The Rewards and Challenges of High-Impact Practices
Posted: September 13, 2023 by Melissa E. Schindler
Editor's Note: This is the sixth in a series of posts in which past LEAP Action Grant recipients report on their projects.
Melissa E. Schindler is an Assistant Professor of English and a 2022 LEAP Action Grant recipient.
At the tail end of the 2021 academic year, I found myself on the road from Cumming to Dahlonega to meet with Dr. Erin N. Bush, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Anthropology, and Philosophy. Despite our shared academic interests, Dr. Bush and I had never met. In fact, we'd never even heard of one another until Allison Galloup, Associate Professor and Special Collections and Digital Initiatives Librarian, suggested that I reach out to Dr. Bush for some assistance with a digital assignment. Such is the nature of a multi-campus institution: sometimes it takes a librarian on the Gainesville campus to instigate a teaching collaboration between a professor in Cumming and a professor in Dahlonega.
Indeed, the distance between the campuses would become a major focus of our collaborative teaching and research. On that day in May, we began our conversation with a discussion about approaches to digital history— I explained to her that, for three years, I'd been leading students in historical research on Forsyth County. In my classes, students would visit a cemetery, select a resident buried there, and conduct genealogical and historical research to piece together a story from that person's life. After repeating this assignment over several semesters, I was increasingly interested in finding a platform for my students' research so that more people in the region could access it. My hope for the meeting with Dr. Bush was that she might point me toward some accessible platforms where students could make their work public.
As the conversation went on, however, a bigger idea took hold. Dr. Bush and I began to brainstorm approaches to collaborative student research. We realized that students in an English 1101 course would not have the time to research, contextualize, and publish digital history projects on their own. But if students in different classes—on different campuses and from different years—worked together, then they could produce collaborative research focused on our local region.
I should pause here to note the importance of researching the history of our local region. Representations of the rural South and Appalachia in popular media are often limited and frequently reinforce stereotypes. Studies show that students are more engaged and motivated in research when they know that their work is original and they feel connected to their local context ().
Dr. Bush and I hypothesized that having ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ students conduct original research about our local North Georgia community would result in a more engaging educational experience, complicate their understanding of the rural South, and help students feel more connected to the region (one of the five goals of the ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ Strategic Plan). What's more, students rarely have the opportunity to participate in this type of research until they take 3000-level courses. By extending this research project to students in first-year courses, we would enable students to experience a high-impact practice very early in their studies.
"High-impact practices" (or HIPs) are methods of active learning that foster critical thinking. The idea is that when students are more actively involved in the learning process, they're more likely to learn and persist through degree completion. The term was popularized in higher education research by George D. Kuh in 2008. Since then, HIPs have become, well, hip. There are HIP workshops, programs, and academies. Some universities (including ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ) mark courses that offer HIP experiences and others even require all students to complete a series of HIP-centered courses as part of their degree programs.
Thus, Dr. Bush and I began to imagine how a collaborative research project could promote HIPs not just in our courses but across ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ. Over the next six months, we planned a two-stage research project. We decided that students in my English 1102 course would begin the project by researching a resident in Forsyth County and writing an essay about that person. At the end of five weeks, my students would hand off their research to students in Dr. Bush's History 3105 course (The Gilded Age and Progressive Era). Dr. Bush's students would take the case studies and use what they'd learned about the time period to provide context for the research. Then, her students would develop digital exhibits about local history using . During the entire ten-week project, our students would participate in asynchronous digital learning communities.
As we developed this joint curriculum in anticipation of the Spring 2022 semester, we soon recognized that our project was unique. For one thing, it involved multiple HIPs: collaborative assignments, learning communities, undergraduate research, and writing-intensive curricula. Even m