Identities Project

Germany and the World Wars, 1870-1990

Submitted by esheffer on 27 February 2009 - 6:11am

Tagged with:

Germany'stumultuous history from the Second Empire through the end of the Cold War. International conflict, social upheaval, andstate transformation during Bismarck's wars of unification, World War One, theWeimar Republic, the rise of Nazism, World War Two, the Holocaust, the divisionof communist East and capitalist West Germany, and the fall of the IronCurtain.

Course Number/ID:

History 138A

Course Length (number of weeks):

Course Delivery Mode:

In-Class

Average Number of Enrolled Students:

Between 10 and 30 students

Course Level:

College/University

Course Contributors:

Teaching Assistant Andrew Visser led discussion sections and helped grade students' written work.

Course Development:

Aproject in my modern Germany survey course at Stanford University fall quarter hadstriking results. The first week ofclass, each student drew an identity at random that he or she would keepthroughout the quarter, creating a unique historical character who was born in1900 and lived through Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century. In weekly posts to individual wiki pages onthe course website, students navigated and synthesized history in multipledimensions, researching the texture of everyday life, untangling pivotalevents, and weighing questions of humanity. They produced a phenomenal body of work.

Theproject quickly expanded into something more than anyone expected. Students were surprised by how invested theybecame in their characters, and by how much they learned in the process. The personal narratives were more work thantraditional weekly response papers, yet students agreed it was a rewarding wayto expand upon the standard lecture, reading, paper, and exam requirements: “it was more than worth it. It allowed us to fuse the course material with our own creativity andtake away so much more than a typical survey of history would foster.”

Whilethe lives the students created were fictional, they provided a powerfuleducational experience. They stimulatedthe students’ curiosity about history, generated a great deal of critical thinkingand writing, and offered a unique entree into a historical period. Students said the open format wasmotivating. Its creative license, use ofthe web, and nine week duration made the work feel less like an evaluativeassignment than an independent endeavor.

Thislinkage of imagination, technology, and autonomy proved fruitful. Though the experience described below isbased on a small group of motivated Stanford students, mostly History majors,who were studying an accessible historical period, the basic outline of thismethod could be readily adapted to different fields and classroomenvironments. Its core concept –crafting historical lives within a web-based community forum – has potentiallybroad appeal, and adds to the pedagogical toolbox for evoking past worlds.

Course Delivery:

Thestudents had freedom to develop their historical characters as theywished. They had one sentence to go onthat gave the circumstances of their birth, such as their persona’s gender, religion,birthplace, and parents’ occupations. Characterswere born into all walks of life: the son of a prostitute in Berlin, thedaughter of Jewish banker in Munich, the son of East Prussian nobility. The rest was up to them to decide. As the students wrote about their lifechoices each week, each maintaining a wiki page dedicated to their character,they had to determine how an individual living at a given time would be apt tofeel, live, and act. Weekly assignmentsstructured their posts, with diary entries for key dates or eye-witnessresponses to certain events, but did not interfere with individual choices. One physics major described his experience:

“Theweekly Identities assignments were somewhat like the weekly problem sets inmath or science classes. In a math orphysics class, it is not enough to just listen to the lecture and read thetextbook; the student actually has to practice solving real problems. TheIdentities Project […] forced me to consider how real people actually makedecisions in historical events; I felt that I was, in essence, ‘solving’ theproblem of ‘how and why do ordinary people act in history’ by ‘practicing’ onmy historical avatar every week.”

Indeed,students constructed their characters entirely on their own. I had planned to give more guidance, as wellas to issue shocks such as unemployment, war drafts, bombing, and loss of lovedones. Yet the students did such atremendous job of creating their own complexity that this was notnecessary. The teaching assistant and Iwere available to discuss ideas and resources, and we addressed majorhistorical inaccuracies in written comments and in class. But we decided to allow these characters todevelop unfettered.

Thisopen-endedness engendered a sense of ownership, and created its own impetus forseriousness and self-correction. Students showed humility in their approach to the material; in the wordsof one senior, “I keptasking myself, is this realistic?” Perhaps more than anything, the high communitystandards of the class wiki helped sustain the quality of the work and aproductive exchange of ideas. In theend, there were just three restrictions placed on the characters: they could notdie or be otherwise incapacitated, could not leave Germany permanently, andcould not substantively change the course of history.

Communication & Collaboration Self-Assessment:

Excellent

Communication & Collaboration Evidence:

Theproject inspired an unusual level of academic commitment. Over nine weeks, the students wrote anaverage of 1,121 words per post, the equivalent of a 4½ page paper every week –including the week theiranalytical papers were due and the week of the midterm. Students often went well beyond the requiredmaterial in developing their characters. Their research ranged from internet searches for images, period-appropriatechildren’s names, and food specialties to scholarly works on particular topicsof interest. Most importantly, thestudents integrated all of this information into a coherent whole and,according to their written reflections on the project, uncovered their own historicallessons along the way.

Learning Material Self-Assessment:

Excellent

Learning Material Evidence:

Overthe quarter, the avatars lived through two world wars and the Cold War, experiencingmonarchy, democracy, fascism, and communism firsthand. They each saw Hitler at the Beer Hall Putsch,and had to decide whether to vote for him a decade later. They were at the Brandenburg Gate when hetook power in 1933, when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, and when it came downin 1989. They had conversations withwriter Joseph Roth in Weimar Berlin, with the Holocaust perpetrators of PoliceBattalion 101, and with estranged family and friends on the opposite side ofthe Iron Curtain. They witnessed and, in some cases,participated in the violence of Germany’s twentieth century, even as they livedat the pinnacle of Germany’s cultural and economic achievements. The characters also reflected upon themeaning of it all as they met together at the close of the century.

