Readings

Pedagogy and Place: Merging Urban and Environmental History with Active Learning

Steven H. Corey

Providing students with opportunities to think and act like historians is a rewarding pathway to the past. Both urban and environmental history in particular lend themselves nicely to hands-on approaches that link the classroom with tangible examples of historical events and trends through a pedagogy of place. In an age where few students have any direct experience with, or even aware­ness of, the once-common sights, sounds, and smells of the industrial city, so-called active learning models allow students to pose as firsthand investigators, observers, and interpreters by examin­ing their own backyards. The benefits of merging urban history and environmental history with active learning, and with each other, extend far beyond the city limits; they are also an effective way to explore suburban, rural, and even global stories often overlooked in traditional approaches to teaching.

Since the early 1990s, active or inquiry-based education has received a great deal of attention from those who argue that university campuses are dominated by passive modes of instruction. Over the same period of time, both urban history and environmental history have again blos­somed, and yes, even cross-pollinated, as vibrant subfields within the historical profession as witnessed through numerous domestic and international conferences and lively scholarly publi­cations. While this article does not make any claims as to the shortcomings of lecture courses—quite the contrary since I find them often fun and rewarding to teach—or brash statements on the promise of urban environmental history as the discipline’s salvation, it does offer examples on how to infuse the undergraduate curriculum with exercises that allow students and faculty to learn collaboratively from local sources.

Every place has a natural history and, from the earliest human settlement, a potentially rich social history. While large cities have easily identifiable built environments, all forms of settle­ment contain features shaped by the interaction of people and natural ecosystems that reflect economic, political, social, and cultural change over time. All municipalities large and small have governmental systems and structures that produce policies and official records for study. Most medium to large cities, as well as numerous smaller communities, have their own historical societies, public libraries, and scholarly institutions that house these and other primary docu­ments in local history collections. Most importantly, all inhabited areas contain people whose stories will interest students and illuminate a region’s past. As such, history at the local level is ripe for undergraduate investigation given the right opportunity, encouragement, and thoughtful supervision from instructors.

While there are numerous definitions of active learning, at base they all seek to enhance the educational experience through innovative and engaging pedagogy that stresses inquiry from a student’s own questions and inquisitive nature rather than top-down transmission of knowledge by authority figures. The most celebrated call for active learning in higher education is the 1998 report Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities, released by the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University. In addition to criticizing hierarchical instruction, the report calls for an academic bill of rights that guarantees undergraduates, even those at small colleges, opportunities for intellectual and cre­ative development through hands-on, inquiry-based education.1 While not everyone agrees with the assumptions and findings of the Boyer Commission, active learning has become popular across the academic spectrum with models varying considerably, even within the same disci­pline. For example, a sampling of articles on the method in history and history-related courses shows that students: crawl around Civil War and Revolutionary Era battlefield sites near their University of South Carolina Spartanburg campus; conduct oral histories in a Detroit neighbor­hood forty miles from their classrooms at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor for use in a theatrical production performed by urban high school students at a community improv company; and, for a medieval studies course at Augsburg College, experience what a university classroom was like in the Middle Ages by wearing robes, reciting greetings and blessings in Latin, and studying from a codex chained to the library’s reference desk.2

In a broader sense, such inquiry-based education is yet another form of experiential learning pioneered by John Dewey and others over a century ago. The most commonly institutionalized form of experiential education today are service learning programs that integrate community service with instruction and reflection to enhance learning, instill civic responsibility, and reinforce bonds between students, their school, and the outside world.3 To keep things simple, I employ a hybrid approach to active learning that blends the spirit and recommendations of the Boyer Com­mission with opportunities for local research and community service that replicate my own educational training in public history and interests in urban and environmental policy.

A Public History Path

James Axtell contends that the biggest mistake we history teachers can make is not to engage the curiosity and imagination of our students with experiences that initially drew us into history. In brief, Axtell’s solution is to treat students like fledgling historians by exposing them to primary sources as soon as possible and encouraging them to develop historical thinking by having them produce histories in a variety of expressive formats.4 Although captivated by history at an early age, my own submersion into the profession mirrors Axtell’s emphasis on learning by doing. I first felt the power of place and the thrill of history firsthand the summer between my sophomore and junior years at the University of Rhode Island (URI) while working as a tour guide for the Newport Historical Society in Newport, Rhode Island. Assigned to the Great Friends Meeting House, I researched and presented my own interpretations of social and religious life in that once-bustling colonial Rhode Island seaport (mercifully, period costume was optional). I remained at URI to pursue a master’s degree in history and then served as a research assistant on an historical investigation of public access to the Newport shoreline under the direction of Elaine Forman Crane (Department of History, Fordham University). From the start of this project, I was capti­vated by the fact that colonial and nineteenth-century land evidence records, maps, photographs, and court proceedings could actually shape the debate on what was then—and remains to this day—a contentious public policy issue.

