Michael Lewis

Reflections: 'This Class Will Write a Book': An Experiment in Environmental History Pedagogy

ON THE FIRST DAY of the spring semester, 2002, I introduced myself to the students in my new Local Environmental History course, and then I told them, "This class will write a book, The Environmental History of the Wicomico River. Each of you are now members of a research team, and over the course of the semester we will work together to determine what such a book should include, what sources we might use, and how to write it up." I explained that there would be no tests, and all assignments would be directly linked to gathering sources, writing and critiquing drafts, and reading secondary literature related to their chosen topics. Everything in the class would be oriented toward the students' central goal—writing their collective book.

Rationale

I HAD PLANNED this experimental course based upon two presuppositions: that one of the most effective strategies for learning history is to do history, and that undergraduate students can most easily become immersed in original historical research (gathering and using primary sources and promoting original arguments) when they work on local topics. Neither of these presuppositions is particularly radical, nor even controversial. But at least in my own teaching I have paid homage to these ideas more often in discussions with colleagues than in my classroom. While colleagues at your university and mine might complain that their historical sub-field cannot be studied through local history, all environmental historians live and teach in a landscape reflecting biological, geological, and human histories. We are fortunate that the methods of environmental history are, literally, grounded and oriented toward local case studies reflecting larger cultural trends or natural situations (culture and nature, of course, used advisedly). Students can use environmental history to analyze settlement, agriculture, urbanization, and resource use (to name a few strands of our discipline) literally anywhere—we have no excuse other than time and our lack of knowledge for not incorporating local history into our environmental history courses. Add to this the general truism that learning to write and think clearly is at the center of education, and there is a compelling pedagogical argument for encouraging, even requiring, undergraduate environmental history students to do original research on local topics.

In addition to a pedagogical rationale, there are also some pragmatic reasons for encouraging undergraduates to conduct local environmental history research. Many of our universities are located in communities far from the national-level scholarly gaze—in my case, Salisbury, Maryland, the unofficial capital of Delmarva (this last phrase, I am reasonably certain, has never before appeared in a scholarly journal). Students thus can actually create knowledge, develop local archives (or start them at the university library), collect oral histories, and have an impact on local debates and local communities' ways of understanding themselves and their histories. While clearly true for students in Salisbury, this is true even for students in, say, New York City, the unofficial capital of the world, where students still can identify people and landscapes whose stories need to be told. This applicability is both exciting to students and useful for the communities in which they work. It is also useful for universities struggling to integrate themselves into their surrounding communities and trying to move past the stereotype of the ivory tower.

Much more personally, encouraging students to conduct local environmental history research can allow faculty to maintain a different research focus while also working locally. Salisbury University, for example, had hoped that in hiring me they would get a scholar who would, over time, discover and share this region's environmental history. My research focus had been upon the global transmission of U.S. conservation science and policies, particularly in India, which prepared me only loosely to fill this local agenda in a part of the United States that I had never visited prior to my job interview. A finite amount of time can be devoted to research in any university position, even less at a teaching-oriented university. I have been able both to develop local environmental history resources and data, and to continue my prior, non-local, research interests by using my teaching time (preparation, class itself, student meetings, and grading) to supervise and foster local research.

For all of these reasons—pedagogical, community outreach, and maintaining non-local research interests while also working locally—classroom based student research in local environmental history is useful. This is what led me to that Local Environmental History classroom in January of 2002, and several startled students.

Choosing a Topic

I DID NOT KNOW the complete history of the Wicomico River before my course began, and I was not an expert in local history. Having lived in the area for a year and a half, though, I had become familiar with many local issues and features. Subscribing to the local newspaper had been an education in itself, with its heavy coverage of local concerns—from fisheries to agriculture to urban sprawl. In choosing the subject for this experimental course, I wanted something that would be relatively easy for the students to grasp as a "topic" and that was somewhat discrete in its boundaries. I wanted the topic to be important to the local community, but not to be so large that the students could not hope to describe it in a semester. I also wanted a topic that, despite my limited knowledge of local history, I could place into a larger national narrative with which I was familiar. The Wicomico River seemed to fit all of these criteria. This might hold true for other university classes as well—most U.S. communities are oriented around a stream or lake or river.

