History News Network recently named Rhonda Y. Williams, associate professor of history in the College, one of the nation's "Top Young Historians."
Williams is the author of The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality, winner of the 2004 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. Her undergraduate course "City as Classroom" has a strong experiential learning component: students meet with local residents and civic leaders, go on neighborhood walks, and complete service learning projects. Williams first developed the course as a Glennan Teaching Fellow in 1999-2000.
In an essay for History News Network, Williams described the roots of her commitment to experiential learning. An excerpt appears below.
In 1985, I headed off to college at the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP) without any idea that I would eventually earn a Ph.D. The daughter of federal government employees, I would be the first person in my immediate family to earn a bachelor's degree. After my freshman year I knew I wanted to be a writer and somehow make a living doing it, and was fortunate to earn an internship at the Baltimore Evening Sun.
I was supposed to be primarily an editor's gopher, but thankfully I met newspaper reporters who mentored me. One gave me one of my first in-the-field assignments: he asked me to cover a story about a community program in the "projects"—residential places in inner cities held in disdain and fear. When I think back on that moment, I sometimes wonder whether I showed trepidation, or whether the reporter simply felt the need to assure me (a young, green journalism student) that I would both be safe and do fine.
Once we arrived at the public housing complex, I met black mothers, including teen parents, who were raising families with limited resources and navigating austere and neglected neighborhoods. This assignment eventually led to my visiting, and writing about, a neighborhood- and church- based parenting enrichment program that served primarily black teen mothers and a few teen fathers.
Two more newspaper internships (including one with the New York Times) and three years later, I graduated from UMCP as the first black undergraduate to receive its highest honor—salutatorian and commencement speaker—in its 187-year history. That same year, 1989, I began my career as a nighttime general assignment reporter. But I soon discovered that, overall, the daily new events I was assigned (including dog shows and numerous weather stories, not on the Hurricane Katrina level of importance) failed to elicit my excitement or fulfill my vision of engaging in useful intellectual inquiry.
I had promised myself that in five years maximum, I would go back to school—or, if I did not like my job, in two to three years. So in 1991, at the two-year mark, I decided to seek a Ph.D. in history. Later, as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania (and always a native daughter of Baltimore), I resolved to focus my research on housing policy and marginalized people's struggles in my hometown, particularly those of poor African American women.
My first book, and many of my subsequent articles, owe themselves to that reporting assignment in Baltimore in 1986—alongside, of course, other intervening experiences (for, as historians know, there are always multiple shaping influences). That assignment, given to me when I was "just" a college intern, launched me on a compelling historical, professional, and personal journey.