After a brief stint as a title examiner in a real estate law firm (which, thankfully, convinced me not to be an attorney), I entered the graduate program in public history at New York Univer­sity (NYU) where I remained to earn a doctorate in American social history. Like many other teaching assistants at NYU, I held down a series of other part-time jobs to pay the rent. One of those positions was with the New York City Department of Sanitation helping that agency write its official history. Garbage was a hot topic in the late 1980s and 1990s and though the bulk of my graduate coursework was in social history (and my advisor, David Reimers, an immigration historian), I soon realized that a dissertation on the history of solid waste management in New York City would be a unique opportunity to combine my interests in urban and environ­mental policy. While finishing the dissertation, I fulfilled the standard circuit of full- and part-time adjunct positions in New York and then was back in Rhode Island teaching American history and Western civilization. At the same time, I also served as research curator for the exhibition Garbage! The History and Politics of Trash in New York City on display at the New York Public Library, November 1994 to February 1995, where I had the privilege to interact with noted public health, urban, social, and environmental historians such as the exhibition’s Guest Curator Elizabeth Fee, as well as Joel Tarr, Danny Walkowitz, Michael Wallace, and the late John Duffy.

After the completion of the Garbage! exhibit, I joined the interdisciplinary Department of Urban Studies at Worcester State College in Worcester, Massachusetts where I have taught urban, environmental, and social history and public policy for the last thirteen years. In retrospect, my progression to Worcester State was natural given the fact that the department specifically wanted a social historian who worked on environmental issues in an urban setting. Equally important, the school needed someone willing to pursue their own academic interests while maintaining the arduous burden of a four-course-per-semester teaching load (albeit with limited opportunities for course reductions through alternative administrative assignments). Unlike traditional history departments, which might have just one or two undergraduate courses in urban and/or environmental history, all forty-one classes in my department’s undergraduate catalogue (we have a separate graduate program in nonprofit management) are urban, with special emphasis on his­tory, public administration, social work, and human services. With just four full-time undergraduate professors teaching an average of 325 students a semester (with roughly seventy-five majors), it is no surprise that my regular rotation now stands at nine separate courses—thankfully, I switch most of these on and off with my department colleague Lisa Krissoff Boehm, who is similarly trained. Needless to say, finding interesting and productive ways to shift the burden of instruction away from traditional lectures and reading-intensive seminars to active learning projects and student-centered research has been one of my top priorities.

Discovering Worcester, Discovering Urban Studies

The most common question people have when they hear that I teach urban studies is, quite natu­rally, “What is urban studies?” After a pregnant pause I usually start off by saying it is a field of study that uses perspectives from different disciplines to understand the nature of urban life. If I have not lost them at that point, I then stress how it is a hands-on approach to the way most people live in the Western world and increasingly across the planet. And if that doesn’t work, I just tell them I teach American urban and environmental history. That usually does the trick since most people find the history of cities and landscapes, especially places they are familiar with, to be tangible and interesting. That same line of thinking pretty much describes how I came to understand the field of urban studies and the use of local history to discuss larger trends.

When I interviewed for my position at Worcester State, I (evidently) made a strong case for using the local community as an urban laboratory. Once hired, I had to figure out how to make that pedagogical commitment a reality. However, like most of my students who have been raised in central Massachusetts, I knew very little about Worcester when I began teaching (except how to wind through the southeastern part of the city to get onto the Massachusetts Turnpike). What I did know came from Roy Rosenzweig’s classic Eight Hours for What We Will. Despite being an essential read in graduate school, I soon discovered that few people in and around the city had have ever heard of the book and that very little scholarly work on Worcester’s recent past has been published. I was quickly brought up to speed by my department colleague, the late Vincent “Jake” Powers, whose own innovative research on nineteenth-century Irish immigration and the Blackstone Canal is an important starting point for all serious investigations of the city.5 Most of what I have learned subsequently about urban life in central Massachusetts has come from student research projects, most notably those on community redevelopment and toxic-waste remediation as discussed below.

The level of active learning within my courses depends largely on whether they are designed as surveys or more advanced specialized classes. My three surveys, “Introduction to Urban Stud­ies,” “American Metropolitan Evolution,” and “Environmental Systems and Public Policy” serve as basic immersions into the fields of urban studies, urban history, and environmental history respectively. As such, they are primarily content driven with small amounts of active learning, usually done within the classroom setting. Whereas my most frequently offered intermediate and advanced courses, “Analysis of Urban Systems,” “Public Policy and Environmental Issues,” and the “Research Seminar in Urban Studies” are active learning intensive since they are designed to build from content and allow students the ability to hone their analytical skills through individual and group research projects. While other classes fall somewhere in between, for brevity’s sake, I will compare and contrast “Introduction to Urban Studies” and “American Metropolitan Evolu­tion” with “Public Policy and Environmental Issues” and “Analysis of Urban Systems.”

“Introduction to Urban Studies” is my department’s bread and butter. It serves as the main recruitment tool for the major and a general education requirement for every other student. Sec­tions fill up quickly during preregistration with most maxing out at thirty-five to forty students. The class itself provides a broad interdisciplinary overview of urban life using essential readings from the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, geography, and political science found in popular anthologies such as Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout’s The City Reader (now in its fourth edition from Routledge). After a few weeks of lecture and class discussion on selec­tions from the City Reader that lay out the theoretical and historical foundations of the course, students present their own interpretations of primary documents from noted reformers such as Jacob Riis and Jane Addams, as well as more contemporary government and nonprofit reports on housing, hunger and food insecurity, urban renewal, and other engaging topics. Students do ven­ture outside of the classroom with an assignment that requires them to select a prominent course theme and compare it with a pressing issue that currently confronts their hometown and/or commu­nity where they live. Students then present their findings in the form of a brief paper (PowerPoint or other multimedia formats are also accepted) and a formal class presentation that inevitably transforms the course into a week or two of lively discussions on topics ranging from urban sprawl and inadequate funding of public education to illegal immigration.