Figure 1. River View.
Though the water is deemed too polluted for swimming, the view is still scenic and riverfront property is the most desirable in Wicomico County.

Photo by author.

As rivers go, the Wicomico is not much. After meandering for a few miles through a small portion of southern Delaware and Wicomico County, Maryland, the river's headwaters combine at Salisbury, Maryland (all of these streams are dammed into small ponds and formerly were used for timber and grist mills, but are now valued for their role in creating pricey lakefront property). since the 1870s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has dredged the Wicomico River from the Chesapeake Bay to Salisbury, a stretch of about eighteen muddy miles. The Pocomoke River to the south is a state wild and scenic river, with spectacular canoeing through bald cypress lined banks (including a stretch owned by the Nature Conservancy). To the north, the Nanticoke River, the longest on the Eastern Shore, has spawned environmental protection groups in both Maryland and Delaware that actively work to maintain the river's health. Its mouth adjoins sections of Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, renowned for its birding. The Choptank River, further north, boasts a fine yacht harbor and a new luxury hotel for waterborne tourists on the Bay. In a region of great boating and fabulous rivers, the Wicomico is utterly indistinct. It even shares its name with a more famous river on the Western Shore of the Chesapeake—and that Wicomico River is a national wild and scenic river. At first glance, then, the Wicomico is hardly a river of empire.

Figure 2. Industrial Waterfront.
Tugboats await their barges at the navigation headwaters of the Wicomico, second only to Baltimore as the largest tonnage port in Maryland.

Photo by author.

For my class, though, the river was perfect. It passes within less than a mile of the university campus. It is intimately tied to the local economy, and the Salisbury port is the second largest in Maryland in terms of tons of materials received and shipped (following Baltimore, but ahead of cities such as Annapolis). The river has a long history of human use, from the Wicomicos who gave the river its name, to the English settlers who established Salisbury in the 1740s, to the farmers and timber barons who used the river to ship goods to Baltimore and beyond in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has seen resource overuse, as its once vibrant fishery has been decimated in recent decades (only one lonely commercial fisherman plied its waters in 2002). The Wicomico is the site of a nascent environmental movement, as sewage discharges into the river (which subsequently reach the Bay) have motivated both a grassroots political advocacy organization, "Stop Overflowing Sewers," and a volunteer river-monitoring program supported by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Wicomico Creekwatchers, which collects dozens of water-quality samples from the river every two weeks. It has been the subject of numerous U.S. Army Corps of Engineers studies and dredging projects (so there is a link to empire, after all!). Perhaps best of all, unlike its more famous brethren, nobody had written about the Wicomico River. Nearly anything my students wrote would be new. Minor rivers and creeks make for good undergraduate projects.

Course Structure

MY DEPARTMENT agreed to cap the course enrollment at fifteen students (I lost a couple in the first month and ended up with thirteen), and it was cross-listed as an upper-level history course and an elective course in our university honors program, as well as filling an elective requirement in our environmental studies minor. This brought together a diverse set of junior and senior students, including majors in biology, biochemistry, chemistry, business, political science, gender studies, English, elementary education, and history, as well as one university librarian working on a second master's degree in agricultural science (she received special permission from her university to take this course, and with some additional assignments, to count it toward her degree). The diversity of the group had the unanticipated benefit of making the students into an interdisciplinary team working together on a common topic. By bringing their different backgrounds to bear on writing an environmental history of the river, the students were able to model the interdisciplinary research that is at the heart of most good environmental histories. The class discussions were rich, and I could rely upon students to offer the biological or economic or sociological perspectives that I often would supply in my other history courses.

