Online Lecture in Coari

http://www.cco.ifam.edu.br/noticias/519-aula-de-historia-atraves-de-video-conferencia-internacional.html

No More Plan B: 

A Very Modest Proposal for Graduate Programs in History

Anthony T. Grafton and James Grossman, October 2011

Entering graduate students file in. They're nervous, they're eager, they don't know quite what to expect. If the director of graduate studies does the job well, the annual orientation ritual will nourish their anticipation, while allaying their anxieties. Still, out of a sense of responsibility, faculty should keep one source of reasonable trepidation on the table: the job market. It is what it is, and entering students need to enter with their eyes open to it.

But open to what? And what is the "it" that is the job market for historians? The academy alone? That is what we say when we offer statistics on placement. That is what we say when the department placement officer proffers the annual warning that ye who enter here do so at your own peril. Most orientations include a reference—in the best cases even some focus—on "alternatives." But the default, the hope, the gold ring, is the tenure-track position.

A curious irony. On the one hand, the intellectual experience that awaits our students is probably richer now than it has ever been in the past. Traditional core fields like political and diplomatic history are experiencing revivals, new fields like transnational history are expanding, and new methods are being forged and honed. The old economy of scarcity that limited research in the early years of graduate school to the stacks of one's own university library has made way for a digital Land of Cockaigne. Verbal, visual, and aural sources from dozens of cultures crowd the screen of anyone enrolled at a university. Meanwhile graduate conferences and social media enable students to tap into national and international networks long before they complete their dissertations, and give them vital experience in presenting their work to multiple audiences. Holders of new doctorates leave their graduate schools in possession of research experience and technical skills that were undreamt of 10 years ago.

On the other hand, this breadth and range, this openness to new ways of thinking and working, somehow disappear when we consider our students' careers. We don't tell them on that first day, "there are many ways to be a historian; there are many ways to apply what you've learned to a career." This matters for two reasons, not necessarily in any order. First, it ignores the facts of academic employment; second, it pushes talented scholars into narrow channels, and makes it less likely that they will take schooled historical thinking with them into a wide range of employment sectors.

For all their energy and learning, their range and experience, many of these students will not find tenure-track positions teaching history in colleges and universities. In 2009–10 the number of jobs posted with the AHA fell 29.4 per cent, from 806 to 569, while 989 PhDs were conferred. This is hardly the first time these two numbers have been far apart. In 1972, the first year for which accurate statistics exist, almost 1,200 new PhDs competed for just over 600 new teaching jobs. Except for two short periods in the late 1980s and the 2000s, the number of openings in history departments has consistently fallen short, sometimes by a very wide margin, of the number of doctorates awarded. As public contributions to higher education shrink, state budgets contract, and a lagging economy takes its toll on endowments and family incomes, there is little reason to expect the demand for tenure-track faculty to expand.

As many observers have noted, this is not a transient "crisis." It's the situation we have lived with for two generations. And it's not likely to change for the better, unless someone figures out how to work magic on the university budgets that lead administrators to opt for flexible, contingent positions rather than tenure-track jobs. AHA supports and joins in efforts to convert contingent to tenure-track jobs—but it's unrealistic to expect these to pay off on a large scale. We owe it to our students and to our profession to think more broadly.

Yet graduate programs have proved achingly reluctant to see the world as it is. For all the innovation in the subjects and methods of history, the goal of the training remains the same: to produce more professors; the unchanged language of supervisors and students reflects this. We tell students that there are "alternatives" to academic careers. We warn them to develop a "plan B" in case they do not find a teaching post. And the very words in which we couch this useful advice make clear how much we hope they will not have to follow it—and suggest, to many of them, that if they do have to settle for employment outside the academy, they should crawl off home and gnaw their arms off.

We should not be surprised when students internalize our attitudes (implicit or explicit) and assume that the "best" students will be professors and that for everyone else... well, "there's always public history." Even those who happily accept jobs at secondary schools, for example, describe themselves as "leaving the academy" or "leaving the historical profession." Even worse, many of our students who actually do leave the historical profession, and take what they've learned in graduate school to the business world, are seen as having crossed the line from the light of humanistic inquiry into the darkness of grubby capitalism—as if the life of scholarship were somehow exempt from impure motives and bitter competition.

This narrow perspective does our students a disservice. Why not tell our students, from the beginning, that a PhD in history opens a broad range of doors? As historians, let's begin with some facts. Holders of doctorates in history occupy, or have recently occupied, a dizzying array of positions outside the academy: historical adviser to the Chief of Staff of the Army, Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Chief of Staff to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, museum curators, archivists, historians in national parks, investment bankers, international business consultants, high school teachers, community college teachers, foundation officers, editors, journalists, policy analysts at think tanks (yes, an entry-level position). The skills that these historians mastered as graduate students—doing research; conceptualizing relationships between structure, agency, and culture; combining research and analysis to present arguments with clarity and economy; knowing how to plan and carry out long-term projects—remain vital in their daily work. In many organizations outside the academy, a doctorate is a vital asset for those who want to rise above the entry level.

