Professor Jerry B. Pierce

Professional Development

• Perhaps the most important achievement in this category was winning a General Education course development grant for Summer 2006. In conjunction with Prof. DiMuzio of the Philosophy department, we were each awarded a grant to co-develop a course that met the proposed changes in the Gen-Ed curriculum. Our proposal was for a team-taught course (History and Philosophy) that addressed the subject of hell and death in antiquity and the Middle Ages. We developed the course in terms of addressing as many of the proposed new General Education Principles as possible, ranging from Effective Learning and Communication to Breadth of Learning to Critical Thinking, and others. The idea was to create an interesting team-taught course that combined our two areas of expertise (ancient and medieval history and philosophy) and present the students with a unique hybrid course. We are actually in the process of teaching this course (Spring 2007) and course information can be found at: www.iun.edu/~histjbp/Hell-07.html
• In addition to the Hell course, I also created a new topics course: Ancient and Medieval History and Film. This course merges the close reading of primary historical documents and scholarly essays with cinematic representations of the past on the silver screen. This course allows students to read epics such as the Iliad and Beowulf and then to analyze how these works are translated into film. Rather than passively watch films in this class, I purposely designed the in-class screenings so that we would frequently stop the film to discuss certain scenes, analyzing everything from the presentation of gendered stereotypes to the function of sexuality in defining historical periods.
• Course Revisions: I am constantly seeking to improve my courses, whether they are a survey or an upper-division to make them as pedagogically sound as possible. For example, in my Western Civilization course (Hist 113, Fall 2006) I felt that the primary source readings were too overwhelming, so I reduced the number of sources to a few key readings. The reduced number of readings meant that students could still interact with primary sources, but not be overwhelmed by a large amount of reading material. Additionally, in all my classes, I decided to write up reading/discussion questions for each class period so that students could be guided somewhat as they read the assigned materials. I have found this approach useful in that it encourages students to think about the sources as they read them and it effectively prepares them for the class discussion. Moreover, I made these questions the basis of the weekly quizzes, to further encourage student comprehension. I also decided that, to get students to complete these questions before class, that they could use any notes they had taken when it came time for the quiz. I even allow them to simply submit their answers (if typed) in lieu of hand-writing the quiz in class. This approach has been an overwhelming success which I have been able to gauge through increased student preparation and substantive discussions.