Because of their varied backgrounds, the students as a whole did not know history—their understanding of U.S. history was sketchy, and most had never heard of environmental history. Most did not know how to conduct historical research, and most had never written a significant history paper. Of course, I cannot always count on history majors knowing these things, either.¹ Thus, I spent the first month of this course with a set curriculum. I began by introducing the students to environmental history as a field of study. We then read three books addressing different aspects of the region's environmental history—Eastern Shore Indians of Maryland and Virginia, Bay Country, and Wye Island—and I tried to contextualize those books into a larger national narrative.² I gave the students an overview of the river itself, in the present. We took a van tour of significant sites along both banks and the headwaters of the river, which is short enough to see easily in a day. For a different perspective, we then went canoeing on the river. I also invited in guest speakers: a biologist from the university to talk about the ecology of the river, the Salisbury mayor to speak about the politics of the river, and a local writer, Tom Horton (author of Bay Country), to suggest how the students might think about studying and writing about the river.

At the end of the first month of classes, the students brainstormed about what their book should include, where and how to find sources, how to divide the material, and who would work on each section. I served as a moderator, but otherwise completely left these decisions up to the students. The only requirements I gave them were that they each had to write their own stand-alone paper (or chapter), that each of the chapters had to be part of a larger cohesive plan, and that they had to divide into four writing groups (of three or four members each, ideally but not necessarily linked by topic). I would have exercised a veto if necessary, but the students rose to the occasion and devised a strong plan of study.

At this point, the students began to feel much more comfortable with the class—they knew exactly what their assignment was, now—and I began to be much more nervous. The course schedule called for one more pre-planned assignment and due date (each student had to read and review one environmental history monograph, selected for its relevance to their chosen topic), but otherwise much of the control of the class passed to them. Again, I gave the students freedom to set the class agenda, within a set of requirements: they had to choose deadlines on which to have drafts due, understanding that once set, these due dates were no longer negotiable; they had to produce at least three drafts and then a final paper, with the third draft being completed no later than a particular date in the last few weeks of the semester; they had to offer written critiques of each of the drafts by the members of their writing group; they had to read the third drafts of every class member and devote two days of class to discussing these drafts; and the final book had to be turned in by the last day of final exams. Within those limits, I asked the students to plan the rest of the semester, based on what they thought would be the most efficient way to use the classroom as a laboratory and workshop for the production of their book. I have since learned that there is a well-developed literature on constructivist learning environments, in which students are encouraged to take responsibility for their education in student-run, project-oriented courses.³ At the time though, I was worried that the students would flounder without more direction. The students surpassed my expectations. Working by consensus they set a schedule with which they were happy, and they planned a series of workshop and brainstorming sessions that proved to be quite productive throughout the rest of the semester.

Technology played an important role in enabling the students to share information as they worked on their projects. My university supports Web-CT instructional technology, which makes it easy to set up a password-protected class website. The students used the website in three primary ways. First, because it was password-protected, I could place materials "on reserve" without infringing on copyrights. Second, a discussion board allowed the students to post questions, share bibliographic information, and communicate between classes (especially important in a Tuesday/Thursday class schedule, where five days pass between Thursday and Tuesday meetings). I have run discussion boards for other courses before, with moderate student enthusiasm, at best. In this course, where the students were working together on a common project, nearly every day brought multiple postings. Third, Web-CT made it easy for students to upload and download paper drafts and comments on drafts from any computer with Internet capability. Students loved being able to turn in or read drafts from home, any day of the week, twenty-four hours a day, with instant accessibility for their peers as well. Further, each reading group had its own private location for sharing text files, so that their critiques of peers' papers would not be read by anyone outside their group. I could monitor all of these postings and discussions. The students also appreciated being able to post questions for me and get answers before the next class or office hour. The students were not graded on their use of the discussion board (they all used it anyway), but they were required to post their papers and draft critiques. I found that the accountability of written draft critiques, posted for the other two or three members of their writing group to read (and me), resulted in a higher quality of paper work-shopping than I had seen in other courses, where student comments often tended toward shallow praise or perfunctory and obvious criticism.

