Cate Denial

This pinned post will be updated with links to other posts as I make them.  Walk through your semester/quarter/term with these ideas for teaching: Thinking: What Do Our Syllabi Really Say? Thinking: Academia is Ableist Thinking: Dis/ability Thinking: Hunger is an Educational Issue FAQ: Content Warnings Thinking: Strong Emotional Reactions Thinking: Where Do We Stand First day exercise: What Do Historians Do? First day exercise and more sources: Revisiting the First Day First day exercise and reflection by Jennifer Sessions:…

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SOCC (Source, Observe, Contextualize, and Corroborate) is my [favorite approach to teaching students the practice of primary source analysis]. It offers a [simple], easy-to-remember structure students can apply in class or out of it, individually or in groups, for the purposes of formative assessment or a formal grade. Yesterday, Jennifer Sessions (a historian of French colonialism at the University of Virginia) asked if there was any way to make the use of SOCC more complicated as the semester progressed. Particularly…

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Warning: spoilers ahead for the Hamilton Exhibition, currently in Chicago. If you’d prefer to avoid exhibition spoilers, skip this post! I teach a course called Museums, Monuments, and Memory, where my students study public history theory and build an exhibition (including exhibit architecture) from the ground up in ten weeks. It’s a really fun class. People therefore generally imagine that I love museums. But actually, I don’t. There are lots of reasons for this, and I cannot hope to name…

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For the first time in my career – stretching back some 25 years now, if you count graduate school – I’ve taken six weeks off from work this summer. I’ve never done such a thing before. My career – including graduate school – stretches over a twenty-five year period, in which the demands of my research, my writing, my course prep, and conferences all made it feel that I could not spare a moment to come up for air. I…

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