My version of “American Metropolitan Evolution” follows the same overall format although it is strictly a history course often cross-listed as “American Urban History” through the Depart­ment of History and Political Science (which provides for a class of thirty to thirty-five students nicely balanced between urban studies and history majors). During the last few years I have used Raymond Mohl’s The Making of Urban America (now entering a third edition from Scholarly Resources Press), along with Roy Rosenzweig’s Eight Hours for What We Will and Thomas O’Conner’s The Hub: Boston Past and Present as core texts in addition to those that I rotate with other members of the department to avoid excessive overlap.6 These three works provide excel­lent case studies (with two of them dealing directly with Massachusetts) and also illustrate how different types of historical scholarship (an anthology, a research monograph, and a broad narra­tive synthesis) treat urban development.

Written assignments for “American Metropolitan Evolution/American Urban History” are also more frequent and substantive than for “Introduction to Urban Studies.” Students are intro­duced to the basics of formal scholarly research (especially via the Internet and the college library’s electronic databases) by selecting a North American city not widely discussed in class or covered in the readings and relating its evolution to key course themes. In another paper, I have them perform just the opposite in terms of research by telling them to leave their laptops at home and explore Worcester by car, foot, or other means to find evidence of its former multieth­nic, working-class, and industrial past as described in Rosenzweig’s Eight Hours for What We Will. Surprisingly, many students have a hard time with this assignment since they cannot find answers in the library or a website and must think for themselves. They also tend to look for literal examples of social conflict over parks, temperance, and leisure rather than at larger ves­tiges of socioeconomic status, ethnic mobility, and economic transformation of the urban landscape. To help bridge the gap, I encourage them to think about why this part of Worcester’s very recent history seems so obscure given the tremendous impact that the struggle between upper-class hegemony and working-class agency has had on the political, social, and cultural nature of the city and their own families.

Having undergraduates experience the city firsthand in a reflective manner is an essential com­ponent for my intensive active-learning courses; especially given the fact that few of my traditionally younger students (those under twenty-three) have ventured beyond the comfort zone of where they grew up and tend to be afraid of certain neighborhoods that adults have repeatedly told them to avoid. “Public Policy and Environmental Issues” and “Analysis of Urban Systems” work well to challenge widely held assumptions about how and why Worcester and its neighborhoods have developed. These two classes usually have enrollments of about twenty-five students per section and, particularly because they are not surveys that must cover large amounts of required material, they have evolved into lecture/workshop hybrid courses where students collaborate in teams that use the larger Worcester metropolitan area as a sourcebook.

Before going any further, I must briefly mention that my department requires all majors to complete a rigorous “Research Seminar in Urban Studies” in their junior or senior year. Lisa Krissoff Boehm and I teach this course as a capstone social history research seminar that builds off content and research techniques introduced incrementally in lower-level urban studies classes. The ultimate goal of the seminar is to have students produce their own original research paper on an urban studies topic of their own selection. Although I consider such a course to be the ultimate example of active learning, it is hardly a departure from what is—or certainly should be—required to graduate from most undergraduate history, social science, or interdisciplinary studies programs. As such, the rest of this article will deal with what is generally missing from the undergraduate curriculum, the integration of active learning into more traditional lectures or advanced courses which, in my case, specialize in urban and environmental history.

Surveying the City: Brownfields

Intended as the sequel to the environmental history survey, “Public Policy and Environmental Issues” is taught every other spring semester and examines the role of government regulatory agencies. As such, the class lends itself nicely to hands-on investigations of local environmental controversies, as well as in-class simulations of how public policy is made and implemented. During the spring of 1997, a student who also served on the board of a local environmental edu­cation organization suggested that we study so-called “brownfields,” or properties with some level of toxic and hazardous contamination that may hinder economic development, as a way to understand the history of pollution regulation and remediation. Her idea was a success and since then the course has become a popular offering that even fulfills requirements for the Department of Geography’s environmental studies concentration.

From the first class meeting, students are told that they will have to do three things in addition to assigned readings and exams: work collaboratively in teams, conduct research off campus, and formally present their work at a campus forum and/or a poster session at the college’s annual celebration of undergraduate research. To ease their initial anxiety, I pass out a copy of a confer­ence paper I delivered on teaching the same course as an experiment in active learning between 1997 and 2000.7 Most students are intrigued that their experiences can be the subject of serious discussion and scholarly reflection. They are also excited that their performance can actually shape how the course is run now and in the future. Before they get the chance to become too full of themselves, however, I remind them that they must first obtain a solid foundation on the evolution of environmental policy and the rise of public awareness over hazardous and toxic waste. Among the most successful readings in this regard have been Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Andrew Szasz, Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice, Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: A Scientist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, and Richard Hofrichter (ed.), Reclaiming the Environmental Debate: The Politics of Health in a Toxic Culture.8 And while I usually save more historical overviews for the environmental survey, I occasionally assigned selected works from William Cronon, John Cumbler, Carolyn Merchant, Martin Melosi, and others to balance out more tedious and dry aspects of policy formation. Not to leave popular culture aside, I also spice up the class by showing excerpts from documentaries or Hol­lywood environmental justice classics such as Erin Brockovich (2000) or A Civil Action (1998), the latter based on Jonathan Harr’s bestselling novel of the same title (which also is a popular reading assignment in lieu of the movie), dealing specifically with Woburn, Massachusetts.9