In addition to using technology to facilitate the class, I used the lure of an audience to encourage the students to produce work that they could be proud of. The first out-of-class audience was an external reviewer. In keeping with the idea that the students were to produce a book, I told them that their third drafts would be sent by airmail to an environmental historian who did not know them. This reviewer would offer comments, as if the papers were a book being proposed for publication by a university press, and those comments (received back in one week) would then be used to make final revisions to their chapters. At that year's ASEH annual meeting, I went to paper presentations dealing with the history of rivers. Based on her presentation, I asked Rebekah Mergenthal, at that time finishing her dissertation at Chicago, if she would be willing to perform this function for my class (I also had a small honorarium of $250 to offer—in no way adequate recompense, but better than nothing). She graciously agreed to look at the student project in mid-April, when their third drafts would be done.

Mergenthal did far more than I could have hoped. At the end of the one week that we had agreed upon, she e-mailed me an eleven page single-spaced review—three pages reviewing the book as a whole, then a section on each chapter. I had asked her to ignore grammar (as I was also reviewing each draft, and making those sorts of comments), but to focus upon argument, sources, organization, and national context. The quality of her response is a testament to her own talent and generosity, but also, I suspect, is typical of the energy and dedication to pedagogy of many of our colleagues. The "external reviewer" was omnipresent in course discussions, before and after the review. The idea of a professional historian who was not their teacher reading and critiquing their work alternately thrilled and terrified the students. They told me time and again that this made the project "real." When Mergenthal's comments arrived, they pored over her suggestions and took them to heart. I also appreciated her comments—after three drafts, my own critiques were growing somewhat predictable to the students, and she helped me to see their work afresh. Their final papers clearly bore the imprint of her comments, and for the better.

I promised the students one other audience for their work. I told them I would submit the book to editors of the local Tidewater Press to see if they were interested in publishing the book. If they were not, I would post the book on the web. FrontPage makes web publishing fairly easy, and I could link the students' work to my own web page. One way or another, their work would be public. Tidewater turned the book down, so the book is currently available at http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~mllewis/local/index.htm. I know that their work has been used and read. By asking questions, digging around for materials, and bringing together sources that had never been combined before, the students created a local market for their writings—the people they interviewed and worked with were interested in what the students found and wanted to read the relevant chapters and sections. Local high school teachers have read and used the portions of the book dealing with pre-twentieth century history. Members of the Wicomico Creekwatchers also have used the book, and the local office of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation asked me to do a local presentation on the history of the river based upon the students' work (many of the students had graduated by that time, so it was not possible to bring the students back together for this presentation). I have assigned the book (over the Internet) in some of my courses. I regularly draw on the information the students uncovered (particularly on the geography of race and the river, as well as the politics of sewage) in my U.S. environmental history survey course, where I give local examples and use local field trips whenever I can.

I conducted one final experiment with the structure of this class. Although I would have to give the students grades at the end of the semester, I wrote no grades on any of their drafts or reviews. I still wrote copious comments on their work, but I did not assign it a letter grade. I told the students to think of this not as an assignment, but as the first project of the rest of their (non-graded) life. Their conscience would have to be their guide in "how good is good enough." Of course, this was artificial, as the students knew that their work still would be assigned a grade at the end of the semester based upon their timeliness in delivering drafts and comments and the quality of their work. (I also told the students that if any of them absolutely could not stand not knowing their grade thus far, they could ask me outside of class—no one did, in part because of peer pressure to pretend that they really didn't care about such artificial structures as grades.) The lack of grades on their drafts and reviews worked surprisingly well at producing excellent student writing. Perhaps because many of the students were honors students and unusually grade motivated, they were slightly desperate to make sure that they received an "A" for the course. Because their drafts were not being graded, they were not sure they had the "A" locked up, so they kept working hard throughout the semester. In truth, by their second draft, the better students in the class had already produced work that was as good as I had ever seen from students. Had I been grading their drafts, in all likelihood at least some of these students would have eased off. In the absence of grades, however, they kept pushing their work further, possibly interpreting my continuing comments as needed revisions for their hoped-for "A." By the end of the semester, with a couple of exceptions, the students had almost universally exceeded my expectations, and produced the best set of student papers I had seen. I am not convinced that this result is replicable. The two exceptions had the opposite sort of reaction to their peers. In the absence of a tangible indication that they were slacking off and not meeting my standards, they did not prioritize working on their papers when compared to other, more pressing, classes in which they knew just how dire their situations were. An ungraded paper just might have been good enough—a 47 in organic chemistry clearly was not.⁴

