This article focuses on the most challenging history courses taught at institutions of higher education in the United States: introductory world history courses, required of undergraduates as part of comprehensive liberal arts degrees. It summarizes conclusions made by recent scholars of teaching and learning and identifies significant gaps between their recommendations and the realities facing faculty assigned to teach these classes. The authors present a vision for a collaborative faculty-led project that aims to ameliorate some of these challenges by centering student engagement and meaning making in their learning experiences. The article also offers evidence drawn from student feedback on educational materials used in the authors’ own introductory world history courses, which reveals that student ownership of learning increased when they could see themselves reflected in the topics they studied and when they had opportunities to better understand and recognize the views and experiences of other people related to those same topics.
{"title":"Collaboratively Reforming General Education History Teaching and Learning: A Roadmap for the Twenty-First Century","authors":"Brenna Miller, Jesse Spohnholz","doi":"10.33823/phtc.v1i1.203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33823/phtc.v1i1.203","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the most challenging history courses taught at institutions of higher education in the United States: introductory world history courses, required of undergraduates as part of comprehensive liberal arts degrees. It summarizes conclusions made by recent scholars of teaching and learning and identifies significant gaps between their recommendations and the realities facing faculty assigned to teach these classes. The authors present a vision for a collaborative faculty-led project that aims to ameliorate some of these challenges by centering student engagement and meaning making in their learning experiences. The article also offers evidence drawn from student feedback on educational materials used in the authors’ own introductory world history courses, which reveals that student ownership of learning increased when they could see themselves reflected in the topics they studied and when they had opportunities to better understand and recognize the views and experiences of other people related to those same topics.","PeriodicalId":422713,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the H-Net Teaching Conference","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139336325","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Twistory (twitter + history) projects encourage creativity and critical thinking by allowing students to research topics they are interested in and turning them into digital timelines. This article describes a twistory project that was created as a collaborative project between a Swiss public secondary school, a museum, and an archive. The project tries to make history come alive for students by turning them into historians, allowing them to research museum objects or archival documents and writing historical narratives about them. Their findings are uploaded in chronological order onto social media with corresponding blogs on the school’s website, resulting in a digital timeline that consists of historical narratives of museum objects and archival records written by students. The article explains how the project works; how the collaboration between the school, museum, and archive developed; and how each institution benefits from such a project. Twistory projects are exciting new ways for museums to engage with students and participate in digitized culture. They also turn students into storytellers and history detectives. They learn how museums and archives work and how to deal with primary sources, do research, write academic papers, and present their work to a public audience. Furthermore, students realize that “history” is not a definitive story that has already been written but that there is an infinite number of fascinating “histories”—depending on the sources considered and the questions asked.
{"title":"When Students Rewrite History: A Twistory Project for Schools, Museums, and Archives","authors":"A. Knüsel","doi":"10.33823/phtc.v1i1.175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33823/phtc.v1i1.175","url":null,"abstract":"Twistory (twitter + history) projects encourage creativity and critical thinking by allowing students to research topics they are interested in and turning them into digital timelines. This article describes a twistory project that was created as a collaborative project between a Swiss public secondary school, a museum, and an archive. The project tries to make history come alive for students by turning them into historians, allowing them to research museum objects or archival documents and writing historical narratives about them. Their findings are uploaded in chronological order onto social media with corresponding blogs on the school’s website, resulting in a digital timeline that consists of historical narratives of museum objects and archival records written by students. The article explains how the project works; how the collaboration between the school, museum, and archive developed; and how each institution benefits from such a project. Twistory projects are exciting new ways for museums to engage with students and participate in digitized culture. They also turn students into storytellers and history detectives. They learn how museums and archives work and how to deal with primary sources, do research, write academic papers, and present their work to a public audience. Furthermore, students realize that “history” is not a definitive story that has already been written but that there is an infinite number of fascinating “histories”—depending on the sources considered and the questions asked.","PeriodicalId":422713,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the H-Net Teaching Conference","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123853006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The author teaches undergraduate seminars on problems of justice arising historically from the freedom of expression clause of the US Constitution’s First Amendment. He began this instruction before the present fraught intellectual climate, with its ideological polarization and its claims, Left and Right, against the traditional arguments for tolerance for opinions different from one’s own. He has long favored confronting what Ken Bain, the author of What the Best College Teachers Do, has called “the big questions,” and in these seminars asks: is it possible for a democratic society to achieve simultaneously the desirable ends of justice and order? Recently he has taught students with strong responses to big questions. The campus is often characterized by vigorous expression of the progressive student consensus but quiescence on the part of the not inconsiderable number of conservative students and students less secure in their opinions. This seminar has maintained proactive conversations, with generally broad participation. In this article, he explains how, through structured discussions, simulations, and the study of judicial processes, historical lawsuits and court decisions have provided frameworks for classes that are explicitly less divisive and more productive of analytical thinking. The article concludes, however, with a discussion of an abiding problem within this generally successful model: the disengaged student whose opinions lie outside the abidingly liberal-progressive campus consensus and who seeks to avoid participation.
