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Doing History: Antioch Stories

Catalog Description

History orients us to our world. Our sense of possibilities and constraints in the present is shaped by our understandings of what people did and tried to do in the past. Over the past decades the Antioch and Yellow Springs communities have gone through many challenges and controversies that not only shape Antioch as we find it today and the possibilities we now experience, but also have been part of national social movements and debates about higher education in the U. S. Students will draw on excellent local resources, including Antiochiana (The Antioch College Archives) The Greene County Historical Society, the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center at Wilberforce, etc., and the guidance of the Antioch College archivist. Students will become more grounded in their new surroundings, and will practice negotiating conflicting historical accounts and perspectives [and engaging in dialogues with members of the community over legacies of their own past.] In general, students will practice history at a beginning level, developing the skills of historians to make their own explorations and interpretations of aspects of Antioch’s past that interest them, [and presenting these interpretation to the community in the form of writings, blogs, Wikipedia entries, exhibitions, presentations, and the like.

Course Overview

This course aims to advance some of Antioch’s broad institutional learning objectives. In fact, the course explores different ways members of the Antioch community—students, staff, and faculty—have struggled to define and apply those objectives in Antioch’s history.

As a foundation course in the humanities, Antioch Stories will attend particularly to knowledge and inquiry, critical thinking, and development of effective written and oral communication skills. Throughout the College’s history Antioch has taken pride (as will this course) in facilitating students to develop creative problem-solving, active civic participation, and particularly the capacity to interrogate theory with practice (my framing of the institutional objective of learning how to adapt knowledge and experience to new settings.) Fuller discussion of these institutional objectives can be found in the curriculum catalog.

These broad objectives will be woven into the specific objectives for this course. The readings and assignments for the course are grouped around those course objectives.

In general we will devote the first half of each class period to discussion of the broad readings and themes in historical methodology for that class. In the second half of the period we will explore particular sources, particularly by Antiochians and about Antioch. This will include conversations with people who have contributed and are contributing to reinventing the Antioch you, too, are reinventing.

Materials and/or Textbook

TK

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