Take Two

THIS SPRING I taught a second version of my local environmental history course. Although the Wicomico had by no means dried up (metaphorically or otherwise), I chose to focus this second course upon agriculture in Wicomico County. Given my experience in the "river" course, I chronologically limited the "ag" course (as the courses have come to be known) to the years 1880-present.

Agriculture has dominated this region's history. When struggling to find relevance for Salisbury's history in the American Revolution, local historians often resort to such phrases as "the breadbasket of the Republic." The map of Wicomico County is littered with names that speak of eating, such as the small communities of Fruitland, Bivalve, and even Pittsville (once a central shipping location for peaches—though the pits of that noble fruit apparently have nothing to do with its name). If you type "Wicomico" into the New York Times electronic search engine, you will be inundated with articles about strawberries, peaches, pears, and the other fruits of Salisbury's fertile soil and long growing season. Following the railroad's arrival in 1860, Wicomico County served as a prime supplier of agricultural goods to Philadelphia, New York City, and even Boston. The Times' traveling agricultural correspondent reported breathlessly on the status of the strawberry crops and the health of the peach trees—in peak strawberry season special "Strawberry Express" trains would leave Salisbury, Fruitland, and Pittsville every evening at sundown, filled with the day's harvest, bound for the markets of the East Coast where they would be sold the next morning.

Throughout the twentieth century, local agricultural developments mirrored national trends with the growth of canning, debates about migrant labor, the rise of grain mono-crops, and the emergence of massive livestock operations (here, primarily poultry). The Perdue Corporation, headquartered in Salisbury, is the nation's third largest poultry producer, and Wicomico County is among the nation's leading poultry-producing counties. The current landscape of the county still reflects its agricultural roots—as one student from suburban Long Island famously declared in class, "It's a wasteland out there!" To many locals, however, the landscape reflects a far different kind of waste, as encroaching sprawl has eaten into the farmland at a staggering rate, visible even in the brief time since I moved to the area in the summer of 2000. (That year the census declared that only 383 people, of a total countywide population of 84,644, listed farming, forestry, or fishing as their primary occupation). As with the Wicomico River, then, agriculture provided an opportunity for students to do research that would be locally interesting and useful. In recognition of the political ramifications of an environmental history of local agriculture, the university Public Affairs and Civic Engagement group, working to get students involved in the local community, provided funding for the course, and will circulate the final report within the community.

Figure 3. Promoting Modern Agriculture.
An expert from the Tilghman Fertilizer Company passes on the newest techniques to a group of local farmers.

Photo courtesy of the Tilghman Fertilizer Company Records of the Edward H. Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History and Culture at Salisbury University, Salisbury, Maryland.

Modifying the Course Structure

THE AG COURSE was based upon the same pedagogical ideas as the earlier river course. The course structure though, was not identical; based upon an extensive survey of the students at the end of the first course, I made some modifications in the second iteration of the course.

All of the students in my river course felt that they had waited too long to begin their research. They also suggested that the required reading (which did not directly link to their research projects, but instead gave them local and national context) was too heavy, at four books in the first four weeks of class. While I have seldom found a student who felt that the reading load was "just right," in this case the students were asking for a reduction in reading general texts so that they could spend more time conducting primary-source research. Based on these comments (and with a big gulp), I assigned no monographs, and I reduced my introductory material from a month to a week. We had two class sessions (not counting the first day of class) in which we talked about two reading packets of articles—one introducing environmental history, and the other introducing local environmental history (including portions of Exploring the Chesapeake's Forgotten River: Perspectives on the Wicomico, the work of the river class). By their fourth class meeting, in the second week, the students were discussing archival materials that they had begun collecting.

