Where the Action Is: Departments Transforming the History Curriculum

When was the last time your department had a substantial, much less multimeeting, discussion of curriculum reform?Even though history, and the humanities, are under national assault from administrators and politicians, our sense is that few departments spend much time on what is, arguably, their most important collective activity.Of all the work that drives history faculty to convene in that most cherished of institutions-the department meeting-conversations about curriculum arguably could have the most significant impact on students' experiences learning history.Fortunately, innovative departments have, over the past decade, begun to hold collaborative, productive, and surprisingly uncontentious conversations over the shape of their curriculum.This March 2024 "Textbooks and Teaching" section highlights several of those discussions.The results, we are pleased to report, are innovative and generative.First off: Why have departments started turning to more systematic dialogue over their teaching?The American Historical Association's Tuning the History Discipline in the United States project kicked off in 2012, creating widespread professional scrutiny of what students actually learn in the history major.The outcomes that developed from that project inspired participating departments, and those beyond the initial participants, to rethink their curriculum and teaching in intentional and collective ways.At the same time, data analytics burst upon the academy, inserting concerns such as retention and graduation rates, the meaning of student success, and the identification of troubling "bottleneck" courses into campus and department conversations.Current conversations about post-COVID-19 pandemic student engagement and continuing socioeconomic struggles have added a new layer to that conversation, suggesting that this is an urgent moment for reflection and intentional departmental action.And, more generally, faculty members have begun to recognize that responding to the political challenges and racial injustices of the moment, along with existential threats to the humanities, depends on thinking much more robustly about how we all teach, together,