Teaching History Writing II

Teaching History Writing II

While I can’t offer a minute-by-minute account of what was said in our panel on teaching students to write history at #AHA20 on Monday, I can offer my take away moments – my ‘What I Learned From My Co-Panelists,” perspective. And I learned a tremendous amount. Let me start with Carolyn Levy of Penn State. Carolyn is a graduate student, and spoke pointedly (and poignantly) to the circular lack of writing instruction in higher ed. Most people who’ve entered the…

Read More Read More

Teaching Students to Write History

Teaching Students to Write History

I was lucky enough to be on a roundtable panel at the AHA about teaching students how to write history, with some seriously kickass writing folks. Here’s myself, Jennifer Foray (who was an incredible chair!), Kate Antonova, Kevin Gannon, and Carolyn Levy, right before everything began. I plan to write up a more comprehensive review of all the things we talked about (spurred on, in no small part, by the fantastic questions from the audience) – but for now, I…

Read More Read More

Teaching Pedagogy

Teaching Pedagogy

Many of you know that this past fall term I taught an undergraduate course called History Pedagogy.  So many of my students have headed off to graduate school in the past and found themselves thrust into classrooms without any pedagogical training.  After years of hearing stories about their experiences, I decided to get them started on thinking about teaching myself. This past fall I had twelve incredible students in the class whose interests ranged from elementary school to college to…

Read More Read More

More Thoughts about Grades

More Thoughts about Grades

Grading in its most traditional sense – a check mark on a blue-book exam or a comment on a paper – is something that bedevils most academics. It certainly bedeviled me before I made some big changes to how I approached it. I found grading tedious, time-consuming, and thankless, and it was only after reading about ungrading that I realized I had options, both in the design of assignments and the medium for feedback. I wrote about that realization [here]….

Read More Read More

The Art of the Draw

The Art of the Draw

On Monday, the students in my Introduction to Native and Indigenous History course read Julianna Barr’s William and Mary Quarterly article about mapping borders in the region currently known as the American southwest.  It’s a fantastic article, full of amazing detail about the ways in which Spaniards, the French, and Native people variously conceived of mapping, borders and territory, but it’s a lot for intro-level students to process. So I had everyone draw their response The students got into a…

Read More Read More

Curiosity

Curiosity

If you, like the students in my undergraduate History Pedagogy course, are reading Josh Eyler’s How Humans Learn, you’ll know that curiosity is a human want that it’s worth harnessing if you want to be a good teacher. Want is perhaps too weak a word – Josh suggests that curiosity is a need, a hallmark of being human, and while children have it in spades, we get more distracted (or jaded?) as we grow older. The research suggests this is…

Read More Read More

Ethics and Tech

Ethics and Tech

We probably all know, to some degree or another, that our data is constantly being harvested by tech companies. Those companies track us across the web, and monetize the information they have on our browsing habits, selling our data to advertisers and other corporate interests. Some of this data is information we quasi-choose to give away (by having a facebook account, perhaps, or wearing a fitbit) but much is extracted from us without our knowledge. (Did you know that facebook…

Read More Read More

Planning our Teaching

Planning our Teaching

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:…

Read More Read More

Sources in Conversation

Sources in Conversation

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…

Read More Read More

The Hamilton Exhibition

The Hamilton Exhibition

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…

Read More Read More

css.php