A few weeks into the semester I conduct a special class on how to research brownfields from the Internet and local sources. Over the last decade, government agencies and nonprofit organi­zations have made registries of hazardous-waste locations available online so that it is relatively easy to find brownfields anywhere across the country (urban and rural areas alike) for investiga­tion. My students are particularly shocked when they see just how many entries can be found on the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) searchable site database; Worcester alone has 1,150 (officially called 21E sites), although many of them are multiple list­ings for the same general piece of property or a reported spill of potentially hazardous material such as petroleum, no matter how small the volume.10

After showing students what previous classes have done, they then select their own brown­fields for the semester. Not surprisingly, students gravitate toward “sexy” sites, that is, the most toxic and/or well known ones such as large abandoned factories, hospitals, playgrounds, and K-12 schools. As a class we narrow down the list to three or four locations that promise to yield enough material for papers and presentations. Next, five “task teams” are created to divvy up various steps in the processes of research and assessment: the first conducts site histories on each brown­field; the second investigates the degree of contamination and remediation status of each site using official government records; the third assesses potential risks to public health; a fourth documents the physical, social, and economic conditions of each brownfield and its surrounding neighborhood; and the fifth explores future redevelopment plans and options for each site. Although there is considerable overlap, each group starts off with a clearly defined mission. I have also switched the process whereby students are divided into three or four teams around a specific brownfield, with each conducting all five tasks themselves. Although this approach can be equally productive, it can also produce spotty results if one team has stronger (or weaker) researchers and/or a site with less material than expected.

Those in charge of site histories start with visits to the college library, the Worcester Historical Museum, and the Worcester Public Library to find as much information as possible on the past use of each property (given the scope and nature of the American Antiquarian Society, I only allow students to go there if absolutely necessary). Particularly helpful are city directories, news­paper clipping files, old insurance maps, city planning and zoning maps, as well as neighborhood and manufacturing histories (often one and the same) that were quite popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, commonly written for the very same companies that owned the site in question. If these repositories yield little information on a particular site, students are directed to official government sources that deal with ownership and building use, specifically tax assess­ment and land evidence records. As each history unfolds, students often find themselves conducting (mostly informal) oral histories with people in or close to their families who have worked, lived, or otherwise interacted with the brownfield in the past. In this regard, the work of the site history group often overlaps with those investigating the condition of each site and the surrounding neighborhood. Although students are reluctant at first to cross boundaries, I encourage teams to collaborate and share information to help ease the research burden.

In terms of uncovering the actual level of contamination and details on the remediation status for each brownfield, students in the second task team must make an appointment to view indi­vidual case files at the DEP regional office in downtown Worcester. Having a regional office in the same city as the college is a distinct advantage since these files are a virtual treasure trove containing land surveys, inventories of hazardous materials, and ground-testing analysis by licensed site professionals (LSP), as well as inquiries from potential buyers and real estate develop­ers. For most students, this is the first time they have ever encountered primary sources in the form of official government correspondence and reports at the municipal level. There is no better way to show students how private sector contractors and government officials go about their daily jobs than by sorting through this material firsthand.

At the same time, though, students are almost always overwhelmed by the amount of informa­tion they uncover and commonly have difficulty understanding the technical jargon of LSPs and the wording of legal instruments, particularly consent orders and condemnation decrees. As such, I encourage students to make sample copies of these materials and share them in class where we try to figure out the most salient points of these documents. Reports on toxicity levels and area contamination are particularly important for the third task team in charge of assessing public health risks. If I am lucky, usually one or two science majors or minors end up taking the class and jump at the chance to apply their knowledge of chemistry, biology, and even hydrology as part of this research group. Members of the third group also consult local and state health depart­ment records as well as the website for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Particularly useful is the ATSDR’s Toxic Substances Portal, which provides detailed information on how toxins affect human health.11 DEP files are also vital for the fifth task team in charge of assessing redevelop­ment plans for each brownfield. Members of this fifth group also examine local newspaper, news magazine, and business journal articles for stories on the activities of major real estate develop­ers in the city. Given the popularity of brownfields as an engine of urban renewal across the country, it not surprisingly that there are usually several articles in the local media that address at least one of the specific sites in question each semester.

While DEP records and newspaper sources provide a great deal of authoritative information, students are eager to conduct their own independent investigations of each site and its surround­ing neighborhood. As such, members of the fourth task team are commonly joined by others in the class when venturing out into the field to take notes, photographs, and/or videos of brownfields. Over and over again, students have noted that this is the most exciting part of the research process—and the entire class—since they are witnessing firsthand and preserving with their cameras a slice of the city’s industrial past before it is lost to urban renewal. Students are equally interested in documenting the larger landscape that surrounds each brownfield, especially factors that impact the quality of life in an area such as vandalism, substandard housing, illegal dumping, and other signs of environmental injustice. After the physical conditions have been surveyed, students examine census records, planning department documents, and an array of state and municipal information on schools and social services in the area to provide a social portrait of the neighborhood for use by the rest of the class.