For the next four weeks we alternated class sessions between discussions in which students shared their ideas and sources, and lectures by local experts (including a soil scientist, a local organic farmer who ran a Community Supported Agriculture program, and the vice president for Environmental Services from Perdue, Inc.). Before each of our source discussions, the students were required to post "research reports" on Web-CT, sharing a summary of their findings in an annotated bibliography form, with narrative explanations for some sources that they had found but not had time to investigate. The students also collected names for oral histories, but did not conduct the interviews.

At the end of this introductory five-week period the students had their "planning" class, in which they organized the rest of the semester, planned their final report, and divided the material. Unlike the river course, the students in the ag course already had developed a strong bibliography by this point. This made it easier for the students to choose what they wanted to work on and to plan what the final report could, reasonably, include. The students did not choose to make their initial due dates for their drafts any earlier than the first course, but they had a stronger research base for their first drafts.

Although I had not assigned them any monographs to read, I still wanted the students to understand the national context for their work. As the students planned the course schedule of deadlines and workshops, I asked them to include four class meetings that I would use for lectures. The lectures were closely based upon the books that I would have liked to assign; my goal was to give the students the national and local context that they were lacking. It felt somewhat strange to give a lecture to a class of ten, but the students agreed that they would rather take notes for four class periods than read the material I was summarizing. I gave the students citations for further information, and, in fact, this second class did a better job of placing their research in a national context than the first had done.

A promising difference in the ag course involved the university library. One of the reference librarians, Susan Brazer, had taken the river course. When she heard that I was offering a different version of the course, she suggested that she could join the class as a librarian-in-residence. She attended nearly every class session and was an invaluable participant in class discussions. She opened her office to the students and made her desk into a repository for photocopies, books, and finding aids. The students met with her outside of class with great regularity, and she spent hours teaching the students how to use reference materials and how to search for information. There is no question that the students benefited from Brazer's participation, and I did as well. Brazer used the course as an experiment in her own right. The students filled out surveys for her at the beginning and end of the semester, and she is using her experience in that class to propose a new way that reference librarians at our university could work with selected upper-level research courses.

Other differences between the two courses were more minor. The ag course was not cross-listed in the honors program, which meant that the average writing level of the students was somewhat less fluid, and the grade orientation was significantly less. The quality of the final research papers was just as high, though the addition of library support and more time for research might have helped with this. The class-size was slightly smaller, at ten students, but the students' majors were again diverse, including the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and education. I slightly modified my grading procedure, giving all of the students a mid-term grade with a narrative explanation (it seemed necessary as a spur to three students who were underachieving). This class, again, used an outside reviewer and Web-CT, both to good effect.

As with the first class, I was able to secure a small university grant for the course through the university Public Affairs and Civic Engagement group. This was useful in paying the external reviewer and purchasing some archival materials that were not otherwise available in our library (including, for example, the 1880 Agricultural Schedule for Wicomico County). It also funded my preparation for this class in the preceding semester, and had my department not been willing to limit the course enrollment it could have helped with that as well. This grant did have one additional requirement: The students had to convert their report into a ninety minute public presentation, which they delivered near the end of the term in conjunction with the Salisbury University Undergraduate Research Conference. This public presentation was surprisingly productive for the students. It forced them to consider how they could summarize their research in a few minutes to a general audience and thus helped to clarify their main points. By planning the presentation as a whole, they also realized where their research had gaps. Perhaps most importantly, they received public feedback that they were able to incorporate into their final research papers. One community member suggested that they had left out the importance of strawberry diseases in encouraging farmers to give up on berry crops; another pointed out that seafood canneries often would switch to tomatoes for a few weeks during the peak summer season. Several other audience members came up to students after the presentation and gave the students phone numbers, ideas, and the names of other people who might be able to offer advice on their research. This well-received public forum, nineteen days before their final papers were due, also helped to rekindle the students' enthusiasm for their final push.