The idea that a doctorate in history prepares one only, or primarily, to teach in a college or university is as contingent as any other, not only historically but also geographically. In Germany—the country that gave us the research university—doctorates in history and similar fields have traditionally been considered appropriate preparation for jobs in publishing, media, business, and politics. A first step towards adjusting graduate education to occupational realities would be to change our attitudes and our language, to make clear to students entering programs in history that we are offering them education that we believe in, not just as reproductions of ourselves, but also as contributors to public culture and even the private sector.

A second, and much bigger, step would be to examine the training we offer, and work out how to preserve its best traditional qualities while adding new options. If we tell new students that a history PhD opens many doors, we need to broaden the curriculum to ensure that we're telling the truth. If the policy arena offers opportunities, and we think it does, then interested students need some space (and encouragement) to take courses in statistics, economics, or public policy. Accounting, acting, graphic design, advanced language training: students thinking at once creatively and pragmatically have all sorts of options at our research universities. And of course there's the whole exploding realm of digital history and humanities, and the range of skills required to practice them.

Yes, time is a problem. It already takes a long time—a very long time—to obtain a doctorate in history. We don't advocate narrowing the historical work that constitutes graduate education in history. Nor do we agree with the well-meaning observers who suggest that graduate training in humanities fields could be made less onerous, and attrition reduced, by easing the requirements: for example, by cutting the dissertation down from the grub out of which a book should emerge into three or more articles that can be researched and written in one to two years. We leave the feasibility of shorter dissertations in other humanities disciplines for our colleagues to assess. In history, the dissertation is the core of the experience. It's in the course of research that historians firm up their mastery of languages and research methods, archives and arguments; and it's while writing that they learn how to corral a vast amount of information, give it a coherent form, and write it up in a way accessible to non-specialists. Most students learn the challenges and satisfaction associated with extended narrative and/or complex analysis only at this final stage.

Instead of cutting down the dissertation, departments need to find ways of keeping dissertation writers attuned to the full range of opportunities that their work opens. Why not incorporate preparation for the future into the later years of doctoral training? This might be the time for an additional course or two, adventures into new realms of knowledge that build skills for diverse careers. That such diversification offers an antidote to melancholy and writer's block is merely a bonus, even more so if these explorations can also add texture or new insights to a dissertation. Departments might also consider workshops that explore the world of work, bring in speakers from government and other areas where many historians find jobs, and mobilize their networks of contacts as advisers for their students. Internships could provide even deeper experience, although care would have to be taken to integrate them into dissertation writing calendars.

Most important is that we make clear to all students that they will enjoy their advisors' and their departments' unequivocal support, whether they seek to teach at college or university level, join a non-profit agency or head off into business or government. We teach our students to question received ideas and to criticize inherited terminologies and obsolete assumptions. It's past time that we began applying these lessons ourselves.

Anthony Grafton (Princeton Univ.) is the president of the AHA. 
Jim Grossman is the executive director of the AHA.

Article extracted from Inside Higher Education

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/11/12/essay-suggests-liberal-arts-training-relates-skills