Once the bulk of the research has been completed, I remind students that they must think about how to make their work accessible to a larger audience. Although I require each student to hand in their own individual research paper, they also take part in group presentations or poster ses­sions held on campus at the end of the semester. The first four times I taught “Public Policy and Environmental Issues” as a brownfields class, I worked with students to organize a forum at the end of each semester called “A Toxic Tour of Worcester.” These sessions were run along the lines of public history workshops whereby students provided brief overviews of each task team’s find­ings using slides, videos, and other visuals to explain each site’s history, level of contamination, and future reuse plans. The “Toxic Tours” were held during the regular class meeting period and were relatively well attended by other students, faculty, and interested members of the larger col­lege community (averaging between thirty to fifty people per forum).

One drawback to the “Toxic Tours,” however, was the fact that they consumed a great deal of preparation time, especially since students were generally nervous about their presentations and I insisted that we use class sessions to conduct a series of rehearsals. Given the fact that roughly 80 percent of Worcester State undergraduates are commuter students, most with multiple part-time (or even full-time) jobs, using the class period to run through their presentations was the only way to ensure they would be ready for the public forums. To minimize this time drain, I now limit course enrollment to no more than twenty-five students (down from an average of thirty) and take advantage of a new campus-wide initiative that showcases undergraduate research with a special one-day conference held at the end of the spring semester. Instead of every task team taking part in this conference, I allow only those with the most fully developed research projects to present in the form of a poster session. To keep my original goal of having everyone present material, I now conduct a series of in-class simulations whereby all students assume the role of a stakeholder in the brownfield remediation process and use the material previously gathered by the five research task teams to form opinions and policy positions on a specific redevelopment proposal.

For example, one semester I had students select a brownfield site then divided them into five role-playing groups: elected leaders (city counselors, state representatives, and one U.S. Repre­sentative); outraged neighbors (who assumed the Not-In-My-Back-Yard or NIMBY persona); government regulators such as DEM and local health officials; private sector LSPs who conduct site inspections and testing; and finally, private real estate developers. The class naturally picked one of the “sexiest” sites in the city, the largely defunct city airport which, despite a new $15.7 million passenger terminal, has no regularly scheduled commercial service and is listed as a 21E site because of the presence of aviation fuels and other chemicals in the soil. To get things started, I charged the real estate development team to come up with a plan for site reuse based on other proposals and successful remediation projects across the county studied during the course of the semester. Their idea, although initially seen by myself and many others in the class as a bit far-fetched, was to transform the entire airport into a large amusement park, complete with a rollercoaster, Ferris wheel, and a waterslide. The plan even called for the inclusion of high-profile chain restaurants and sports bars in the passenger terminal to take advantage of that building’s stunning views of Worcester and, when the weather is clear, Boston off in the far distance. Stu­dents in the remaining groups were charged with using the material generated by the research task teams to shape the arguments and actions of their assigned characters at a mock public hearing.

Role playing turned out to be an excellent way to highlight the interconnected nature of research since everyone in the class was dependent on the work of others for specifics on the level of con­tamination, the cost and legal responsibility for site clean-up, the demographic makeup of the surrounding residential neighborhood, and actual plans for the park. I assumed the role of modera­tor and after a slow start (no one was really sure how much acting needed to go into their roles), the room became electric as students applied the readings on environmental history and public policy from earlier in the semester and the research of the task teams to the plan in question. The mock hearing lasted two whole class periods (it could have gone on longer) and students responded better than I expected to issues relating directly to the site’s past use, its level of contamination, and the impact of remediation and construction of an amusement park on public health, the city’s economy, and the overall quality of life in the neighborhood. Most exciting was the fact that those who were usually shy during regular class discussions generally outperformed others. I even found myself second-guessing my initial opinion on the plan based on arguments presented in class. Although this particular simulation involved a hypothetical proposal, it was grounded in the facts surrounding an actual brownfield site and other real-world circumstances that allowed students to merge their own creative energies with basic social science research techniques and historical inquiry. While the exercise is certainly not appropriate for all history courses, it is one way to make undergraduates feel more comfortable with highly technical information while at the same time showing them how the past can help explain and even shape public policy.

Institutional Collaboration: Downtown Success and Neighborhood Pitfalls

Allowing students to make their own connections between and assessments about the relationship of a region’s history to contemporary urban affairs also underscores my approach to “Analysis of Urban Systems,” usually offered in the fall semester. Despite its dry and somewhat intimidating title, most students enjoy this class since it examines an array of government, nonprofit, and private-sector activities designed to sustain and enhance urban life by combing advanced social science theory with actual case studies close at hand. In fact, I am usually able to use many of the same resources for “Analysis of Urban Systems” that I do for the brownfields class and others with active learning components based in local history research. In contrast to my environmental history and policy courses, “Analysis of Urban Systems” also provides greater flexibility in choos­ing semester research projects that reflect current urban events, trends, and public-policy debates that directly impact and interest undergraduates. This course also provides ample opportunities for institutional collaboration and service learning activities with organizations interested in documenting and shaping the current transformation of the urban landscape. The results, however, can vary considerably and illustrate the need to pay attention to how students approach assigned tasks and overall course agenda.

