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@CitizenWald
I’m curious what the composition of this class is—e.g. is this upper-division history majors or first-years in a gen ed class?

But I do find that even history majors don’t necessarily come in with a good background in the history of political ideologies (socialism, fascism, or even liberalism).

@tkinias Short answer: small seminar with students at various points in their studies. Our course numbers reflect general levels, and this one is classified intermediate, but there is no set sequence, and few courses have prerequisites, so anyone can take pretty much anything. All but one are in their first year (counting spring-semester transfers)

And as I've said: I am not criticizing or testing them: just need to know what they know or don't know so that I can pitch my explanations correctly

@CitizenWald
Oh yeah, I know you’re not “kids today”-ing!—just trying to calibrate to what I see with my own students.

@tkinias Right, that was just for the benefit of anyone jumping in here in midstream.
And what do you find?
(I have taught a large gen-ed lecture course at UMass but that was via Zoom during COVID and TA's had all the direct contact with the students, so it was hard to draw too many inferences from that)

@CitizenWald
I find students vary quite a lot in what kind of knowledge they bring in—but that I can’t really make any assumptions. (E.g., when I taught modern Britain last year, I wound up taking a class period in the early 20C to explain what socialism and Communism are, because I realized students didn’t have the background to understand the significance of the rise of Labour).

@CitizenWald
But things vary quite dramatically between the lower-division courses which are mostly nonmajors taking their general education courses and the upper-division courses full of history majors. Our history majors are very good at synthesizing material from different courses, so by the time they’re juniors & seniors they’re building a network of good background knowledge.

@tkinias I would say the same. However, not only are we small: with a greatly shrunken faculty and a student body just starting to grow again after our near-death experience and the decision not to take a new entering class in 2019, we are being asked to teach more courses at intermediate or lower level, so in effect we need to teach more to generalists (fine with me)

@CitizenWald
that makes sense—we haven’t been through that kind of crisis, but history has shrunk to the point that I am one of only two T/TT historians on campus, so there’s similarly not a lot of opportunity for narrow specialization!

@tkinias Ah, not so different, then. I enjoy teaching beginning students or those otherwise not specialized, but I do think/fear, that, for this reason and others, our courses are going to have to change a lot in the next few years. I think I'll be able to do what I need to, but the curriculum may lose a lot

@CitizenWald
Yeah, our curriculum is going to wind up being very different from what we had when I was an undergrad in a department with a few dozen faculty. But letting go of the old way of narrowly slicing things up by nation-state is probably a good thing anyway.

@tkinias Sure, the national organizing principle is a relic of the 19th century. What I worry about it just a new thinness of the curriculum, a situation in which we tackle things eclectically and superficially. One advantage here is that we have a consortium with a fuller range of course offerings. But that places more stress on good academic advising, which in turn requires faculty who are both broadly and deeply educated.

@CitizenWald
Yes, exactly. I think we need to have more conversations in our discipline about how we organize curriculum in small departments.