Hampden-Sydney College’s experiential learning program, Compass, boasts a roster of unique and engaging course offerings. This fall, two Compass history courses brought the subject to life through innovative experiential learning approaches.
Pandemic-necessitated scheduling changes this fall divided the academic calendar into two blocks, one ten-week and one four-week block. And given the shortened nature of this fall’s Introduction to Public History course, HIST 285, Elliott Professor of History Caroline Emmons likened it to speed dating. Students explored the five main sub-fields that make up public history—oral history, archaeology, historic preservation, archives, and museum exhibition and design—and engaged with each of these disciplines through unique experiential learning activities. Class members explored the old College campus using ground-penetrating radar with archaeologist Charles Pierson, engaged with primary source material in the archives with Archival and Digital Projects Librarian Sarah Almond, and designed and presented a museum-style display now exhibited in the Pannill Center for Rhetoric and Communication.
“Hampden-Sydney students are in the middle of a giant laboratory for public history work,” Emmons says. “We use our historic campus and surrounding region as a way to both indulge the students’ love of history and teach practical skills.”
And in an increasingly reflective time in our country’s history, those practical skills appropriately include learning how to study and communicate about controversial topics. “Public history is the interpretation of history for a public, not an academic, audience,” Emmons explains. “So it requires teaching students to consider the diverse stakeholders who will be interacting with the information and their unique experiences and expectations. In doing this, we are training them to converse effectively about controversial topics, which has never been more important.”
For the final project of the course, students gained firsthand experience navigating historical complexity as they created a museum-style exhibit detailing the history of the plaque that marked the location of the now fallen “Constitution Oak,” an oak tree that was planted to commemorate the service of Richard McIlwaine, H-SC’s 11th president, as a delegate to the controversial Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1902, which enacted Jim Crow policies and resulted in widespread voter disenfranchisement for people of color.
“One of the goals of Compass is to encourage students to engage in a reflective practice across all disciplines to ask them not only to perform a set of academic tasks but also to dig a little deeper by thinking about the broader context of what they are studying,” Emmons says. “Students are learning how to tell stories about themselves and their communities and to do it not only honestly and rigorously but also with empathy and civility.”
One of the goals of Compass is to encourage students to engage in a reflective practice across all disciplines to ask them not only to perform a set of academic tasks but also to dig a little deeper by thinking about the broader context of what they are studying. Students are learning how to tell stories about themselves and their communities and to do it not only honestly and rigorously but also with empathy and civility.
Dr. Caroline Emmons, Elliott Professor of History
As Emmons’ students dove into history on the Hill, Elliott Associate Professor of History Eric Dinmore took his Global Cultures 103 class to the far corners of the world. Global Cultures courses have students explore three world regions through each region’s use of various cultural artifacts such as art, music, religion, or, in this case, epics.
“Epics are a great point of entry to understanding the cultures we’re comparing in class,” Dinmore says. “I wanted students to gain an appreciation for how epics, which were originally an oral tradition, were a major part of how human beings made sense of their world in pre-modern global history.”
So students became storytellers as they memorized and performed excerpts of tales from East Asia, South America, and West Africa. “When students think about their experience reading the story versus telling the story, they gain this new dimension of understanding of how these texts were originally performative,” Dinmore explains. “There’s a lot of mental acuity required to make these stories worthwhile to listen to.”
As epics were passed down through civilizations, a game of telephone ensued, and the epic was modified, enhanced, simplified, or customized by the storyteller. “There was a tension because I wanted their recitation to adhere to the original text, but I also wanted them to make it their own,” Dinmore says.
Students took on this challenge through individual showmanship, using props or different voices for characters. “Students were able to gain an appreciation for the epic form across various societies as well as the different styles of storytelling within the culture,” Dinmore remarks. “But they also considered what the tradeoff might have been when the epic was finally written down and that element of customization was lost.”
And in their final recitation, ancient met modern as students performed centuries-old tales from around the world using everyone’s favorite contemporary technology: Zoom. To accommodate quarantined students, Dinmore utilized the video conferencing platform with surprisingly poetic results, noting that “it ended up being a fascinating intersection of where we are in 2020 where students were telling medieval-age stories from around the world while on one campus and via the internet.”
Adds Dinmore, “Compass helps students combine book and active learning and then synthesize both through reflection to create a greater appreciation for any given topic.” And in these and other Compass courses that took place in the fall’s first academic block, H-SC faculty ensured that students maximized their ten weeks through impactful and engaging experiential learning.
Pandemic-necessitated scheduling changes this fall divided the academic calendar into two blocks, one ten-week and one four-week block. And given the shortened nature of this fall’s Introduction to Public History course, HIST 285, Elliott Professor of History Caroline Emmons likened it to speed dating. Students explored the five main sub-fields that make up public history—oral history, archaeology, historic preservation, archives, and museum exhibition and design—and engaged with each of these disciplines through unique experiential learning activities. Class members explored the old College campus using ground-penetrating radar with archaeologist Charles Pierson, engaged with primary source material in the archives with Archival and Digital Projects Librarian Sarah Almond, and designed and presented a museum-style display now exhibited in the Pannill Center for Rhetoric and Communication.
“Epics are a great point of entry to understanding the cultures we’re comparing in class,” Dinmore says. “I wanted students to gain an appreciation for how epics, which were originally an oral tradition, were a major part of how human beings made sense of their world in pre-modern global history.”