Student Learning in World History Class: A Qualitative Exploration

I wrote one of the first 2-week teaching modules for the History for the 21^st Century project, which examined the meaning of colonialism and decolonization in world history, and asking students to assess the status of the process of decolonization in our world today. After peer review and having it tested in other faculty’s classes, I taught the revised version and one other teaching module that I had no previous experience with in Spring 2023. I planned to use both teaching modules in my world history survey in Spring 2023. You can imagine my horror when my department chair asked me to teach this course online, asynchronous. But in the event, the course proved to be the perfect, adversarial testing ground to take these modules through their paces. In this discussion, I talk about the ways diverse students at a Hispanic-serving public institution, mostly non-majors, managed to turn readings, videos, and activities into a learning experience and still provide feedback to improve the modules. I will discuss the myriad of ‘real-world’, technical, and classroom challenges that fed into this effort, the results, and what they mean for collaborative, faculty-led, student-centered projects like History for the 21^st Century. I will then introduce three students who took that class, and ask them to reflect for no more than 5 minutes each on their experiences learning these lessons, including what elements they found the most meaningful to them, what elements they found the most challenging or confusing, and what final assignment they ended up writing, and what they learned from the process. Following this will be a conversation with students about learning in introductory world history classes.