Evaluating the Three-Assignment Sequence

In designing this element of the course, I focused on the idea that incremental, recursive learning would yield deeper understanding of both the content we were exploring and the methods involved in constructing interdisciplinary analysis. The single text analysis, text web, and reading-texts-through-history papers moved students from the familiar and fairly straightforward activity of analyzing a single written text to working with multiple kinds of texts and looking for connections among texts and then to the more complex task of connecting those texts with historical trends and issues. This created a layering effect, with increasing complexity and a self-conscious movement toward integration. The results are very encouraging. Students' work and their self-reports on their learning both show that the assignment sequence led to greater skill and confidence about interdisciplinary analysis.

Students' work demonstrated a growing level of comfort with using multiple resources and making connections between texts and history. I focused my assessment on the third paper in the sequence, an assignment called "reading texts through history," which asked students to identify major historical issues during the period when their texts were created and to explore how history and texts illuminated each other. A few students submitted papers that essentially summarized major historical issues that emerged during the period when their texts were created, with brief mentions of the texts as illustrative details. 

For example, Erin's essay focused on a historical theme, stopping in a few places to note how a poem and a photograph illustrated her theme. Most made more substantive uses of the texts, however, and identified stronger connections between texts and history. In the best cases, students explicitly noted how the texts helped them gain insight to the historical trends and their growing knowledge of history clarified the themes reflected in the texts. Allison's essay focused on issues of class and race. She linked employment and civil rights trends with changes in technology. She compared two photographs of women doing laundry, a white woman and a black woman, drawing on her research on employment and civil rights trends to suggest the story behind each photo. Yet she also noted how what she saw in the photos and the story told in Alice Childress's monologue, "In the Laundry Room," helped her understand more deeply the feelings of individuals who experienced those social changes. In between these extremes were a number of papers that offered more implied connections or that made the link in one direction but not the other. For example, Athena clearly explained how her texts - two photographs and a poem - illustrated economic and social stratification trends of the 1930s and the 1990s, but she did not use the texts as sources for deeper understanding of history. 

While the papers were generally strong, students' approaches to interdisciplinary analysis varied widely. This is to be expected, since interdisciplinarity lends itself to such flexibility and multiplicity. This variety poses a challenge for assessment, but it's clear that all of the students identified at least some connection between history and texts, and the majority made specific and substantive links. 

Students' reflections on the assignment sequence add to my sense that it accomplished its goals. Immediately after completing the sequence, students remained unsure of their ability to use interdisciplinary approaches. The midterm assessment survey showed that students felt comfortable with the task of analyzing texts but did not yet feel confident about their ability to identify or explain connections among texts or between texts and history. The most often cited strength that students saw in their own work (9 students out of 27) was text analysis, and two others cited their use of the 5-part rubric. Given that most of the students were English majors, this would be expected. However, several students specifically commented on their ability to analyze visual texts. Only four students cited making connections as a strength, however, while 12 out of 27 indicated that they had struggled to make connections. Some wrote that they found themselves stretching to identify connections, while others felt that the connections were simply not clear enough. As Kate explained, "Trying to connect texts is hard. There are more connections the more you look at the texts and they can become confusing." Interestingly, three students who said they had difficulty making connections also commented that they felt there were too many connections. Allyson explained it this way: "It was difficult at times to find a conversation between two texts that seem so different on the surface. In addition, so many things overlap - it seems muddy at times." Part of the difficulty, it seems, lay not in finding the links but in articulating them, as suggested by the fact that the second most common response to the question about difficulty and confusion focused on the challenge of articulating the student's ideas in the papers. As Jennifer wrote, "I felt that I had all this information swimming in my head and it was hard to get down on paper in a coherent manner. In most cases, I could see the connections, but had a hard time verbalizing it." 

Such difficulties are to be expected, I think. Students are engaging in unfamiliar activities, and so they are at once conscious of their own uncertainty and unable to judge the quality of their own work. At this point in the term, too, students had not yet had opportunities to engage in further integration work. Over time, however, it appears that they became more confident, perhaps because they were able to look back and see their own progress more clearly and because they found that they could apply the ideas learned in this sequence to later assignments. By the end of the term, nine students out of 22 who completed an open-ended final day reflection on their learning commented specifically about how the three-assignment sequence facilitated their understanding of interdisciplinarity. As Nicole wrote, "The projects incorporated what we were reading and our prior knowledge of our environment. The projects were at times difficult and confusing. But when everything came together, it was like a light bulb went on! Oh! Now I get it! The projects built on one another and we learned something new from each project. . . . And now, what I like most about this course was our interdisciplinary assignment(s)." Justin's description suggests that he clearly recognized the developmental aspect of the sequence and his sense that despite his uncertainty at the time, in retrospect the sequence worked well: "Initially I wondered what the various assignments had to do with each other. It was like laying the foundations for a house. You have to start slow to begin with, you don't start this class with a great deal of knowledge as to what work is. Although still confused into the third assignment, I had an idea of where I was going. . . . Now, it all makes sense, generally. There was a 'method to the madness'!" For Joe, not only did the assignment sequence clarify his understanding of the connections between texts and history, it also strengthened his understanding of the concept of work: "At first, I really felt work, and its relation to society was the most important thing I learned. However, after I learned how to do the connect texts project, in which we created a graphic, this really showed me what the course was about. I really understood how objects and texts all connected to the other, and symbolized the hard work that my family has performed."

Interviews with Athena and Justin at the end of the term reinforced this. Both expressed frustration with the assignment sequence, explaining that the assignments asked them to complete projects that were unfamiliar and challenging. Justin noted especially the difficulty of trying to bring together "objects that might on the surface seem unrelated . . . , and then to put them in a historical context." For Athena, the primary challenge was writing. As an English major, she had always counted on writing to be her strong point, but writing interdisciplinary papers proved difficult. Yet despite these frustrations, both credited the incremental nature of the assignments with helping them learn and develop confidence. As Athena explained, "The step-by-step process, I think, is the important part. . . . to understand interdisciplinarity you really need to take it step by step and make sure everything really laid out on the table." Justin described his first response to the assignments as confusion: "What in the heck do these have to do with one another?" But on reflection, he said, "I kind of laugh at that, because I see now that it was a perfect way to get into the whole interdisciplinary field." The initial assignment was easy, he explained, because English majors write text analyses all the time, but the next two steps in the sequence "really cemented" the concept of interdisciplinarity for him.