Learning Outcomes & Assessment Self-Assessment:

Excellent

Learning Outcomes & Assessment Evidence:

Theweb posts grew increasingly intricate, academically rigorous, and personal. Students said their characters came to feel three-dimensional,and that the work became “lots of fun” as they were “growing close to theperson.” A number discussed theirchoices and shared their wiki pages with friends and family, and described how“as time went on my character’s future seemed to unfold naturally.”

Studentsbegan intertwining real-world and historical interests, experimenting withdifferent political causes, social niches, and vocations – a communist painter,a film propagandist, a well heeled department store owner. Students also endowed their avatars withpersonality quirks and incorporated their own family histories. One based his character’s persecution andemigration from Nazi Germany on his own family’s experience, and another wrotehis actual grandfather into his story. Students used the project as an opportunity to explorespecific topics, one freshman observing how “if you wanted to learn moreabout the Battle of Stalingrad you could have your character be at Stalingradon that date.” Several had theircharacters join the Nazi Party precisely in order to better understand itsappeal. One history major, prompted by election campaigning overProposition 8 in California, had her character outed as gay in the Third Reich;she researched the treatment of homosexuals in Germany’s successive regimes,integrating legislative history and details like the number of gay bars in Eastand West Berlin into her weekly updates.

In turn, students sent their characters on divergentpaths. Some plunged headlong intoradical events and ideologies, while some “took the path of least resistance”and “just let history pass [them] by.” Some characters’ values and personalitiesstayed consistent, while some were more “chameleon like,” with “fluctuating,elastic political positions.” Somecharacters spent their whole lives in one place, while some ranged far andwide: a colonist to German Southwest Africa, Jewish émigrés to Britain andAmerica, a priest to counsel killers in Poland, a resisting factory worker toAuschwitz, and a POW to Siberia. As onesenior put it, the project “forced me to see the many different players in Germany[…] it is always important to remember that one nation is made up of advocates,oppressed people, dissenters, rulers. There is no standard.”

Course Look & Feel, Web Usability Self-Assessment:

Excellent

Course Look & Feel, Web Usability Evidence:

Studentcomments point to the open nature of this exercise as providing a sense offreedom rare in their coursework, allowing space for creativity, authorship,and identification. This was not only“quite cool,” but an important learning experience that nurtured historicalcuriosity and understanding. Students saidthe events of the past came to seem both more complicated and morecomprehensible – and far more memorable.

Learner Support Self-Assessment:

Excellent

Learner Support Evidence:

Certainly,this project highlighted layers of history that are often difficult to conveyin a survey course. Students said theygained a greater appreciation for everyday complexities – for how ordinarypeople adjusted to extraordinary times, and how these adaptations propelled newsocial and political realities.

Theirsimple vignettes expressed complicated ideas: characters matter-of-factlycarried billion Mark notes in their pockets during hyperinflation, signed theirletters “Heil Hitler!”, traded sex for American nylon stockings, and picnickednear the Berlin Wall. One farmwoman from Dachau had visceral misgivings about the localconcentration camp yet supported it nonetheless: “I dislike the communists asmuch as anyone else, but smelling [their ashes] on the wind turned my stomach.” Students said they came to betterunderstand the importance of the personal, or the “inner why,” to how thingshappen in history. A junior reflected:

“The project forced us to see the situation as much fromwithin as a student can, several years later and thousands of miles away. Oskar, to whom I grew attached, had a past, afamily, thoughts, ideas. There werejustifications for his actions that were intricately tied in with all of these,ones that I would never have considered without a specific persona in mind.”

Thelength of the project underscored how bound the characters’ perceptions andopinions were to the circumstances of the moment, how decisions made in onedecade reverberate in the next, and how long a life really is. One sophomore’s character, anarmaments-manufacturer-turned-democratic-leader, summed up this elasticity: “the only way to begin to make sense of the five verydifferent Germanys I have lived in is to understand the malleable nature of thehuman mind and human society.”

Ibelieve the project’s appeal lay precisely in its development ofinteriority. The first-person narrativescaptured an interest in understanding individuals and the choices they makewhen confronted with momentous events – an abiding fascination with how historymakes individuals and individuals make history.[1] And the work became quite personal. I had initially conceived of the project asan expanded role-playing exercise that would knit the class together; I haddesigned the characters to have geographical and personal links, and structuredinteractions between them in the weekly assignments. But this social aspect was less interestingto the students. Debates, presentations,and discussions were productive, yet it was undoubtedly the written work thatthe students found most compelling. Their feedback made it clear that, for them, the independent explorationof their written worlds was paramount.

Teaching Innovation:

Thisexercise can be an effective way to develop individual interests within thebounds of a survey course, as a complement totraditional lectures, exams, and papers. Students said that, as they became watchfulfor things that related to their characters, they became more engaged with therest of the class material. Most didn'tfind this limiting, but saw it as an “additional angle” that helped “focus yourattention when it came to the lectures and the readings.” There are, of course, potential pitfalls tothe exercise, especially if students are not sensitive to their own or theproject’s limitations. Yet since theformat is flexible, assignments can be adjusted week to week, and concernsabout historical empathy, judgment, or representativeness can make forinstructive class discussions.

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