作者在本科生研讨会上讲授美国宪法第一修正案中言论自由条款在历史上引发的司法问题。他是在当前充满忧患的知识分子氛围——意识形态两极化和主张左右对立、反对容忍与自己不同观点的传统论点——之前开始这一教导的。长期以来，他一直倾向于面对《最好的大学教师做什么》(what the Best College Teachers Do)一书的作者肯·贝恩(Ken Bain)所说的“大问题”，并在这些研讨会上提出这样的问题:一个民主社会是否有可能同时实现正义和秩序的理想目标?最近，他教的学生对重大问题有强烈的反应。校园里的特点往往是，进步的学生积极地表达自己的观点，而为数不少的保守的学生和对自己的观点不那么自信的学生则保持沉默。这次研讨会保持了积极的对话，参与普遍广泛。在这篇文章中，他解释了如何通过结构化的讨论、模拟和对司法程序的研究，历史诉讼和法院判决为班级提供了明确减少分歧、提高分析思维效率的框架。然而，文章最后讨论了这个普遍成功的模式中一个持久存在的问题:那些不参与的学生，他们的观点游离于持久的自由进步的校园共识之外，他们试图避免参与。
{"title":"Confronting a Source of Contemporary Student Disengagement","authors":"David A. Gerber","doi":"10.33823/phtc.v1i1.173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33823/phtc.v1i1.173","url":null,"abstract":"The author teaches undergraduate seminars on problems of justice arising historically from the freedom of expression clause of the US Constitution’s First Amendment. He began this instruction before the present fraught intellectual climate, with its ideological polarization and its claims, Left and Right, against the traditional arguments for tolerance for opinions different from one’s own. He has long favored confronting what Ken Bain, the author of What the Best College Teachers Do, has called “the big questions,” and in these seminars asks: is it possible for a democratic society to achieve simultaneously the desirable ends of justice and order? Recently he has taught students with strong responses to big questions. The campus is often characterized by vigorous expression of the progressive student consensus but quiescence on the part of the not inconsiderable number of conservative students and students less secure in their opinions. This seminar has maintained proactive conversations, with generally broad participation. In this article, he explains how, through structured discussions, simulations, and the study of judicial processes, historical lawsuits and court decisions have provided frameworks for classes that are explicitly less divisive and more productive of analytical thinking. The article concludes, however, with a discussion of an abiding problem within this generally successful model: the disengaged student whose opinions lie outside the abidingly liberal-progressive campus consensus and who seeks to avoid participation.","PeriodicalId":422713,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the H-Net Teaching Conference","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129888364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Amid a larger context of political and social changes in India, this article reflects on a personal-academic trajectory and the problems, possibilities, and pleasures of teaching and researching histories of gender and caste in modern India at the University of Delhi for more than three decades. As a feminist historian, the author first points to some of the limitations in her early years of teaching courses on gender, where she occluded caste as a category of analysis. However, an examination of the conjunctions between anti-caste thought and gender through a Dalit feminist pedagogical lens led to shifts in her curriculum and academic scholarship. The article goes on to discuss how preparing and teaching courses on gender-caste histories pose many challenges in terms of queries from the university administration, curriculum design, pedagogic practices, and student responses. Classroom spaces are highly politicized in India, with pronounced gender, caste, class, and linguistic identities that often overlap with each other, which has implications for teaching and research. Finally, the article deliberates on the creative possibilities of such courses and pedagogical strategies, as students critique the crafting of mainstream history writing, feel drawn to new theoretical tools and methodologies that rely on different archival registers, and question the erasure of caste as an analytic, in the process also making the classroom a more democratic space.
{"title":"Studying and Teaching Gender-Caste Histories in India: Problems, Possibilities, and Pleasures","authors":"Charu Gupta","doi":"10.33823/phtc.v1i1.172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33823/phtc.v1i1.172","url":null,"abstract":"Amid a larger context of political and social changes in India, this article reflects on a personal-academic trajectory and the problems, possibilities, and pleasures of teaching and researching histories of gender and caste in modern India at the University of Delhi for more than three decades. As a feminist historian, the author first points to some of the limitations in her early years of teaching courses on gender, where she occluded caste as a category of analysis. However, an examination of the conjunctions between anti-caste thought and gender through a Dalit feminist pedagogical lens led to shifts in her curriculum and academic scholarship. The article goes on to discuss how preparing and teaching courses on gender-caste histories pose many challenges in terms of queries from the university administration, curriculum design, pedagogic practices, and student responses. Classroom spaces are highly politicized in India, with pronounced gender, caste, class, and linguistic identities that often overlap with each other, which has implications for teaching and research. Finally, the article deliberates on the creative possibilities of such courses and pedagogical strategies, as students critique the crafting of mainstream history writing, feel drawn to new theoretical tools and methodologies that rely on different archival registers, and question the erasure of caste as an analytic, in the process also making the classroom a more democratic space.","PeriodicalId":422713,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the H-Net Teaching Conference","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128674607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Instructors seek to create meaningful learning experiences for their students, and through student evaluations and self-reflection, teaching practices can be improved. While feedback from student evaluations at the end of a term can help to improve the experience, there are many proactive tactics instructors can use to create a positive and beneficial learning experience for students. The first step is to evaluate teaching practices and to create and revise courses as needed to reflect the constantly evolving challenges of teaching at a university. Given how content delivery is evolving, instructors need to reflect on how they can create a positive environment that provides structure and support for all students. This article discusses a few ways to improve teaching, including setting up clear expectations for communication and performance, providing clear directions and rubrics, engaging and communicating with students, building a safe community for learning, and providing substantive feedback. While the main goal is to increase student learning, another possible outcome of creating a safe and open space is more positive end of the term evaluations.
