Seattle Pacific’s History Department developed a new curriculum to revive interest in history, draw students to major in a shrinking discipline, and highlight history’s relevance to contemporary students and problems. The new curriculum launches in autumn 2020.
Assistant Professors of History Rebecca Hughes and Alissa Walter, along with Associate Professor of History Zhiguo Ye, solicited input from history students, history alumni, and other history faculty to design the curriculum.
Since 2008, the number of history majors has declined by 30% nationwide.* SPU had 54 history majors in 2008; by this year that number dropped to 29. Walter says women are increasingly underrepresented among history majors nationally, which is why new course offerings will intentionally address issues of gender and justice.
“We want our new curriculum to be attentive to issues of race and marginalized populations. We want to be a department where students of color feel they belong and where classes reflect the history of all different people groups.”
The curriculum offers 13 never-before-taught courses designed to help students understand their own context and explore the way current events shape their understanding of history. It also emphasizes practical skills and career relevance by requiring students to take courses on historical methods and study history thematically rather than chronologically.
“We want our new curriculum to be attentive to issues of race and marginalized populations. We want to be a department where students of color feel they belong and where classes reflect the history of all different people groups.”
New classes include: “Human Trafficking, Slavery, and Refugees: History of Forced Migration” and “Women and Gender in the Muslim Middle East.” Eight more courses will be taught for the first time in the 2020–21 school year, including “War on Terror: History of Our Lives;” “Created Lives: WWII;” “History Online;” “Doing History Practicum;” and “Race and Immigration in Europe.”
“The new curriculum presents a really different way of thinking about history,” said history alumna Janessa Reeves ’19. “It feels more human. It’s not just dates and certain facts you have to memorize or have knowledge of, but it’s looking at the way we interact with history, and it’s so much more engaging.”
Students can create a historical documentary film, a history blog, or a small oral history collection, highlighting practical research and writing skills through the new “Doing History” courses. It’s a change from “studying history.” In one class, students worked in teams to pitch mock funding proposals for Iraqi and Syrian refugees living in Amman, Jordan, based on data collected by their professor (Walter) during recent field work.
“One of the things we thought about is how we could help communicate the value of not just historical knowledge but historical thinking,” said Hughes. “This is really part of being an informed citizen.”
The old curriculum emphasized facts over skills, meaning students could graduate from the program with a lot of memorized information but unable to put those facts to use in their jobs, Walter said.
“There wasn’t an intentional scaffolding of building skills step by step,” she said. “That’s something we’ve changed and redesigned.”
The new curriculum is also designed to help students think of their own lifetimes in a historical context. For instance, Walter pointed out that nearly all her students were born after Sept. 11, 2001, and have lived their entire lives in the era of the war on terror.
“They don’t know how to ask questions about what it is that they’ve been living through,” she said.
The new curriculum is also more globally focused. “One of the major contributions of this new curriculum is to ‘break up’ with the traditional divisions … we live in an interconnected world,” Ye said. “The curriculum offers many more courses with global scope and multiple study abroad programs.”
Not surprisingly, the task force report found the division between West and non-West “highly problematic.” The world outside the West was defined in negative terms (“non-West”), implying the history of world regions outside the West was secondary and marginal to that of the West. This disparity also reflected in the number of credits required for Western history (20) versus “non-Western” history (10).
“One of the major contributions of this new curriculum is to ‘break up’ with the traditional divisions … we live in an interconnected world.”
The new curriculum introduces thematic “pathways” to enable students to focus on specific themes in history, including gender, politics, and faith. Students also will be required to take one class that examines the intersections between history and Christianity. “One of the distinctive features of our new curriculum,” explains Hughes, “is that we have a new category of study: Christian Perspectives on Problems in History. This new requirement affords students the opportunity to study thorny issues in history (such as genocide, forced migration, and war), and reflect on them through the lens of Christian faith and ethics. It provides students with the tools to make wise and faithful decisions for the future.”
History alumnus Conrad Reynoldson ’09, an attorney and founder and vice president of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit law firm Washington Civil & Disability Advocate, was excited to hear about the new curriculum.
“I loved the core content of my history classes, but it would have been helpful to have spent more time discussing practical application and providing career guidance,” he said in an email. “I can only recall a handful of occasions when the subject came up during my studies.”
The new curriculum will enable students to better understand the marketable skills they learn in history classes, including research, writing, and critical thinking, and will emphasize past graduates’ success in the job market.
Ye summed up the new curriculum in this way: “In the end, history is about memory,” she said. “If people lose their memory, they don’t know who they are. It is the same with a society, a civilization. We need to understand our identity as a nation and a world, and our new curriculum allows our students to do this. I’m excited about its global perspective, practical focus, and engagement with social issues through Christian faith.”
The final proposal was approved by the Curriculum Committee earlier in the fall.
*Flaherty, Colleen. “The Vanishing History Major.” Inside Higher Ed. Nov. 27, 2018.