Between 1997 and 2003, “Analysis of Urban Systems” focused on the tremendous changes that were occurring with the redevelopment of downtown Worcester and upgrades to the region’s transportation infrastructure. During this same period, my home city of Providence, Rhode Island experienced a similar, although far more extensive and widely heralded urban “renaissance” that my colleague Mark Motte of Rhode Island College also chose to have his geography undergradu­ates examine firsthand. Given the many similarities between our students, our (state) colleges, and the two cities (former manufacturing centers that vie for the title of second-largest city in New England) within an hour’s drive of each other, we decided to collaborate in examining urban renewal at the local level through active learning.

This collaborative version of “Analysis of Urban Systems” ran as a cross between the more general historical and theoretical overviews presented in “Introduction to Urban Studies” with the intense hands-on research of “Public Policy and Environmental Issues.” The first month or so was taken up with lectures and select readings on post-World War II urban renewal with a special emphasis on downtown revitalization and its impact on surrounding neighborhood life. Professor Motte and I came up with a series of common readings that included: selections from the classics Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans; more recent academic works like Jon Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985, Janet Abu-Lughod, From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York’s Lower East Side, Larry Bennett, Neighborhood Politics: Chicago and Sheffield, and Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit; plus popular treatments of urban forms such as Joel Garreau’s Edge City: Life on the New Frontier.12

We then had students examine a handful of contemporary redevelopment projects taking place in their own city through research task teams similar to those established for “Public Policy and Environmental Issues.” We even scheduled three meetings per semester with both classes com­bined, one in the form of a field trip to downtown Providence and an inner-city neighborhood, the second a tour of the same features in Worcester, and the final in the form of a joint presentation called “A Tale of Two Cities,” which alternated between the Worcester State and Rhode Island College campuses each year. This experiment in institutional collaboration and active learning was quite rewarding since students had the opportunity to witness and analyze the transformation of two cities firsthand. As expected, they thoroughly enjoyed visiting each other’s downtown and were quick to point out both parallels and differences between each city’s development and plans for future growth. Most rewarding was the opportunity to walk through residential areas most students had never seen before, even if they were located in their own city, and meet community organizers and others working to enhance the quality of life in these neighborhoods.

These annual “A Tale of Two Cities” exchanges were well worth the extra effort in coordinat­ing the syllabi of two separate classes, organizing transportation between each city, and securing appropriate venues for the joint presentations of student research. Needless to say, our home col­leges were excited by the occasionally favorable publicity we received in the campus and local press. After six years, though, the interest and hype surrounding the redevelopment of each city’s downtown began to wane. As such, Professor Motte and I decided to finish our collaboration with an article for PS: Political Science and Politics that reviewed and assessed the active learn­ing process we employed for “A Tale of Two Cities.”13

I then turned the focus of “Analysis of Urban Systems” toward the impact of the red-hot real estate market on residential life in lower-income neighborhoods. My students were also inter­ested in this topic and became excited when I informed them that we would be working with a local Worcester community development corporation (CDC) in locating vacant lots suitable for building new affordable housing. I originally thought that having students work with a CDC would be a rewarding way for them to apply urban renewal theories and practices covered in class to their own backyards. I also thought that if successful, the collaboration could evolve into a long-term service learning program where my department would assist this particular CDC with its long list of research needs. However, not everything went according to plan and I was forced to reconsider this particular project to accommodate the concerns of students about the ethical nature of their research. Given the delicate interpersonal style of community organizing and local politics in Worcester (or any city for that matter), I have decided not to provide the actual name of the CDC we worked with this one particular semester. Members of my depart­ment have worked closely with this organization for many years and even though this particular project had its kinks, we still enjoy a productive relationship. Therefore, the experiences dis­cussed below are meant to be a cautionary tale about potential pitfalls in relying on past successes and the desire to promote the “greater good” when implementing active-learning projects.

At first everything worked as planned with class visits to the CDC headquarters and several guided field trips through the neighborhood by CDC staff members. As in other versions of the class, once students were finished with their scholarly background readings, they were divided into research teams, this time to examine the neighborhood’s history, survey the physical condi­tion of streets, buildings, and other infrastructure assets, to locate and identify vacant lots, and finally to research the ownership and tax status of those lots large enough for new housing units. About halfway through the course I noticed a great deal of tension between team members in charge of lot research and their general lack of enthusiasm for reporting back to the rest of the class. After several failed attempts to rekindle their interest we finally had “the talk” to figure out what was happing. Much to my surprise, I discovered a general perception with about half the class (which totaled twenty-eight students) that they were being used by the CDC to advance a real estate agenda they did not agree with. I was intrigued since everyone in the class was ini­tially enthusiastic to help the CDC stabilize the housing market and thwart speculative real estate investment by building homes for people who already lived in the neighborhood to purchase. Now many were skeptical that this process would actually drive up rents and make the area even more unaffordable for low-income families by turning it into an owner-occupied rather than pri­marily rental district.

Rather than being upset with their cynicism toward the CDC plan, I was secretly excited and took it as a clear sign that the active-learning process was fermenting. I also realized that this dissenting view could be channeled into an alternative research agenda. I quickly reconfigured the membership of the task teams and created a new group to come up with alternate strategies to make the area a more affordable place to live. In the end, we delivered on our promise by giving the CDC a detailed list and map of buildable lots, along with a survey of housing stock and other physical assets in the area. However, rather than presenting their work in a public forum with CDC members present, students debated the implications of their findings of the vacant lot research and alternative housing plans with each other in a setting similar to the mock public hearings over brownfield remediation used in “Public Policy and Environmental Issues.”