{"title":"Setting Positive Class Expectations through Shared Language, Civil Practices, and Clear Directions","authors":"A. Carney, K. Ringenbach","doi":"10.33823/phtc.v1i1.171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33823/phtc.v1i1.171","url":null,"abstract":"Instructors seek to create meaningful learning experiences for their students, and through student evaluations and self-reflection, teaching practices can be improved. While feedback from student evaluations at the end of a term can help to improve the experience, there are many proactive tactics instructors can use to create a positive and beneficial learning experience for students. The first step is to evaluate teaching practices and to create and revise courses as needed to reflect the constantly evolving challenges of teaching at a university. Given how content delivery is evolving, instructors need to reflect on how they can create a positive environment that provides structure and support for all students. This article discusses a few ways to improve teaching, including setting up clear expectations for communication and performance, providing clear directions and rubrics, engaging and communicating with students, building a safe community for learning, and providing substantive feedback. While the main goal is to increase student learning, another possible outcome of creating a safe and open space is more positive end of the term evaluations.","PeriodicalId":422713,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the H-Net Teaching Conference","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131258947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How should “hard history” be confronted to understand the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II? This article shares a way of teaching this topic that not only confronts directly the real experiences of Japanese Americans in concentration camps but also humanizes the story. Encouraging students to learn the history experientially, the author uses two different sets of historical primary sources, offering both an “outsider” and “insider” perspective. First, the author explains that he focuses on the biographies and objectives of different photographers who took photos at Manzanar, highlighting how this context helps illuminate students’ perceptions and understanding of these photographs, revealing a larger story about the experience of Japanese Americans. Second, he describes how he incorporates the diary of Stanley Hayami, a Japanese American teenager interned at Heart Mountain who used his diary to retain agency within an oppressive system. Through an analysis of the diary with students, the author demonstrates how this diary captures the complexity of the Japanese American experience in American concentration camps.
{"title":"Hard History: Teaching the Japanese American Experience in American Concentration Camps","authors":"Daniel P. Kotzin","doi":"10.33823/phtc.v1i1.174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33823/phtc.v1i1.174","url":null,"abstract":"How should “hard history” be confronted to understand the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II? This article shares a way of teaching this topic that not only confronts directly the real experiences of Japanese Americans in concentration camps but also humanizes the story. Encouraging students to learn the history experientially, the author uses two different sets of historical primary sources, offering both an “outsider” and “insider” perspective. First, the author explains that he focuses on the biographies and objectives of different photographers who took photos at Manzanar, highlighting how this context helps illuminate students’ perceptions and understanding of these photographs, revealing a larger story about the experience of Japanese Americans. Second, he describes how he incorporates the diary of Stanley Hayami, a Japanese American teenager interned at Heart Mountain who used his diary to retain agency within an oppressive system. Through an analysis of the diary with students, the author demonstrates how this diary captures the complexity of the Japanese American experience in American concentration camps.","PeriodicalId":422713,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the H-Net Teaching Conference","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114462337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
It is challenging to balance content delivery while also inspiring student engagement. This article discusses how instructors in secondary and higher education settings can equip students with content knowledge, improve critical reading and communications skills, and help them engage with one another by using story cubes and role-playing games. It also addresses the academic benefits of game pedagogies in liberal arts classrooms.
{"title":"The Power of Play: Game Pedagogy and Engaged Learning","authors":"S. Epting, Amanda L. Hodges","doi":"10.33823/phtc.v1i1.176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33823/phtc.v1i1.176","url":null,"abstract":"It is challenging to balance content delivery while also inspiring student engagement. This article discusses how instructors in secondary and higher education settings can equip students with content knowledge, improve critical reading and communications skills, and help them engage with one another by using story cubes and role-playing games. It also addresses the academic benefits of game pedagogies in liberal arts classrooms.","PeriodicalId":422713,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the H-Net Teaching Conference","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126402782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：