by Jenée Wilde, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of English
In the Jane Grant Room at CSWS, a dozen students gather around the conference table as their instructor gets the workshop started. This week, classmates in group A are the editors, providing detailed critical and generative feedback to the op-ed writers in group B. Next week, their roles will be reversed.
“I really liked that one week we were an editor and the next week we were writing,” said Tanya Gunarathne, a general social science education major and nontraditional student at UO. “Being able to comment on our classmates’ work was intimidating at first, but after a while I was excited to see what everybody wrote, and they were excited to see what I wrote. It was an awesome thing to see.”
Her classmates agree. “It felt like we were all on a team trying to achieve a new goal, and it was completely different from any other class I’ve had,” said Elizabeth Elliott, an international business global studies major who is minoring in history and sports business. “It was cool to experience something new.”
Gunarathne and Elliott are in HIST 416 Women and the Family in 20th Century America, a CSWS-funded Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing taught by Jack Evans, a fifth-year history PhD student.
“It’s so uncommon for a grad student in history, and maybe more generally speaking in the humanities, to get any kind of experience teaching these smaller types of classes,” Evans said. “To have a really well-funded classroom environment, being part of an intellectual community where you’re valued and allowed to make independent choices, is something so seldomly afforded to grad students. To be allowed in the CSWS as a graduate student, and to be treated as an equal and welcomed into this teaching environment, is something that I’m so tremendously grateful for.”
The history seminar is a result of the Center’s recent efforts to amplify graduate and undergraduate participation in CSWS activities and programs. During our 50th Anniversary (2023-24), we raised more than $50,000 to launch two new undergraduate initiatives: a summer research fellowship in STEAM fields (see story this issue) and the CSWS Calderwood Seminars in Public Writing.
The mission of Calderwood Seminars is to empower students to communicate specialized knowledge to a broad audience by teaching them to explain academic work in a way that makes the information relevant to others. By encouraging students to connect their liberal arts studies to the world beyond the university, the Calderwoods help to prepare students to participate actively in a democratic society.
“One of the things we say in the Calderwood Seminars is that it’s not just writing for academics, for professional historians, it’s writing for life, writing for the general public, and writing in specific ways for their parents and for their siblings,” Evans said. “There’s something that really speaks to students about doing that kind of writing.”
These small seminars are designed around short writing assignments that might appear in a blog, magazine, newspaper, or other media outlet. Students revisit knowledge acquired in their majors and shape it for general readers, producing NPR-style Academic Minutes, book and film reviews, interviews and profiles, op-eds, and other forms of public writing. Course mechanics involve a weekly rhythm of outside-of-class peer editing, in-class workshopping, and delivery of multiple drafts, with students rotating each week between the roles of editor and writer.
“I felt so enthusiastic about having a smaller class,” Evans said. “With 10 students coming regularly, this class was just incredible. The way they were able to build collegial relationships with one another in a learning community was so distinct from anything I had experienced before. I had no way of knowing it would go quite so well when I signed up to teach the class.”
This unique curriculum was first developed by economics professor David L. Lindauer at Wellesley College in the 1980s for an Economics Journalism course. The pedagogy proved adaptable to other disciplines, encouraging its widespread adoption at the college. In 2013, with funding from the Stanford Calderwood Charitable Foundation, a teachertraining program was developed for Calderwood Seminars. Within five years, the program had expanded to more than a dozen colleges and universities.
At the UO, Calderwood Seminars have been offered by the Clark Honors College and by the Department of English. With funding from the Calderwood Foundation, the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, and our donors, CSWS is sponsoring six seminars over three years in collaboration with faculty from the departments of History, Art, Comparative Literature, English, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and Women’s, Sexuality, and Gender Studies. The purpose of CSWS Calderwood Seminars is to train undergraduates to effectively communicate cross-disciplinary research on women and gender to the public.
“Most of my classes as a history major have been focused generally on men, especially white men,” said Lash Eversole, a history major who is minoring in secondary education. “So it’s really refreshing to actually see a focus on women right now.”
“Hearing students talk about the way in which they first began to encounter women’s history, feminist history, histories of people who were of non-masculine genders across the spectrum, and the way that opened up whole new worlds of seeing for them and whole new ways of understanding I think is such a valuable part of this,” Evans said.
Evans designed his course to introduce students to some of the scholarship that UO faculty are producing on histories of gender.
“Through courses like the Calderwoods, we can integrate some of the really valuable research that CSWS is funding,” Evans said. “For many of these books my students were working with in their writing, it was so powerful to get to turn to the acknowledgements and say, look who is funding this research.”
Topics included Marsha Weisiger’s research on gendered injustice in Navajo history and Annelise Hinez’ work on histories of white and Asian American women, as well as other scholarship on lesbian communes in Oregon, the Indigenous Child Welfare Act of 1978, and the fall of Roe v. Wade.
“I believe having a place for group discussion and for sharing your work and getting feedback is so much more important for history students because history is not just learning about a historical event,” said Shawn Fonda, a history major and international student. “It’s more like learning that part of history is for telling and sharing some message from the past.”
“It’s history that isn’t being taught,” said Teddy Coates, a political science major who is minoring in history. “Each week would be something that I’ve never heard about or have broad knowledge of but no real conception about, like a lot of Native American stories. I think a lot of the things that I learned about should be more well understood by the public, not just in an upper division liberal arts setting. I am a more well-informed person, without a doubt.”
—Jenée Wilde is the CSWS research dissemination specialist.
Editor’s note: Quotations in this story have been edited for brevity and clarity.