Textbooks and Teaching

The Collaborative Research Seminar

John Wertheimer

At the first meeting of my legal history seminar at Davidson College, I tell my ten students that our goal for the semester is simple: to produce a collaborative research paper that is so well conceived, so thoroughly researched, and so finely written that it gets published. Publication, of course, will not always be possible, though I will thank you not to mention this to my students. But whether or not my seminar accomplishes its stated goal of publication, I am confident that it will always achieve its unstated goal: to teach students—and remind me—how to research, write, and love history.1	1
Davidson College is a "highly selective" liberal arts school in North Carolina. It has been a good home to my collaborative research seminar. All of the school's 1,650 students are full-time; almost all live on campus. History is a popular major here, and law a popular career choice. Attracting good, hardworking students to my legal history seminar has not been difficult.	2
I originally conceived the collaborative research project as a mere training exercise to prepare students for what I thought would be the seminar's capstone: individual research papers. Walking—and talking—through a single research project in the term's first half, I thought, would prepare students to write papers of their own thereafter. Teach the flock to fly together, then watch them disperse and soar.	3
But a funny thing happened on the way to the individual term paper: the flock became so fond of their collaborative project—and each other—that they refused to separate. They pleaded with me to drop the individual assignment so that they might continue collaborating. I feigned reluctance but was inwardly delighted. I had already noticed that collaboration had ignited a passion for history usually restricted to honors students and departmental groupies. What is more, I too had unexpectedly fallen for our topic (a 1931 arson case involving a group of young, white, female inmates who torched their state-run "training school" to escape its horrors) and did not fancy saying goodbye to it just yet. I agreed to stick with the group project and have never looked back.	4
I have now taught my seminar four times. Each year my students and I explore a different episode from North Carolina's legal history. In addition to the arson case described above, we have studied a 1914 challenge to a Winston, North Carolina, city ordinance mandating racial residential segregation; the Reconstruction-era prosecution of a black man and a white woman for "fornication," even though the couple was legally married; and a depression-era community's female-led efforts to shut down Greenwich Village, a bawdy roadhouse that had opened in its midst.2 I am already looking forward to next year.	5
In what follows, I will discuss organizational detail, wherein lies the devil of the collaborative research seminar or of any effort to teach outside the box. To start, I offer three general suggestions. First, trust your students. Motivate, coordinate, but do not dominate their efforts. Second, be flexible. No matter how well-crafted your syllabus is (and craft it as well as you can), be prepared to make midstream modifications. Third, be as committed to the group project as you expect your students to be. They will make the course a top priority only if they see you doing so.	. . .