The Applicability of this Experiment

I AM CONVINCED that encouraging students to conduct local environmental history research is a highly effective teaching strategy. Measured by the quality of the final papers, these two courses have produced the best student research and writing of any of my courses. The papers reflect a level of subtlety and sophistication in thinking about the past that I have seen only rarely in other student writings. A few of the papers in both courses would have been acceptable in graduate school. Keep in mind that the students doing this good work were usually not history majors! And while the best students in any of my classes produce good work, these local research courses have been most surprising in the quality of work produced by otherwise mid-level students who have either never been pushed before, or never been told that they can and will produce a paper that will be read by a larger audience. These students need more support in the research process than they can get in normal courses, but given that support, the students in my courses have produced well. My second class was eventually led by an elementary education major who registered for this class by mistake, decided to stick it out in spite of being terrified at writing a serious research paper, and eventually produced a solid twenty-two page paper. Students who were bright but lazy produced the worst papers in both courses, not students who were unable or unprepared.

Measured by the students' opinions of their work, these courses have been similarly successful. Their end-of-the-year course evaluations are the best I have received. In the narrative section of the evaluation, all of the students but one indicated that the course was the most demanding that they had had in college. At the same time, they all indicated that they would take the class again, if possible. Most of the students indicated that this class taught them more about writing and research than any of their other courses at college. One student told me "this is what I thought college would be like." Many students commented that they had realized that their chapters could be improved indefinitely; as one student wrote, "I am pleased with my final product, but not satisfied. ... This class has helped me write a good research paper, which I have never done before." The students, with a few exceptions, were proud of their chapters and thought that they represented their best work in college. They also commented extensively on the "team" aspect of the course, and how much they came to rely upon their peers: They worked hard to avoid being seen as a drag on the overall quality of the eventual cumulative book.

That said, I have not converted all of my upper-level courses into this format. My local environmental history course will continue to be taught as a research project, but I have not, for example, converted my U.S. Environmental History course into a local research project course (though I use local examples derived from student research in the local course to illustrate U.S. history). If I were to do so, the students probably would learn more about the craft of history, more about writing, and more about the specific topic upon which the class was working, and they would probably remember that material for a longer time. But they would never have the opportunity to get an overview of the larger national-level story. While I did give students in my ag course a series of four lectures, those lectures were geared toward (in this case) agricultural history, and I do not feel that the students in that class have as broad a framework for understanding U.S. environmental history as students in my survey course. I still feel that there is a virtue in providing students with a broader framework for understanding history; there is a role for survey courses that cannot be filled by research seminars.

My thinking on this is still somewhat in flux. What good is "covering" the material if the students only remember it for an exam and never internalize or use the information that is presented to them? Perhaps it would be worthwhile to cover slightly less material in my survey course, if I could incorporate a more significant research requirement. As one of my river students commented, in a lecture course "I believe I would have learned less about environmental history, and not felt as passionately about it." At the same time, I have had students in lecture courses who did internalize what they were learning, and who did learn in every sense of the word.

These are old debates, and I surely cannot answer them here. Ultimately, the deciding factor in keeping my U.S. environmental history course primarily a survey is not pedagogical, but practical. I cannot have all of my upper-level courses capped at fifteen students. Teaching a class of thirty students in the style that I have outlined here would not work. In attempting to compromise—to combine a survey course with a research course—I have yielded sometimes mediocre, sometimes abysmal, rarely brilliant, research papers. It is in this middle ground that I am working now: How can I combine the hands-on experience of a good research project in a survey course, in the midst of an otherwise heavy teaching load? The normal method of requiring a paper, but devoting little class time to research itself, works only for my best students, and even then it is inadequate. I did not really learn how to do research until I was in graduate school, and many of my peers had the same experience. I am convinced that if I can successfully integrate applied research as a central part of my survey course, not just as an additional requirement, it will make the course better, and the students will take more out of the course.