Lessons Learned

In the main, active learning has enriched my teaching experience far more than I could have imagined when I first began to experiment with hands-on research at the local level. Even with those projects that did not go as well as planned, students enjoy the opportunity to apply theories and material covered in class to the world around them. Most importantly, they appreciate the fact that they become partners in their educational process and respond by producing higher quality written work and more engaged class discussion than in my courses that lack active learn­ing components.

I especially enjoy watching students learn how to work collaboratively at both the research and presentation stage. While it is certainly true that there are those who do not work as hard as others in the group, it is not difficult to figure out who is failing to pull their weight. I have dis­covered that by constantly requiring updates of group activities, whether in the form of short in-class presentations or brief papers, it is possible to monitor the overall progress of the class and those who are struggling to perform up to their capacity. Collaboration, though, is more than students working with each other; it is also students and professors brainstorming together over how to best find information or interpret documents, as well as the entire course working with external agencies or students from another institution of higher education. Throughout this pro­cess, I have learned a great deal about how to better manage courses and much more than I ever expected about the cities where I live and work.

The biggest drawback to implementing active learning models is finding the right balance between lectures, assigned readings, class discussion, tests, research updates, and yes, even presentation rehearsals. This concern, however, is no different than planning for any type of course. By slowly introducing active-learning assignments into select sections, I have been able to figure what works and what does not, or whether a class has become overtaken by the active-learning process at the detriment of curriculum content.

Although nothing is perfect, I would argue that a clear indication of success in implementing active learning is the overwhelmingly positive response of those students who have decided to continue their studies in graduate school. While my department has always enjoyed a good track record in this regard—with more than half of all majors eventually pursuing some form of gradu­ate and professional training—we now find that more and more of our students are being accepted into competitive public policy and planning schools, as well as directly into doctoral programs in the social sciences and humanities (with funding!) by using their active-learning research projects as writing samples in their application portfolios. The same level of success also holds true for an increasing number of majors who have been able to secure impressive entry-level positions in government and the human services. In this respect, active learning has not only improved the classroom experience, it has also helped to change fundamentally the lives of my students. That, in no small measure, is the best reward of all.

Author’s Note

I dedicate this article to the late Charles and Violet Daniel who inspired me as history teachers. I also thank Lisa Krissoff Boehm for her constructive criticism and support for this article, as well as Amy Howard, Michael Lewis, Gregory Wilson, Laura A. Watt, and Jared N. Day for their helpful comments on the teach­ing and learning experience.

Notes

1 The Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, Reinventing Under­graduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities (Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foun­dation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1998), http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf/ (accessed June 9, 2008). For a favorable overview of the Boyer Commission, see Lion F. Gardiner, “Why We Must Change: The Research Evidence,” Thought and Action 14, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 71–88.

2 Andrew H. Myers, “Teaching History in the Backyard,” The History Teacher 35, no. 4 (August 2002): 455–64; Charles Bright, “‘It Was as if We Were Never There’: Recovering Detroit’s Past for His­tory and Theater,” The Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (March 2002): 1440–46; Phillip C. Adamo, “Medieval Connections: Active Learning and the Teaching of the Middle Ages,” Teaching History: A Journal of Methods 31, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 59–73. For specific examples of active learning in environmental history classes, see Michael Lewis, “‘This Class Will Write a Book’: An Experiment in Environmental History Pedagogy,” Environmental History 9, no. 4 (October 2004): 604–19; and Robert M. Rakoff, “Doing Original Research in an Undergraduate Environmental History Course,” The History Teacher 37, no. 1 (November 2003), http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/37.1/rakoff.html (accessed June 2, 2008).

3 Brian F. Geiger, “Teaching about History and Science through Archaeology Service Learning,” The Social Studies 95, no. 4 (July/August 2004): 166–71; Learn and Serve, America’s National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, “What is Service-Learning?” http://www.servicelearning.org/what_is_service-learning/service-learning_is/index.php (accessed June 9, 2008).

4 James Axtell, “The Pleasures of Teaching History,” The History Teacher 34, no. 4 (August 2001), http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/34.4/axtell.html, paragraphs #14-15 (accessed May 22, 2008).

5 Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Vincent E. Powers, Invisible Immi­grants: The Pre-Famine Irish Community in Worcester, Massachusetts, From 1826 to 1860 (New York: Garland Publications, 1989). For more recent scholarly work on Worcester see Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).

6 Raymond Mohl, The Making of Urban America, 2nd ed. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Press, 1997); Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will; Thomas O’Conner, The Hub: Boston Past and Present (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2001).

7 Steven H. Corey, “The Brownfields of Worcester: History, Higher Education, and Public Policy Anal­ysis.” Paper presented at Brownfields 2000—Research and Regionalism: Revitalizing the American Community, sponsored by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Atlantic City, New Jer­sey, October 11–13, 2000.

8 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Andrew Szasz, Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: A Scientist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (New York: Vintage Books, 1997); Richard Hofrichter, ed., Reclaiming the Environmen­tal Debate: The Politics of Health in a Toxic Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

9 Successful readings that highlight the larger historical context of urban environmental history and public policy formation include William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991); John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, 1790–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Samuel P. Hays, Explorations in Environmental History (Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (New York: Routledge, 1992, 2005); Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action (New York: Random House, 1995).

