wide range of classroom settings. The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial started as a stand-alone website before we added a mock trial exercise. While the site is relatively sophisticated, it is also not strictly necessary for this exercise. On the most basic level, the trial exercise relies on a close reading of testimonies and legal documents. All that would be needed for the model to be replicated is a web page or even a simple online forum, such as Dropbox or a Google Drive folder, where a set of trial documents can be accessed. In our experience, the key is to place large amounts of information online but then to rely on students’ competitive instincts to drive first independent investigation and then classroom discussion, hence making the most of limited time.
While the Amboyna trial exercise lends itself well to classes on the history of commodities or European expansion in Asia, there is no shortage of other trials with long paper trails that would serve equally well for a similar exercise. With relatively limited preparation, the Teaching with Trials model could be applied to diverse trials throughout history. Equally, there is no reason it could not be used for disciplines beyond history as the trial format could be applied to a wide range of subject material.
A review by Michael Prince of the literature on active learning reveals a consensus on the importance of interactive engagement and how it can improve student learning outcomes by facilitating a more hands-on learning experience.2 As Richard Hake notes, interactive engagement is designed to “promote conceptual understanding through active engagement of students in heads-on (always) and hands-on (usually) activities which yield immediate feedback through discussion with peers and/or instructors.”3 Enabling student engagement requires teachers to create an environment in which there are repeated opportunities for students to interact both with their instructors and with their peers, all the time receiving continual feedback as they work through problems.4 While the importance and value of the flipped classroom has long been noted, detailed studies have been confined mainly to the sciences, with far less research in the humanities.5 As a result, there are fewer proven templates available for educators looking to flip the humanities classroom. We believe that the model sketched out in this chapter both is easily replicable and has multiple advantages. By using an accessible interdisciplinary approach that combines digital humanities with history and law, Teaching with Trials encourages active learning by students through ongoing collaboration with their peers while also promoting a deeper engagement with primary source materials. In particular, the model encourages students to engage in targeted research and develops their critical analysis skills by requiring them to closely examine a wide variety of sources in order to formulate a persuasive argument for their respective sides.
Our experiment with Teaching with Trials proved highly successful. Combining digital humanities platforms with the flipped classroom approach provides, we believe, an excellent means of engaging students and making the most of class time.
NOTES
1. Adam Clulow, Amboina 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
2. Michael Prince, “Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research,” Journal of Engineering Education 93, no. 3 (2004): 223–231.
3. Richard Hake, “Interactive-Engagement versus Traditional Methods: A Six-Thousand-Student Survey of Mechanics Test Data for Introductory Physics Courses,” American Journal of Physics 66, no. 1 (1998): 64–74.
4. Todd Davis and Patricia Murrell, “A Structural Model of Perceived Academic, Personal and Vocational Gains Related to College Student Responsibility,” Research in Higher Education 34, no. 3 (1993): 267–289.
5. For example, see Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson, “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Educations,” Biochemical Education 17, no. 3 (1989): 140–141; Scott Freeman, Sarah Eddy, Miles McDonough, Michelle Smith, Nnadozie Okoroafor, Hannah Jordt, and Mary Pat Wenderoth, “Active Learning Increases Student Performance in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics,” Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America 111, no. 23 (2014): 8410–8415; Edward Redish, Jeffery Saul, and Richard Steinberg, “On the Effectiveness of Active-Engagement Microcomputer-Based Laboratories,” American Journal of Physics 65, no. 45 (1998): 45–54; Karl Smith, Sheri Shepard, David Johnson, and Roger Johnson, “Pedagogies of Engagement: Classroom-Based Practices,” Journal of Engineering Education 94, no. 1 (2005): 87–101.
High-Level Student Engagement on a Zero Budget
Creighton University
WHILE PARTICIPATING IN THE EARLY Modern Digital Agendas (EMDA) 2015 institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, I often spent my free time browsing the stacks.1 Among a multitude of interesting rare books, I found a toy theater version of Othello.2 Toy theater is a type of theatrical performance that was historically performed by juveniles and involved coloring and cutting out characters and scenery from a book to use when performing a provided script. I was immediately intrigued: How would a juvenile version of Othello deal with the “R-rated” racism, sex, and murder in one of Shakespeare’s most intimately violent plays?
I read the toy theater and Folger Digital Online Text versions of the two scripts and decided to compare them.3 What did Skelt leave in the toy theater version, and what did he take out? And how did he go about this task?
Figure 6.1 shows a small excerpt from the Skelt toy theater script for Othello.4 It is the beginning of act 2, scene 2 in the Skelt script, and roughly covers act 1, scene 2 of the Folger Shakespeare Online version. The toy theater version roughly cuts some sixty-one spoken lines of the scene into nine lines, without (in my opinion) losing much of the flavor and dramatic purpose of the scene. In fact, the Skelt script in its entirety cuts the full version of the play into less than one-tenth of its size (in terms of spoken lines of text): 3,680 lines down to 317. But trying to balance two books and my notebook all at the same time to come to that conclusion was not easy. I found myself doing a large amount of transcription.
Figure 6.1. A small excerpt from the Skelt toy theater version of Othello.
From my recent years of teaching college-level computer science and digital humanities courses, I was well aware that balancing a number of books and transcribing text were not activities that our current millennial students were even remotely interested in doing. I could barely get them to read a text; transcribing differences based on a tedious comparative analysis of two scripts in hard copy would have been an unpopular—if not impossible (for some)—assignment.
My go-to solution for this problem was to create an HTML5 and JavaScript web page tool to do all of the processing needed to visually compare the two scripts. My students could use this tool for the grunt work and then focus on analysis and conclusions—the activities most connected with my learning outcomes. Furthermore, why not have my advanced students make their own tools, to learn a skill that will provide a rich, flexible, and easy-to-use solution to any similar problem for them in the future? In either case, students who engaged themselves in the assignment were virtually guaranteed to learn about the subject matter—Shakespeare’s Othello—simply by building and/or using the tool.
FROM DETACHED LABORERS TO SKILLED MAKERS
It is clear from the literature that experiential teaching methods improve learning in a number of ways.5