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Course Description "Modern U.S. History" is a first year, introductory survey, General Education course that also fulfills the Global Perspectives requirement and Ethnic Studies requirement. While the course itself is not compulsory, since it does fulfill three requirements it is in high demand, especially for first year students. This lesson on the Gilded Age begins about the third week of the course – after the introductory review of the Civil War and Reconstruction and some initial work with primary documents and the online course features (e.g., D2L, drop box, discussion board). This class typically enrolls 45 students with a few overloads. All students have laptops and we work in classrooms with projectors, computers, etc. There are no TA's or graders allowed. Due to high enrollment, laptops, and the inexperience of first year students, there is much frustration during the initial weeks as students get adjusted to college-level expectations in the midst of all the distractions their laptops offer! When we begin this lesson study, students are at the point of realizing that they needed to keep up with the weekly reading, take notes, and come to class prepared if they wanted to do well.
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Our learning goals revolve around students' struggle to learn about strikes and government regulations because of their preconceived notions about unions and big government. We want students to understand why Americans supported an expansion of government regulations at the turn of the 20th century, especially why the middle-class initiated and drove these reforms in pursuit of "modernity." Therefore, we begin with the problems of the Gilded Age. Here students learn about the extreme wealth disparities, high mortality and injury rates in the workplace, poor public health, violent reaction to strikes, high unemployment rates, and corrupt urban machine politics. We constructed our study around an interactive lecture with a primary document discussion group activity that was graded for historical interpretation (i.e., an explanation of why these events happened at this particular time and are still relevant for us today). We found that students' preconceived notions of immigrants are their biggest stumbling block, but when we have them focus on their reactions to low wages, lack of workers' compensation, etc., they are able to anticipate Progressive Era reforms. Students enjoyed and seemed more engaged when asked to respond personally; they were most frustrated when asked to apply the reading terms from the textbook and to stick to the historical context. Individual reflection followed by group work seems to minimize these frustrations. However, finding the time in or out of class to cover the topic, reflect, then discuss (and grade homework) was still problematic.
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