10 Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, http://db.state.ma.us/dep/cleanup/sites/search.asp (accessed June 17, 2008).

11 United States Department of Health and Human Services, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, “Toxic Substances Portal,” http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/substances/index.html (accessed June 17, 2008).

12 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961); Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: The Free Press, 1962); Jon Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Janet Abu-Lughod, From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York’s Lower East Side (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994); Larry Bennett, Neighborhood Politics: Chicago and Sheffield (New York: Garland, 1997); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

13 Steven H. Corey and Mark T. Motte, “In Our Own Backyards: Inquiry-based Learning and Institutional Col­laboration at Two New England Colleges,” PS: Political Science and Politics 36, no. 3 (July 2003): 427–32. For a more extensive view of the so-called “Providence Renaissance,” see Francis J. Leazes, Jr. and Mark T. Motte, Providence: The Renaissance City (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2004).

Bio
Steven H. Corey is a professor and Chair of Urban Studies at Worcester State College in Worcester, Massachu­setts. He earned a PhD in American history from New York University and served as research curator for the exhibition Garbage! The History and Politics of Trash in New York City, on display at the New York Public Library, November 1994–February 1995, and is textbook co-editor with Lisa Krissoff Boehm on The American Urban Reader: History and Theory (Routledge, 2010). His work on solid waste management has appeared in Environmental Ethics and he has written on college teaching for P.S. Political Science and Politics.

Using Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times to Teach the Social Sciences

Professor Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Ph.D.
Department of Urban Studies
Worcester State College

(Previously published within the North East Popular Culture Association newsletter.)

In two of my introductory-level courses, “Introduction to Urban Studies” and “American History II,” I have used the first twenty minutes of the film Modern Times (1936) to illustrate the overwhelming scale of the industrialized/urban world in the mid-twentieth century. The film, starring Charlie Chaplin and set to music created by the comic genius, is the last film to feature Chaplin in his “Little Tramp” role. The film opens with a shot of streams of men and women flowing out of the subway station in an unknown urban setting. The streams of workers change into rows of sheep marching out of the subway station and the meaning is unmistakable—like sheep, these herds of men and women do as they are told and flow into the city’s factories and other workplaces. We then enter the “modern”-day factory, a setting that is not entirely in keeping with true 1930s technology. The boss of the factory, for instance, keeps tabs on his employees by watching them on a large television screen in his office. He can even observe the employees in the men’s room—in this manner he catches the employee played by Chaplin attempting to take a smoke break in the lavatory.

The film shows the viewer the antics of Chaplin and his cronies on the assembly line. Chaplin’s job consists of tightening two bolts on the unrecognizable product that travels in front of him on the conveyor belt. He often loses the tempo of the work, forcing the entire line to stop while he takes a break. Chaplin becomes the guinea pig for a new “feeding machine” apparatus that a sales team encourages his boss to try out during the lunch break. Chaplin attempts to keep working as the machine feeds him soup and dessert. Of course, the machine goes haywire (as all machines eventually do, the film seems to say) and we are left with a hilarious scene in which Chaplin, still hooked into the machine, is fed a cream pie, full in the face of course, and then is repeatedly hit with the “mouth wipe”, another automatic feature of the machine.

After lunch, the line again goes faster than Chaplin can manage, and ultimately he loses his ability to keep his calm. Mentally taxed, Chaplin climbs onto the conveyor belt, all the while continuing to tighten the bolts on the item that is being manufactured. Chaplin’s entire body is sucked into the machinery of the factory itself, riding over the gears that turn the assembly line. All the while he tightens the bolts of the machine, his wrists unable to stop the motion that he must make all day.

Students watch the film before I introduce the Ferdinand Tonnies terms of “gemeinschaft” (a complete community with ties based on kinship) and “gesellschaft” (a contractual society, where ties between people are no longer based around family, but rather common economic, political, or other interests). The film enables the class to remember the terms and to understand the fundamental argument Tonnies is making. For Tonnies, something of great value is lost in the evolution away from kinship-based societies to the contractual ones.

Many people claim that modern industrialized and post-industrialized urban life leads to mental disorientation and confusion. The typical urban dweller, many theorists have argued, is stressed by modern society and may become unhinged. Emile Durkheim refers to the anonymous nature of this new life as ‘anomie,’ a disconnection from others that must be unhealthy.

Having gotten the basics of the argument, we turn to discussion. The class discuss how they feel in the city. Do they like or dislike the sensation of walking among people they do not know? Do they prefer living in the country or the city? We discuss the ways in which people’s family lives and everyday interactions differ in the cities, suburbs, and rural areas. As sociologist Herbert Gans points out, too, there are places in the city that are much like the countryside, small neighborhoods where most people do know each other, or at least where an individual fits into the society in a recognizable way. Gans calls these places “urban villages.” I ask the students to assess this idea, and to name some places they might term “urban villages” in cities with which they are familiar.

Then, as devil’s advocate, I introduce the statistic that more people suffer from depression/mental health ailments in places other than urban environments. Is there a reason people might want to foster the idea that the urban setting is unhealthy regardless of the reality? We discuss the idea of anti-urbanism, and its roots in America and Europe. Students often have strong ideas about cities themselves—either hating them or loving them—and we often spin an animated discussion with these ideas.