Today we are asked to reflect on how we might change the project to encourage creativity and innovation. Briefly, my project calls for a flipped classroom in which students will get a brief video lecture as background to the concept of the National Community (Volksgemeinschaft).
Now, I had also been toying around with the notion of assigning students roles as people within Germany and have them follow themselves from 1920 to 1939. However, today I had kind of a breakthrough with the project and think I have something much easier for college students to interact with than my previous model.
Under this new idea each student will still be assigned a role, but I will not change that role. Before I had intended on demonstrating a transition from Worker to Communist Worker to Nazi Worker....and other along these lines. Instead, I want to leave this more free form. Instead of tying the students hands, I want them to be more open with their interpretations of the evidence they are provided. Say a student gets "Farmer" as a role. That student should read my blurbs (sent everyday that correspond to a specific date range) with their person in mind. I will make sure to reference every role within my blurbs so they have an idea of how their particular person fared during the Inter-war and Third Reich time periods.
After five days of blurbs that take the students from 1920 to 1934, I will share a link to a video lecture that discusses the stabilization era of the Third Reich that saw the Nazis implement their vision of the Volksgemeinschaft. Following that vid and their interpretations of the blurbs, I would like them to use the two-page response essay they are required to write to reflect on how they think their person might have fared from 1920 to 1934.
Changing from strict role transitions to a more open-ended analysis I think is much better. Not only does it put a burden on the students to do the leg and mental work of thinking about their person across time, but it leaves the students free to make a more personal interaction with the history. Hopefully, through this project, they will come to have a much stronger grasp on the circumstances that allowed the Nazis to rise, what the Nazis did once in power, and how both of those concepts impacted Germans on an individual level. If this project accomplishes all of those things, I think I have created more responsible citizens, in which case I will be very happy.
Until next time!
Derrick Angermeier
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