Teaching Intellectual Heritage: Journeys Through Footnotes

As undergraduate students learn the essential skills of historical research, they also learn that knowledge has a genealogy. Even outside of the dedicated historiographic seminar, there are still opportunities to instruct students on how knowledge emerges, shifts, and solidifies over time. Drawing on pedagogical interventions based on project-based learning and low-stakes assessment, this analysis focuses on a unit called “intellectual heritage” within a writing-intensive seminar. Students use footnotes from present-day research articles to trace knowledge backwards and forwards. In so doing, they learn critical reading techniques and take a practical approach to implementing the essential skills of historical thinking: context, change over time, causality, contingency, and complexity. Students particularly connect to the independence of this project through individual research trajectories with an opportunity to share results with their peers and compare the divergent paths through which their footnotes journey takes them. Though many of the students who participate in this activity are not historians by major, they learn to think like historians in a way that they can then apply in other contexts, especially in critical media literacy.