The History Teaching & Learning Project: Laying the Groundwork for Departmental Change at the University of Colorado Boulder

Our history department at the University of Colorado (cu) Boulder has long been dedicated to quality teaching.Tenure-track faculty invest considerable energy in their courses and teach the lion's share of the curriculum, including most introductory courses.With our teaching-line colleagues, we strongly identify as good teachers, pursue innovative pedagogy, and care about our students' success.Yet with the decline of humanities enrollments after the great recession of 2007-2009, we recognized that something was not getting through to our students (or their parents) about the value of history as a discipline.For all the dynamic work happening in our classrooms, our curriculum was too content-driven, and it did not communicate how our students would develop the discipline's signature competencies as they navigated the major.We needed our students to see the value of history for understanding the world and to appreciate that they were gaining valuable skills relevant to various career paths.While we had tweaked the major over the years, history still looked, well, stuck in the past.Our desire to refresh the study of history at cu Boulder coincided with an era of rising scholarly attention to the practices that foster student learning and educational transformation.Historians had started to engage with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), asking what it means to study history, determining which practices and assessments were best suited to teaching history, and using this knowledge to articulate the relevance of history beyond the academy.The Tuning the History Discipline in the United States project, launched by the American Historical Association (aha) in 2012, was foundational in creating a framework of core competencies for the discipline.In 2016, Lendol Calder and Tracy Steffes issued an important call to historians to develop effective assessments that align with defined learning objectives.And to promote original research in SoTL and its use among historians, the aha issued two sets of principles in 2019: "Guidelines for the Incorporation of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning