Team-Based Collaborative Learning: What We Gain from the Lab Model

Many history undergraduates feel they are part of an unspoken hierarchy in which students in STEM appear to be first-class citizens in the student body because they have more clearly defined pathways to research opportunities and career success. Faculty in STEM fields have used labs to create collaborative research opportunities and allow students to become part of a scientific intellectual community. What can we, as historians, adopt from this model?

At Smith College, learning from and sharing with our colleagues in the sciences, we have found that such communities are no less important in the humanities. In 2020 we launched a series of Humanities and Social Sciences labs that allow faculty to work with multiple cohorts of students on projects that are in progress year-round. The labs allow students to engage in research on topics that hold particular interest and importance to them, to learn a variety of technical skills within their discipline, to teach those skills to their peers, and to develop a host of ‘soft skills’ necessary to manage and coordinate these larger projects.

This lab model has empowered students in CODEX, Smith College’s Medieval History lab, to craft a variety of outputs from network maps charting land ownership and military service in Southern, to databases of text and economies of knowledge in English universities, to an undergraduate journal focused on Medieval Studies. More importantly, it has fostered a community of students capable of training each other in the academic and technical skills needed to produce these projects.