.  With enrollments of up to 65 students per section and delivering all of American history in a single semester, coverage and assessment for this class pose formidable challenges to faculty.

Eager to teach both skills and content, however, and using the Tuning Project’s Discipline Core as a guide, I have banished the multiple-choice exam from my survey classes to make room for the doing of history, emphasizing in particular the one important skill not articulated in that Core:  writing.

I am on both the AHA History Tuning project and my own university’s Assessment and Outcomes Committee, and I therefore sit at the intersection of academics and measurable results.  Informed by both, this paper presents the results of my curricular changes.