This is the second in a series of teaching columns by 2021–2022 History Division teaching committee chair Ken Ward.

I can be a little medium-centric in my teaching. In my last column, I explained one way that’s true—in my deemphasizing the textbook in my history course to focus on things like podcasts. It’s something I’ve had success with, but this focus on the medium definitely doesn’t suit everyone.

Elisabeth Fondren, for instance.

“I’ve always focused more on the content than the platform,” she told me recently during a conversation about teaching, “so I’m not one of the professors to switch and say ‘here’s a podcast, here’s a video.’”

Clearly she’s not as hung up on content delivery as I am. But Dr. Fondren, who is an assistant professor of journalism at St. John’s University in Queens, is absolutely finding her own novel ways to connect with the current generation of students in her journalism history course. While the textbook may be safe in her classroom, another mainstay of history courses has gotten her attention: long written assignments.

For Elisabeth, it’s a matter of being in touch with what’s useful to students and making sure they’re staying energized in the learning process, not just in terms of providing relevant information but also engaging projects. It’s too easy, she told me, to lose students in the transition from learning to application, especially when today’s students have so many extracurricular responsibilities, often including jobs.

“The demand on students is so high,” she said, “and it’s the professor’s responsibility to gauge and maybe event adapt your method of delivery and assessment. It’s not a one-way street.”

Deprioritizing written assignments like long research papers doesn’t mean lowering standards. Instead, it’s a matter of finding other ways to assess what Elisabeth is really after: deep, personal engagement with course concepts and critical thinking.

Sometimes this means asking students to craft video reflections and take place in online discussions. At others, it means learning to be critical and persuasive in a medium other than a term paper. For example, in one assignment Elisabeth’s students interrogate a primary source like a documentary and then tweet about it, structuring the assignment such that students learn to build a coherent argument in only 280 characters.

Crucially, behind these assignments is Elisabeth’s drive to make history relatable to students, to use the course to bridge things that happened “back then” to what we’re experiencing today.

Nowhere is this clearer than in an oral history assignment she assigns. In it, students find and interview someone at least two generations older than them about how they’ve used media throughout their lives and how those interactions have informed their worldview. In assignments such as these, she encourages people to research within their own families to uncover ways of relating to course concepts in deeply personal ways.

Because her students come from such diverse backgrounds and share in class what they find in assignments like these, the classroom becomes a place of both learning and sharing.

“I really try to focus on how the class can be as insightful as possible for the students,” she told me. And if that insight can be harnessed through something that students find more engaging than a long written assignment, perhaps it’s worth helping students connect with history by deemphasizing the role of the paper in assessing learning.