Below is the PowerPower of a presentation from the second week of a history course on the culture of Paris and Berlin in the 1920. (This example is part of a larger strategy for using Decoding described in An example of Holistic Decoding in a History Course)
Rather than simply presenting this as a traditional background lecture, I used it to model the processes that students should follow in answering a question on the papers that they would write later in the semester. In order to model some of the basis I emphasized:
- Presented them with the kind of question that a historian might pose about the material we were studying
- Broke the question down into the steps that they have to follow to actually respond to the prompt
- Asked secondary questions to better understand what was implied in the central question
- Reinforced the notion that history is always about presenting interpretations and offering evidence that supports them by organizing the background lecture around three different ways to explain the changes in art in the late 19th and early 20th century
- Provided evidence supporting each interpretation
- Stressed the need to always pay attention to the historical context at the moment being considered
At the end of this presentation, the students worked in teams to explain a particular event in terms of each of the interpretations that I had presented earlier.