False Dichotomy   

November 12, 2013
By  Devin T. Hagerty

The liberal arts are dead, or — at best — dying. That's the theme of story after story in today’s news media.
Professional skills training is in. The STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields are in. Practical, vocational higher education is in. The liberal arts are out, relics of a “traditional” way of thinking that has been overtaken by the pressing demands of our dizzyingly complex digital age.
As new students arrived on college campuses this fall, the message many of them heard is that majoring in history, or English, or anthropology is a surefire recipe for a life of irrelevance and poor job prospects. These “conventional” disciplines cannot possibly train students for productive, enriching careers in the high-tech information age whose future is now.
Although this viewpoint is rapidly gaining the status of settled wisdom, it is tragically misguided. It is based on a false dichotomy, namely that the liberal arts and the more vocational, preprofessional, practical disciplines — like, say, computer science — are fundamentally different and opposed. But this misunderstands both the age we’re living in and the challenges we face, not to mention one of the most significant trends in higher education over the last few decades — the evolution of interdisciplinarity.
In essence, this whole debate comes down to skills. The liberal arts are often said by critics to provide little that is of “practical value” in the “real world.” In reality, though, liberal arts curriculums can and do give students skills that are just as professionally useful as those in more “relevant” occupationally specific fields of study.
At my university, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, students this fall can declare a new major called global studies, which integrates courses in 12 liberal arts departments — including economics, geography and environmental systems, history, media and communication studies, and political science — into a rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum. Majors are required to study abroad and to achieve fluency in at least one foreign language. By graduation, they will have demonstrated their research, analytical, critical-thinking, and writing skills in a substantial, “capstone” research project. Our students will also do internships with companies, not-for-profits, and government agencies.
Equally important, they will develop “global competence,” which employers in many professions have identified as one of the most desirable, but grossly lacking, sets of skills required of their new employees. Broadly defined, global competence is “the capacity and disposition to understand and act on issues of global significance.” Its central elements include knowledge of world affairs — cultural, economic, and political; proficiency in communicating with people in and from other societies, both verbally and in writing; the ability to appreciate multiple perspectives and respect cultural diversity; and the intellectual and psychological flexibility to adapt to unfamiliar and rapidly changing circumstances.
Developing the skills that we hope to instill in UMBC’s global studies majors is an inherently interdisciplinary mission. In a recent New York Times column, Yale professor Nicholas Christakis argues that the social sciences (a subset of the liberal arts) badly trail the natural sciences in generating innovative “institutional structures” that can produce the kind of cutting-edge science necessary for solving some of the world’s most intractable — often intrinsically interdisciplinary — problems. However, he also notes that this is beginning to change, for example, in the form of a new global affairs major at Yale.
Whether it’s global studies at UMBC or global affairs at Yale, these exciting new programs tangibly articulate why talking about liberal arts education versus practical training creates the false perception that these two enterprises are essentially at odds. At UMBC, it's the combination of interdisciplinary liberal arts education; substantial research, writing and analysis; rigorous foreign language training; study abroad; and experiential learning in the form of internships and other applied opportunities that will give students the skills they will need to thrive and “do good” in the 21st century.
The tragedy is that we might blow it. If we continue to present students with a false choice between the liberal arts and “real-world” vocational training, we will produce what social scientists like to call “suboptimal” outcomes. Too many talented, energetic, hard-working students will choose “safe” educational and career paths, and too many truly global problems will go unsolved.


BIO
Devin T. Hagerty is a professor of political science and director of global studies at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

HISTORIANS WITHOUT BORDERS: online lecture in Brazilian Rain Forest

Historians Without Borders  is a new project that has just started with the key support of the Cave Hill Educational Media Services, and its Director Ms. Patricia Atherley. By taking advantage of the training and information given in the course: “Advancing Teaching and Learning with Technology”, part of the UWI Postgraduate Certificate in University Teaching and Learning, I started an internet based interactive program between students and lecturers/teachers to improve the understanding of topics in history of Latin America and Brasil. The free internet resources that are available permit us to have online chats, discussions and lectures without the costs of renting a video-conference room. The advantage is that students at UWI will have opportunity to discuss a text with the author, or to engage in a discussion with students in other campuses and countries.

The first trial of the project came unexpectedly from the interior of the state of Amazonas. Having sent out invitations to participate in this project to some of my colleagues in different universities, this city in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest promptly accepted. In the Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Amazonas, located in Coari, a town with a population of about seventy eight thousand people, a history teacher (also a PhD student),Ygor Cavalcante, asked me if we could do the first experiment with his students. The reasons: a) their students were studying the same topic that we were discussing in the Cave Hill class on the History of Brazil; b) their school is considered a high level secondary school, part of a federal program that was created for talented students to obtain double certificates: an upper level secondary school plus a certificate in I.T.; c) history is a mandatory discipline in all primary and secondary schools, so, the senior students in this program are able to follow the discussion at the university level.

There was only one problem, in that the Brazilian students do not speak English and our students at Cave Hill do not speak Portuguese, so we decided to go ahead with an online lecture and discussion, in which I presented the topic and they asked me questions and made comments. Their own technicians helped me through internet chat while we arranged the technical aspects of the presentation. We had two hours of lively interaction, exchange of information and fun.

A second lecture was done on November 20, when Brazilians celebrate Black Culture and History. In the same institution, in Coari, I was asked to give a lecture about the influence of the reggae music in the Brazilian Movement Against Racism. Once again, the Educational Media at Cave Hill came to rescue me, as Mrs. Atherley took time from her busy agenda to teach me how to transform my power point presentation into a film. Mission accomplished, I lectured for about 150 students, from my own office: by  using the Google hangout, first they watched the film that I sent (while I followed the presentation without participating) then I came alive, to answer their questions an comments. We are planning another one for next month, and next semester will involve Cave Hill students.

Why is these events in Coari important? Because we could see that it was technically possible and proved to be a great outreach tool. This connection which will get even better, gives Cave Hill and the Department of History greater visibility, one that can include other disciplines. Brazil is a huge market for university education, and Coari is also the headquarters for one of Petrobras’ (Brazil’s world class oil company) research projects.  The students from this institution are most likely going to federal universities with scholarships. Many universities around the world are investing in internationalization and one of the tools to achieve that is the interactivity over the internet with other universities at all levels.

 The language barrier is not a difficult one, and can easily be overcome by making more courses available, motivating students to learn another language seriously, and using the technology in creative ways.

http://www.almanaqueurupes.com.br/portal/?cat=313

http://www.almanaqueurupes.com.br/portal/?p=10900