By Robert Baird, CITL Senior Associate Director

History Has a Lot of On-Ramps

While majoring in History is sometimes disparaged as a humanities degree with a narrow disciplinary focus and limited career options, a new History course at the University of Illinois has been designed to introduce first-year history students to the reality of the wide variety of research and career options available to them. Designed by Stefen Djordjevic, Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies, and Chloe Parrella, Doctoral Candidate in History, History 199 has been taught twice and garnered positive feedback from students and colleagues. For Stefan, one of the challenges for young students is the bewildering variety of research approaches: “History has a lot of on-ramps . . . you could start with, you know, ancient antiquity, you could start with modern Europe, you could start with race in America, and all are valid. And our curriculum has a lot of on-ramps, and it is very . . . individualized in its structure.”

Traditionally, students entering the History Department would gradually learn, semester after semester, about focus areas, campus resources, individual faculty, and their career options. This old school approach was deemed slow and haphazard. As they set about designing History 199, Stefan and Chloe hoped to address this need to connect students more quickly and powerfully with their peers, other faculty and the many possibilities of study and career focus at Illinois. For Stefan, “. . . we [did not] have a unified academic experience for a lot of our majors . . . we could have hundreds of history students and they never see each other in a class. They could be so, so far apart. And we thought it was an important kind of curricular experience and a social one to give them a chance to meet early on and have something shared that they can follow and take with them . . .”

Watch the Full Interview.

Reconnecting After the Pandemic

The Covid Pandemic was the other major impetus for the History 199 development. “That first year they came back from the pandemic, you know, had their first class back in 2021. So a lot of students were really kind of hesitant around each other. They weren’t sure how to occupy . . . the space in the classroom . . . there was a great kind of renaissance in a lot of students and awkwardness,” Stefan said. “And I think we saw that in some of our faculty as well . . . And after seeing that in 2021, my thought was, I think it’s even more important than ever before to have that communal experience that socializes students with each other, with the department.”

A History Toolkit in a Course

While the idea of an exploratory class for freshman is not a new one, and the College of LAS has a very large and successful LAS 101 course at Illinois, Chloe and Stefan wanted to customize their 101-course model specifically for History students at Illinois. Chloe explains that the course is viewed as “our toolkit. So, we’re focusing more on the skills that they’ll need to start developing as well as thinking career prep; how to be strategic about opportunities that you have here and integrating into the campus and our many, many wonderful resources such as the museums . . . we visited the Spurlock Museum, which is always a hit. And that has resulted in students seeking employment opportunities at the Spurlock. Some students were already employed at the Spurlock and then simply got to give tours to their peers, which was really awesome. And that’s led people to pursue museum studies.”

“Let’s Go All History”

Stefan and Chloe shared the story of one History student who was planning to transfer to the Gies College of Business, “where the good jobs are.” Having taken History 199 and a few Business courses, the student told Stefan mid-semester: “Nope, no Gies [College] for me. I love history. Let’s go all history. And I asked him, so what’s changed that? And he said, I realize there’s a lot I can do . . . I thought I was going to be a teacher, a lawyer, or maybe like a professor or something in a museum, He said. I don’t really feel like any of those things. None of those are me. And I realized now I can go into government. I can go into nonprofit work. I can make a positive impact on my community.” The student went on to take four History courses in his second semester and become the youngest elected official in the State of Illinois as Trustee of a school board.

History Faculty & Students Discuss the Barbenheimer Moment

The first iteration of the course allowed Chloe and Stefan to improve things as they prepared for the second version of the course. The frequent and wide variety of guest speakers was core to the design of the course; however, there was a feeling that “the students felt very talked to. And so I really wanted to, in the second iteration, to have a much more dynamic way of starting conversation as opposed to just being told information,” Chloe said. One of the most impactful improvements was to pull in History faculty for individual table-top discussions with the 199 students. Chloe remembers: “I managed to wrangle 12 faculty into a room at once, and they each led a small group discussion based on what it is to be a historian . . . Some students didn’t leave . . . They really engaged; some students enrolled in courses with those professors for the next semester.”

Stefan recounted how several of the faculty/student discussion tables debated “a great question of 2023, which is Barbenheimer [The simultaneous release of Barbie and Oppenheimer] and had intensive conversations about it. But I think that was in itself valuable because . . . when students interact with faculty, they might see us as these far off . . . subject matter experts, people who read a lot of books and then lecture from on high. And the ability to have this moment and talk to this person who might seem like this distant Herr, Doctor Professor—suddenly–has really strong feelings about, the various scenes in the Barbie movie–I think makes that student feel like it’s a much more welcoming community.”

History Alums and Bartending Gigs

The variety of guest speaker panels for the course includes one of upperclassmen and one of alums. The upperclassmen panel allows the students, “to see what all the different stages of growing into being a historian or a graduate with a history major, what that can look like,” according to Chloe. Whereas the alumni panel offered a focus on careers and, “to get students thinking early in their careers about their job, about what kind of career path they want to take, what’s open to you as . . . a history major,” Chloe said.

Stefan shared another example of how History 199 connected students with alums in friendly and personable ways. “And we had one panelist talk about their career. They had a bunch of different jobs on campus, off campus, academic affairs. But one of the jobs they had was a bartender for a while. At the end of it, this one first year student went up to them and was like, how do I get a job as a bartender? Like that was their takeaway from this. I was like, I want to know, I want to learn about people better. To communicate with them, how do I do this? And they had about a 20-minute conversation about how to get a bartender gig in Champaign-Urbana.”

Student Feedback and Forward Momentum

For Chloe, still busy with her own dissertation, History 199 has been a significant way to support her students, “helping integrate these young people into this very overwhelming and scary new place that they very much desperately want to be able to call home, but don’t yet have that connection.” Going further, Chloe feels that “Getting to watch them grow and become more comfortable and bond with one another has been one of the most rewarding parts of my career.”

Part of their sense of how History 199 is going comes from Chloe and Stefan’s commitment to continual feedback from students, from an openness to live feedback during class to anonymous surveys throughout the semester. One core course goal—the development of community—was frequently praised by the students. For Chloe, “I get students saying, you know, I have made excellent friends. I have joined clubs with my table mates from 199. I plan to room [with another classmate]. I plan to study abroad with people I met in 199 and go as a friend group . . . I’ve networked with alumni. I’ve instituted a rigorous bedtime and . . . schedule and have stayed on top of everything. And I feel more secure in myself as a college student and as a young adult . . . And while it might be more of an intangible impact, it’s one that I think is incredibly important.”