Friday, February 13, 2015

Query: Online Resources for Teaching the Scholarly Monograph

[As a former editor of  Studies in Legal History, I'm always interested in thinking about how to teach scholarly monographs in law-school seminars and upper-level undergraduate and graduate classes in the arts and sciences.  The current editors have asked us to post the following query, which seeks advice, particularly from teachers of such courses, about what authors might provide online to help them teach their books. Although this idea has been percolating for some time, it happens that our current Guest Blogger, Sophia Lee, wrote the book that the editors propose for a trial run.]

The editors of Studies in Legal History, the official book series of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH), are interested in developing teaching materials based on books published in the series.  We are committed to producing materials that are both useful and interactive, posting them on our website (aslh.net/bookseries).  Thanks to generous funding from ASLH, we have the opportunity to explore different formats in the interest of generating lively and thought-provoking course materials. 

We seek your advice and counsel on how best to achieve these goals. We would value your suggestions both on how best to produce such materials, and who might have useful experience in what works best.  We hope to include both video and documentary materials (with proper permissions, of course).  Our test will be run with Sophia Lee, whose book The Workplace Constitution was published recently, and our hope is to generate a format that will be useful to any author who would like to use it.

Please send us your suggestions for teaching materials and tell us what you have found works most reliably.  We hope to have a first set of materials by the end of the spring semester, and look forward to working with authors to help spread the use of legal history in undergraduate, graduate, and professional courses.

[Comments here are welcome, but in any event please send your suggestions to one of the current editors, Sarah Barringer Gordon: sbgordon@law.upenn.edu.]