The project is here
I thought it went pretty well, although there are some things I need to work on.
I had the students do a survey about it, and most of them found it helpful, and other than a few complaints about the reading load they seemed to have liked it and claim to have learned something from it.
I was reasonably happy with what they ended up doing. All of them read some stuff, and all of them learned something. Almost all of them were able to at least summarize an academic article.
In general, I need to do more to help them with synthesis and analysis. They mostly did fine with the chapter/article summaries, but had more problems with the group papers and final papers. The group papers tended to be summaries of the three articles/chapters they read rather than much of a synthesis or analysis. This was a common complaint from students about the oral presentations as well. They tended to do better when they were asked about things (usually by me) after their oral presentations. In general, they seem to have only started thinking beyond summarizing a reading when they got to writing their own papers.
-So maybe the solution is to meet with the groups after they have done their readings and before they do their group papers? Admittedly that may be a small window. Maybe meet with individuals after they have done their individual articles?
-They chose their topics from a large group of possibilities To some extent I lucked out on topics, since they all picked things that went together well so the group presentations seemed related. (Military, Police, Radical Right, Technology for the nation, Colonial Korea, Taisho Democracy, Great Depression, Religion and Drugs.) You may notice a bit a skew towards the “right” and the state here. Consumerism group did their best, and I did a sample presentation on café waitresses, but the cultural side of Taisho ended up a bit left out.
-I think the prompt for the final essay mattered a lot. That is the target, and they will fixate on it. McClain helped by giving me something from the text that was both broad and steered them a bit, but maybe I could do better.
-Oral presentations should be about 10 minutes each. That is about where they all ended up in any case.
-I had a set of “big picture” articles that I shoved to the end of the list, in hopes nobody would pick them as their topic. I had considered having everyone read them, but that would have been way too much reading. I did recommend them when a few students asked, and they seemed to help
In general I think the idea of trying to do a sort of distributed research project, i.e. setting up the scaffolding so that undergraduates can sort of do a joint research thing like grad students in a seminar is one that can work. Taisho is a topic that works well for this, since it fits right into the middle of the class, comes after a clearly defined period (we did a book on Meiji) and before the rise of ultra-militarism. I supposed the Nanjing Decade in Modern China, amd Han and the Outcome of Classical Chinese Philosophy in Early China could sort of work for this. Less sure on how to do it in the Early Modern China and Japan classes.
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