The History of the Future

Since I was growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, I have been fascinated with images of the future. Therefore, in the mid-1990s when I was looking for course content within which to explore some new approaches to teaching and learning, I decided to develop a course on the history of images of the future. This course, which I have taught as both a small, first-year seminar and as a 120-student "lecture course" uses collaborative learning teams, weekly web-based exercises that take students through a sequence of learning tasks, and a great deal of exposure to texts, images, and films in which different visions of the future have been presented.

Those seeking more information about this course may access the History of the Future Course Portfolio or the course web site. Most of the site is password protected because much of the material within is under copyright, but instructors who are exploring new forms of pedagogy may obtain the password from me at dpace@indiana.edu.

Boulevards, Cafes, and Music Halls: How Paris Gave Birth to Modern Culture, 1850-1900

This is my newest course and one of my favorites. It traces the development of modern culture in Paris in the second half of the 19th century. We explore the creation of the physical environment of modern Paris through the radical restructuring of the city in the 1850s and 1860s and of a modern consumer culture. We explore the remarkable cultural exploration of these decades and the devastating effect of military defeat, siege, and the civil war occasioned by the Paris Commune. This course is taught in two versions -- one in Bloomington as part of the Intensive Freshman Seminar and the other is taught in Paris itself, through the I.U. Overseas Studies Program. For more on the overseas version of the course see www.iub.ed/~hlp/Paris/mainpage.htm.

 

 

Paris and Berlin in the 1920s: A Cultural History

This junior level "lecture" course has become an old friend. The subject matter is rich and varied -- the Parisian avant garde, the culture wars of Weimar Germany, and the experience of the American expatriates of the 1920s. And for almost twenty-five years it has served as a laboratory for trying out new approaches to teaching, as successive ways of revisions have introduced a great variety of media presentations, collaborative learning teams, and an extensive web site that presents students with a great array of cultural artifacts from the 1920s

Those seeking more information about this course may access the course web site at http://www.indiana.edu/~pb20s/ Most of the site is password protected because much of the material is under copyright, but instructors who are exploring new forms of pedagogy may obtain the password from me at dpace@indiana.edu.

Teaching College History

Another old friend. Since 1983 I have been teaching a graduate pedagogy course in the Indiana University Bloomington History Department. I take students through a varied sample of current pedagogical literature, covering such topics as leading discussions, student intellectual development, the cultural experience of college, diversity, instructor-student interactions, strategies of course construction, lecturing and alternatives to lecturing, teaching basic skills, the use of technology, and the new role of scholarship of teaching and learning in American academia.

You can view a copy of the syllabus from a recent version of the course by clicking here.

European Society from Napoleon to the Present

This was the project that began my systematic involvement with pedagogy in the late 1970s. With invaluable assistance from my History Department colleague Professor James Diehl, Professor Tom Schwen and Indiana University's Division of Development and Special Projects, and three gifted graduate students (Madonna Hettinger, Roger Beck, and David Hiebert), I began to learn how to make the goals of a course explicit and to shape learning activities to achieve these goals. The most innovate element we introduced into the course was a major simulation of modern European social history. Each student was assigned the role of a character in one of five social classes and followed the life of that character and his or her descendants from 1789 to 1912. Each week the students chose from among three or four alternative response to the problems facing their families at that point in history and observed the impact of these choices, as the mechanism of the simulation reproduced the experience of industrialization, urbanization, the rise of the working class, political revolutions, and other historical changes. The production of this simulation required the creation and coordination of forty-one different 2-3 page scenarios, each of which presented the situation of one of the families at a particular moment in history, the options available to it, and the consequences of each option. These scenarios were based upon historical research and were filled with details that made the past more alive for the students. Audiovisual material was developed to supplement the scenarios, and the social classes served as units for discussion. The simulation produced a very visible increase in student learning and involvement in the course, and it allowed the class to function at a much higher conceptual level.

Other Courses

I have had the very good fortune to have been able to teaching more than twenty different courses in my first thirty years at Indiana University. Here is a list of the courses I have offered, and I will be happy to provide more information about any of them.

Visions of the Future: A History
Paris and Berlin in the 1920s: A Cultural History
Teaching College History
European Society from Napoleon to the Present
Dawn of the Atomic Age
The Idea of Progress in Modern European Thought
Struggle, Conflict, and Competition in Modern European Thought
War and Society in the Twentieth Century (Co-taught with Professor James Diehl)
European Intellectual and Cultural History, 1860-1930 (Graduate Colloquium)
Ideas and Western Culture, I: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment
Ideas and Western Culture, II, From the Enlightenment to the Present
Positivism, Aestheticism, and Decadence in European Culture, 1850-1930
The Concepts of Consciousness in Twentieth Century European Thought
Existentialism in Contemporary European Thought and Literature
Structuralism
Mass Culture and History
European Thought and Culture, l895-l9l4
European Intellectuals since l780: Political and Social Thought
European Intellectuals since l780: Changing Images of Human Nature
European Intellectual and Cultural History, l945 to the present
European Cultural and Intellectual History, l850-l9l4