With only minor tinkering, I will continue to offer my local environmental history course as I have outlined it here—in the spring of 2006 I will focus either upon forests or barrier islands. I will decide after investigating research resources and local interest in these two topics. The combination of an applied end result, an external reviewer to give feedback, and a team-oriented project seems to motivate and encourage the students to take greater responsibility for their education and become active learners. I am persuaded that this course is the best one that I teach. Insofar as my goal is to teach skills, not just information, this course works. (Of course, it does teach information as well, though it is more narrowly focused.) I hope students can take the skills that they learn in this course and apply them in acquiring additional information outside of class.

The benefits of this course extend beyond the strictly pedagogical. Local community members and organizations, from members of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to local fishermen and farmers, have read parts or all of the students' work. The recently completed 2004 class report on agricultural change in Wicomico County over the last 120 years (Eating Delmarva: Agricultural Transformations in Wicomico County, 1880-Present) will be distributed by the university's public affairs outreach organization to local business and political leaders, so that they can better understand the changing role of agriculture—environmentally, socially, and economically—in this area. The students' research is public history, and it is transforming their local community.

And me? The information that the students have found has changed the way that I understand the region in which I live, and has provided me with countless examples to use in other courses that make national level stories locally relevant. I now teach environmental justice not just with Gary, Indiana, or Cancer Alley, but also with local chicken factories and swampy neighborhoods. It also has equipped me to do lectures on local history in the community. In the summer of 2004 I presented a lecture to Wicomico County secondary school teachers on tying local history to national history—the bulk of my presentation focused on material uncovered by my ag class on the development of Salisbury as an agricultural boomtown between 1880 and 1940. And through it all, I still am working on my non-local research agenda; I can still write about science and conservation, about wilderness and India.

Figure 4. Sewage Warning.
During heavy rains, storm runoff would inundate the Salisbury sewer system, causing raw sewage to be dumped into the river. The subject of vociferous local complaint from riverfront property owners and recreational boaters, the city has been working to separate its sewage and stormwater pipes.

Photo by Carrie Maase.

Michael Lewis recently has published Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1947–1997 (Ohio, 2004, 2003 in India), and is working on an edited volume on U.S. wilderness history. He is assistant professor of history and the director of the environmental issues program at Salisbury University, Maryland.

Notes

A brief version of this paper was presented at the 2004 joint meeting of the American Society of Environmental Historians and the National Council on Public History. The comments and ideas of my co-presenters and audience participants, particularly Thomas Lekan and Steven Corey, both of whom have conducted similar classes at their own universities, were useful in refining my ideas. The classes on which this essay is based were made possible by a Salisbury University Teaching and Learning Network Faculty Mentor grant to encourage experimentation in pedagogy and a Public Affairs and Civic Engagement Research Seminar grant. I also could not have taught these courses without the support of my departmental colleagues, all of whom encouraged me to take risks with my teaching—an essential assurance for any tenure-track faculty member.

^1. Our university requires that all students take two semesters of world civilizations in their freshman year, but those are general survey lecture courses. History majors take a proseminar course in their fourth or fifth semester that teaches basic research and writing skills, but some students prove remarkably resistant to internalizing that otherwise excellent course, and others begin taking upper-level courses before they have taken the proseminar.

^2. Helen Rountree and Thomas Davidson, Eastern Shore Indians of Virginia and Maryland, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997; Tom Horton, Bay Country. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Boyd Gibbons, Wye Island (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 1987).

^3. For an introductory overview, see David H. Jonassen, "Designing Constructivist Learning Environments," in Instructional-Design Theories and Models: A New Paradigm of Instructional Theory, Volume II, ed. Charles M. Reigeluth (Malhwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1999), 215–239.

^4. This discussion of student responses to the lack of grades is based both upon course evaluations and numerous discussions with students after the course was completed.

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