Flipped and Blended Redesign for a History Course to Incorporate Student Engagement

Mexican American Studies (MAS) regularly offers MAS 10A/B Mexican American contributions to U.S. History and Government to serve San Jose State University’s (SJSU) ethnic Mexican population and others interested in examining U.S. history and government with an emphasis on the ethnic Mexican experience. The course is designed to be taken sequentially over two semesters to cover the broad scope of the nation’s emergence and political development from the ethnic Mexican perspective beginning prior to the arrival of the Spanish up to the present day. In addition to supporting the ethnic Mexican community generally, MAS expects this course to attract students to the MAS minor and soon to be established MAS major. As an entry level offering, MAS intends for the course to provide skill development for ethnic Mexican students who arrive on campus with various levels of preparation. The proposed course redesign focuses effort in four critical areas. First, MAS 10A/B has been redesigned as a flipped, or blended, course to expand the pedagogical platform to deliver greater amount of content in several curricular areas and provide more consistent support to develop reading, writing, communication, and research skills. Second, introduction of a flipped model will support additional efforts to convert MAS 10A/B from a traditional lecture course to a student-centered learning space incorporating active learning approaches. Third, the redesign of MAS 10A/B takes advantage of a modular format to organize content, concepts, and historical debates with a focus on skill building in reading comprehension, lecture capture, written communication, research, note-taking and effective study habits. Fourth, cultural citizenship is a critical conceptual tool in the Mexican American Studies canon and has been incorporated into the redesigned classroom to realign the course curriculum to highlight ethnic Mexican political agency in specific conjunctures of the American experience.