Looking for Zalman: Making Historical Scholarship Visible to Undergraduates

Abstract

LIKE MANY WHO TEACH undergraduate history, I have made efforts in recent years to bridge the gap between my teaching and my research. In highly focused, upper division courses, it is often possible to share my own work with undergraduates by assigning an essay I have written or by using my own primary source material as the basis for in-class exercises. Yet the majority of courses that I teach are not in my area of research, and in these classes it is more difficult to draw meaningfully on my own work when trying to engage students in discussions about doing history. In the spring of 2003, however, the convergence of a research seminar I was teaching with an unfolding scholarly project-which turned into a mystery-resulted in an unusual opportunity to share my experiences as a researcher with students. Although the focus of the course was not directly related to my project, the parallels between my students' research processes and my own quickly emerged. My mentioning of my project soon grew into brainstorming sessions in which students tried to imagine new sources for me to consult, debated standards of historical evidence, and mused about where to draw the line between fruitful research and a wild goose chase. This experience suggests the kinds of new questions and directions that can emerge from an attempt to make one's scholarship visible to students.