by Jared Asser, History

History is an interpretive discipline, and this is its strength. Except in the most banal of cases, there is no single “right” answer to any historical problem, and two historians can approach the same documents and leave with different a understanding of their significance. A historian’s interpretation is influenced by their methods and techniques of analysis, of course, but even these are driven by their interests and a broader intellectual agenda. Getting undergraduate history students to accept, much less embrace, the uncertainty of the past and of see themselves as capable of arguing over the past is one of the critical difficulties in undergraduate history education. While this can be an issue of students not seeing themselves as an authority, it can also be a crisis of vision. Writing Intensive Pedagogy can help with the latter.

The format of undergraduate writing is fixed and often not up to students: most courses rely on a 10-12 page research paper that uses some mixture of primary and secondary sources. This stock genre of writing seems to offer little in the way of utility: while such an assignment requires the basics of research and argumentation, there isn’t much else at play here (I certainly struggled with connecting my undergrad education to the ‘real world’). But this can also be a problem, not of the assignment itself, but with vision.

Vision operates at two levels. At the most abstract level it is how students use questions derived from their existing worldview to ask questions about the past. More concretely, it allows for a unique way into the sources, is helpful for going from topic to question, to argument, and can provide method and structural aid. But most importantly vision guides how students can find meaning from the undergrad research paper: topic and course choice for instance are connected to a students’ broader interest whether they are conscious of it or not and in a perfect world, the conclusions that students arrive at will challenge the worldview that drove their research in the first place.

WIP pedagogy goes hand in hand with cultivating students’ vision. In fact, there may be a reciprocal relationship between the two. Writers such as Gottschalk & Hjorshoj and Mary Lynn Rampolla have argued that the most important revisions actually take place before the completion of a rough draft. As such, we need strategies to prevent the “concrete” of a rough draft from “setting” into an unchangeable final draft. Earlier in the semester I ran a writing workshop where I asked students to reflect on what they wanted to get out of the assignment beyond the topic itself. By studying Muslim/Christian social relations in the medieval period, what else do we learn?

Before the exercise, I quickly introduced my students to some of my own work on masculinity and violence during the Civil War. While no one study (of any length) can answer why, for instance, men are so violent, every case study adds to our understanding of the question. Whether it is stated or note, all writing ‘is about something else’ and this is no less true for our undergrads writing their history research papers. While this reflection seemed a touch too personal to collect, I noticed a significant majority wrote for ~4 of the 5 minutes that I had allotted for the reflection. I assume that this means they took the exercise seriously and walking around the room I noticed many large handwritten and typed paragraphs.

Of course, students may not have arrived at a coherent bigger picture for this particular assignment. But WIP strategies may be useful for students to understand their own interests and connect their projects or assignments to a broader intellectual project, one that is driven by them and not the curriculum. Acknowledging and encouraging the development their interests will help students approaching a historical topic. In this way, WIP strategies may play a double role. While preparatory writing helps students to explore a topic and develop an argument prior to putting words on paper, it may also allow them space, in the classroom, to explore their own interests and draw connections between what they want to learn, and a given course’s assignments.

If this sounds a little like writing-as-bildung, so be it!