FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND EDUCATION
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In most of the Department’s courses that are not part of our joint degrees His- tory Majors are now a minority. This makes for interesting teaching. Given that we currently have very few students from Humanities & Education taking our courses – even the would-be Archivists from Library Studies are sparser than I would have hoped – our classes are instead filled with undergraduates from not only the Social Sciences but also from Pure and Applied too. This last group can have more time to read than Humanities students, all of whose other classes will have long reading lists, but it also means that they may have had limited experience in taking essay-based exams since they were sixteen and do not know how to take full advantage of researching with the Library’s open-stack humanities collections. In recognizing these broad changes, the Department spent considerable effort over 2022–23 to recast most of the undergraduate courses that we offer: rebalancing the grade allocations within individual courses away from midterm and final exams – and towards tutorial reports and research papers, many of which incorporate a few marks for an outline, something that few of our students have been taught to consider. In the process older courses that retain our 1980s and ‘90s 60% exam grade and assign 20% for a brief term paper lost the “research intensive” ratings they were granted thirty or more years ago. I thought that we had caught all of these, as revisions to a pile of venerable classes were processed through FAQAC (both Dr. Sharon Bramwell-Lalor, the Chair of Humanities & Education’s FAQAC commit- tee and Dr. Dexnell Peters, our new FAQAC rep, took on overloads to enable this process of revision to be undertaken). In the event around half a dozen stragglers, including some venerable courses which missed revision, lost their “research intense” rating to this process. Correcting this will require revisions to these classes’ grade ratios and bibliographies in 2023–24. This time, however, History & Archaeology’s requests should not overstrain the FAQAC process. The process of revision for our course offerings went considerably further. We searched the Department’s back-list for courses that would repay reviving. One of the late Dr. John Campbell’s undergraduate courses at St. Augustine on ‘The History of Sexuality to the Nineteenth Century’ was developed out of a History of Sexuality course that he first taught at a summer school here at Mona. On transferring to St. Augustine he split it into a two-semester 300-level sequence. Our colleagues there managed to find his proposal for the first part, which ran from the Kama Sutra to the late Nineteenth-Century, but his subsequent course, running up to the present, has yet to be relocated (even though it remains on the list of classes accepted for their Gender Studies program – though regrettably the program did not have a copy in its files either). We initially intended to simply re-use it, as we have with other classes like the undergraduate Quantitative History course that we also transferred from St. Augustine – a class which is taught to packed classrooms in both semesters (as we have to use Lab classrooms for these courses they are, by default, capped at thirty students). But, given the number of years since Dr. Campbell’s class was last
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