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Issue Addressed The
department and CID team are attempting to address the first-year
experience, which has been deemed especially important in the
intellectual and professional development of the graduate student.
Currently the department has a proseminar to introduce first year
students to the department, broad historiographical debates, issues of
professionalization, and the future of the discipline. The concern is
that the first-year graduate students are not getting an early enough
introduction to focused historiographical debates and research.
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Issues The
arguments for the proposal derive in part from past Proseminar
evaluations. These indicated that the proseminar was a popular way for
students to meet each other, the faculty, and learn about
nuts-and-bolts issues of professionalization, library use, funding,
etc. Students seemed to feel its specific discussions of reading and
historiography were less successful because of the size of the course
and because the readings proposed by faculty who came in to visit were
not always addressed in the class discussion which followed.
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Change or Innovation The
department intends to address this issue by instituting a "two-term
first year sequence involving a team taught--or two-section
concurrent--historiography seminar followed by a research seminar--also
possibly team taught or broken into two concurrent sections. Running
concurrent with the historiography course (and possibly also research
seminar) would be a bi-weekly meeting, also required, that would
address some of the professionalization and meet-the-faculty functions
previously addressed sucessfully by the proseminar.
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Reasons for Approach The
CID team selected this approach in order to sustain excitement in the
discipline, as well as introduce students to the "hands on" practice of
history earlier.
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Intended Effect The
projected effects of this innovation include: richer and longer
first-year experience, which would foster esprit de corps among the
incoming class, better trained students able to do research earlier,
faster professionalization, and the production of a research proposal
that would be the basis for a research project in the second semester
of the first year sequence.
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Data or Evidence Faculty
and student feedback, progress through program, and students'
evaluations will demonstrate the success of this innovation.
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