By Alex Ramiller, City and Regional Planning
Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024
One of the most challenging aspects of teaching U.S. housing policy is conveying the complicated progression of events and policies that contributed to the contemporary housing policy landscape. It is impossible to discuss housing policy without wading into a veritable “alphabet soup” of arcane and inscrutable acronyms. How are students supposed to differentiate between the “FHA” (“Federal Housing Administration”) founded in 1934, and the “FHA” (“Fair Housing Act”) passed in 1968? How can they connect these abstract organizations and policies with concrete historical moments?
In my experience, the key to conveying these complex ideas – while maintaining student engagement – was to make students active participants in the production of their collective knowledge. During a unit covering the history of U.S. housing policy, for example, we provided the class with a blank timeline created on “Jamboard” – an interactive and collaborative virtual whiteboard. At the beginning of the unit, students were divided into small discussion groups and were instructed to add virtual “sticky notes” to the whiteboard, featuring historical events from the past century with which they were already familiar. The class collectively filled the virtual whiteboard with a wide range of significant moments in U.S. and world history, ranging from the Great Depression, the Civil Rights movement, and the Covid-19 pandemic. At the end of the unit – after we had surveyed the history of U.S. housing policy – we returned once again to the virtual whiteboard. This time, when students went into discussion groups, they were given the task to add housing policies that had been introduced during the unit to the existing timeline of historical events. Students took the opportunity to catalogue what they had learned, adding policies ranging from New York’s 1867 tenement laws to the Covid-19 eviction moratorium.
This exercise served multiple pedagogical purposes. The initial activity both gauged students’ existing knowledge about historical events and provided them with a shared set of historical reference points that they could return to throughout the class. Returning to the timeline at the end of the unit – and encouraging students to integrate their existing collective knowledge with the information they had learned about U.S. housing policy – gave students an insight into the historical circumstances that shaped each housing policy and left them with a visual reference that they could (and did) reference throughout the course. By overlaying what they had learned about housing policy onto the broader historical context, students were able to identify important overlaps between specific policies and the historical moments when they occurred.
The effectiveness of this approach was evaluated in several ways. Following the in-class activities, we discussed the students’ contributions and asked them to reflect on insights they had gained from overlaying historical events and housing policies within a single timeline. We solicited in-class feedback about the assignment and received very positive responses. We also regularly returned to the timeline throughout the course, contributing to it further and referencing it when we encountered modern aspects of U.S. housing policy that were informed by historical events. I also evaluated the extent to which students actively made use of this shared resource during subsequent in-class discussions, which made me confident that the activity had bolstered their understanding of U.S. housing policy history. I view these types of collaborative activities – providing students with the opportunity to collectively produce their own reference materials – as a valuable tool for teaching complex policy topics.