SMC Core Curriculum Course Proposal Form Fall 2013
Electronically submit this course form and attachments to the Chair of the CCC by
October 1. Please submit a separate proposal for each desired learning goal.
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Name of Proposer: Aeleah Soine
Email address: ahs3@stmarys-ca.edu
Department/Program of Proposer: History
Name of Department/Program housing the course: History
Name(s) of Program Director/Department Chair: Myrna Santiago
Course Acronym, Number and Title: HIST 117: 20th Century—Postwar Europe
since 1945
7. Proposal is for All Sections of the course: __X___
Proposal is for instructor’s section(s) (Pathways to Knowledge only): _____
8. Course Prerequisites (if any): none
9. Unit Value of Course: 1.0
10. Mark with an X the Learning Goal for which the course is being proposed.
Pathways to Knowledge (at most one)
Social, Historical, Cultural Understanding: _X__
Engaging the World (as appropriate, generally zero to two)
n/a
Teaching and Learning Narrative for Social, Historical, Cultural Understanding:
HIST 117: Postwar Europe is an upper-level topics course targeting history majors
and minors, European language and studies majors/minors, International Area
Studies majors concentrating in Europe or Global Studies, and anyone else with a
vested interest in the history of contemporary Europe since World War II. I would
also like to note that this is a course still under major construction being that I won’t
teach it until Spring 2015. Still, I can be reasonably confident that it will
conscientiously uphold these teaching and learning outcomes for Social, Historical,
and Cultural Understanding.
Specifically, students in HIST 117: 20th Century –Postwar Europe since 1945 will…
1. “examine human activity in particular periods or places from an
historical perspective” by focusing on the historical impact of World War II,
the Cold War, decolonization, and globalization on the reconstruction of
Europe since 1945. It will apply historical perspective to topics that remain
within living memory, in order to emphasize the role of contingency and
simultaneity in history. That is, to ask questions about major historical
events, such as the Marshall Plan, the Algerian War, the formation of the
European Union, and the opening of the Berlin Wall to think about how and
CCC Course Proposal Form
2013-2014
September 4th, 2013
why such course-changing decisions were made and how they might have
been made differently at the time.
[Learning] All of the assignments for this course try to get students to think
about historical agency—individual and collective—in some way. The use of
newspaper articles are a good opportunity for students to seek out many
firsthand primary sources reflecting broad public knowledge and sentiment
at a particular moment in time without any benefit of privileged or future
knowledge. The paper assignments will be designed and scaffolded in class to
prepare students to use library and internet resources appropriately and to
have the ability to tackle this accessible form of historical research effectively
and independently.
2. …“present interpretations of historical causation and change” through
chronologically organized readings, lectures, discussions, and other
classroom activities that build a sense of both continuity and change over
relatively short span of historical time. Certainly, every historical event is
embedded with a need to find or explain its causes and effects, but this
course in particular will focus on the difficulty of explaining short-term and
long-term causation while still waiting to see the long-term effects.
[Learning] This course will formally assess student understanding of
causation and change with timelines, sequential map exercises, and essays
featured on quizzes and at the heart of paper assignments. The final exam is
cumulative, so it will likewise provide a suitable tool for assessing the
students’ global sense of change over time and explanation of historical
causation over the period from 1945 to the present.
3. …“ask students to employ historical methodologies to interpret
evidence about the social world.” The three essay assignments emphasize
core historical skills and methods. The first paper takes the form of
historiographic (or scholarly debate) interpretation, in this case on the
intentions and legacy of the Marshall Plan. The second paper broadens the
sense of debate to the public or political forum by asking students to analyze
a public historical debate within a country over how to respond to the
demands for independence from colonial subjects OR to reexamine the
debate and decision-making process leading up to the choice to join the
Treaty of Rome or not. The third paper seek to get students do some
historical detective work of their own by finding and interpreting archived
newspaper articles about their choice of one among three historical choices
CCC Course Proposal Form
2013-2014
September 4th, 2013
or turning points: a) the Polish Solidarity strikes that are seen as the first
concrete protests leading to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, b) the
decision to follow, or not, the American-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics,
OR 3) the crisis in the Balkans that in many ways brought Europe full-circle
in revisiting and dealing with the threat of armed conflict on its continent
and among its people for the first time since World War II.
Again, all of these activities work together to prepare students to think critically
about the past, preserve a sense of contingency when discussing and writing
(about) history narratives, and to be self-conscious about the process of “doing
history” in a time period within living memory.
CCC Course Proposal Form
2013-2014
September 4th, 2013