Overview of What I am Doing in Romania!

I have been teaching in the American Studies department at Babes Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca for the 2009-2010 academic year.  In the fall I taught a BA-level course in American oral history course. The students in the class were third years (the last year in university here), and I wanted this course to introduce the students to the theoretical and practical sides of oral history, which we focused on for the first half of the semester. In addition, the students had to incorporate at least one oral history interview that they conducted in a 15 page research paper. Since the students had never written a paper before, the second half of the semester was focused on how to do that.

In the spring, I have been teaching two courses and working more informally with a small group of 3rd year students on their thesis papers (a 60 page paper they have to write in order to graduate). For the 2nd year MA students, I am teaching an introduction to public history where we discuss a different topic each week (museums, archives and collections, popular history, etc).  We have been able to have a tour of the BBU museum and learn more about how it works, and we also were able to have someone who works in historic preservation at the Ministry of Culture come to class and discuss the state of preservation in Romania.  The other course is for 1st year students in the BA program.  This class is an introduction to research and writing. This is a very different approach to teaching and coursework here because most courses rely solely on an end of year exam for the entire grade. In this course, I have been working with another faculty member to teach students how to take notes on a book, use the library, choose a research topic, understand the difference between a topic and thesis, and finally write their own 10 page research paper (going through the process of topic, sources, thesis and outline, draft, and final paper). The department plans to continue teaching this course after I leave, and I hope that through my work with them that other faculty members also will begin to require papers of part of their assignments.
As you can tell, most of my work here has focused on my own teaching. Instead of conducting a separate research project, I have been working more with the students and faculty to discover their concerns about the program and to try to encourage change when possible. It will be a long process that must continue after I leave, but I hope that this new course and some of the discussion that I have started will be able to instigate that change!