** Active Learning Strategies for Humanities Curricula **

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1. Role-Playing Games.
   • The instructor provides either real or imaginary historical contexts along with a range of relevant characters/roles; students are encouraged to research these contexts, characters, and/or roles, and then to improvise dramatic interactions among their characters during class periods.

2. Collective Problem Solving.
   • Both conceptual and practical problems will sometimes resist solution because problem-solvers are unable to frame their questions in original ways; collective problem solving exercises encourage small groups of students to take a problem (e.g., how to interpret a literary text or historical event) and reformulate it (i.e., conceive it differently, even oddly) in at least ten new ways (for example, one could begin to reformulate the classic problem of explaining Hamlet’s inaction-- his psychological disposition--as a moral problem: why is Hamlet caught among competing moral values?). The focus of this sort of exercise is not on providing solutions but on rethinking the nature of the problem itself.

3. Class Encyclopedia.
   • Students are encouraged to select a special range of topics from the entire set of course concerns/issues, and to write “encyclopedia entries” that they would imagine being of use to the next “generation” of students who take the course.

4. Calendar Nodes.
   • Students are encouraged to use holidays (national, regional, religious, etc.) as “nodes” at which lines of historical influence converge; at least fifty lines of influence might be provided for a holiday like Columbus Day (astronomical, technological, financial, political, cultural lines- -to name a few).

5. Thematic Analysis.
   • Literary, scientific, political, philosophical (etc.) achievements can be understood as “events” that emerge from the intersection of thematic trajectories. (One might, for example, see The Wizard of Oz as a literary event shaped by thematic tensions like: (a) gold vs. silver currency standards, (b) aristocratic vs. populist models of government, (c) industrial vs. agrarian economies, (d) absolute vs. relative conceptions of moral goodness, (e) developmental vs. fixed accounts of character, and so on.) Students are encouraged first to identify and then apply thematic trajectories from their “other” courses (whatever else they happen to be studying) with/to an “event” under analysis in the “home” course (origin of the project

6. Models.
   • Students are encouraged to build simple models as contexts for extending their understanding of key course-specific concepts. This sort of exercise encourages students to ask: What would a good model look like? How should the model actually be constructed? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the model? Suppose, for example, one wants to explain relativistic gravitation; would placing an ant and a lead weight on the surface of a balloon provide a good model? Computers provide an excellent resource for this sort of work (SimCity is a nice example of a commercial product that enables multi-level modeling of techno-socio-political problems, ideas, issues, etc.).

7. Thinking Together with Children.
   • Students are encouraged to “work through” their own understanding of course material by presenting what they’ve learned in a particular course to a group of children. There shouldn’t be any a priori restrictions placed on what or how much a given age-group can learn (in other words, one shouldn’t begin with the supposition that, say, a group of five-year olds won’t be able to understand the allure of gambling in a Dostoevski novel or how prime numbers can be used to write unbreakable computer access codes); the task is for the college student to capitalize on both the curiosities of children and h/er own creative resources, rather than to rely on the vocabularies, formulae, and background assumptions typically found in textbooks and exploited by university instructors when presenting the same material.

8. Cognitive Analogies.
   • Students are encouraged to imagine multiple ways in which an idea, fact, explanation, procedure, etc. could be understood. How, for example, might a painter represent Darwin’s ideas about kin selection? Or, how might the musicological structure of a Beethoven violin sonata be realized with tinker toys? Or, how might Oedipal conflicts serve to represent the confinement of negative electrical charge to specific nuclear orbitals?