Guest Post: Kevin Mason, “Choose Your Own Adventure: Creating Assignment Autonomy with Self-Determination Theory in the US History Survey”

Today’s guest post comes from Kevin Mason, Chair of the Department of History at Waldorf University. College students crave structured autonomy. As students enter the classroom they often find themselves disappointed by a curriculum that exposes them to a broad variety of content, often in areas outside of their intended majors. Engaging these students serves…

Cassandra Clark

Lessons From Teaching United States History in the Age of COVID-19

I have struggled to finalize a topic to discuss this month. The chaos of the semester coupled with the state of our nation and the world, in general, has made it difficult to consider what teaching techniques I can share. As I scoured my mind to identify a topic that I feel is relevant, I…

Matthew Teutsch

Graphic Memoir Project

This semester in my Literature and Composition Graphic Memoirs class I am having students do a creative final project. For this project, they will either create their own graphic memoir or do a “Call and Response” piece for Looking at Appalachia. Since this is a new assignment, I am making my own graphic memoir alongside…

Cassandra Clark

Perspectives: Flexibility, Adaptability, and Teaching How to Build a Historical Argument in a Remote Learning Environment

Every day our social media threads and email inboxes are inundated with perspectives about the best way to deliver remote instruction. I have added my own two cents to the milieu of advice as well. However, what I have found is that the most effective way to adapt to my new teaching reality is to…

Teach My Book

Teach My Book: Lindsay M. Chervinsky, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution

Teaching United States History is excited to present Teach My Book, a series of posts where distinguished authors reflect on their work and how instructors might integrate their insights into the classroom. Our thoughts today come from Lindsay Chervinsky, Historian at the White House Historical Association. Dr. Chervinsky is discussing her new book The Cabinet: George…

Designing distance learning opportunities for the overachievers

Based on feedback from my students, and guidance from my university, I have decided to make the rest of my survey course entirely asynchronous. I will hold optional collaborative discussions, but everything that is graded or otherwise required can be completed independently and with limited technological requirements. I am erring on the side of accessibility…

Flexibility, Communication, and Compassion

Over the past few weeks many universities and K-12 schools have shut down face-to-face meetings and turned to online classes and coursework. This move is substantial, and there are a lot of things to consider when thinking about how we, as educators and students, will approach this shift. As such, today, I want to take…

Teaching Online

I, like most of you, will be teaching online for the rest of the semester. As part of my preparation, I read through the TUSH archive to steal ideas from some of our bloggers. Here’s a list of some of my favorite posts about teaching online. Teaching US History Online: Some Reflections by Kevin Gannon…

Teaching the Zeitgeist through Bernie Sanders

Super Tuesday’s results are in, making Bernie Sanders a leading candidate to battle Donald Trump for the White House. The fact that this previously “unelectable” Democratic socialist, along with his platform of universal healthcare, has moved into the mainstream should enlighten historians about how seemingly static cultural abstractions such as the zeitgeist actually change…

Teaching the 1940s and 1950s with the History of Children and Youth

If you are teaching the second half of the U.S. survey this semester, you are probably about to cover the 1940s and 1950s. Do you plan to include the history of children and youth as you teach these decades? If not, here are a few ideas to get you started. First, there are various sources…

“Memory is a wily keeper of the past”: The Narrative of Memory

Throughout our lives, we create memories, then we reconstruct those memories, and they appear again and again within our mind. For me, one memory that always pops up concerns a time when I was a kid, riding a four-wheeler at my grandfather’s camp. I sat down on the seat, my dad sitting behind me, and…

Finding Common Ground: Teaching Politics in 2020

In my first Teaching US History post, I spoke about the concept of teaching students to “see both”–to realize that both the good and bad are tangled up in almost every topic in history or current event we study. I wrote: Seeing both starts with us as educators. Regardless of our own political and historical…

Teaching Race, Native American Identity, and How to Construct a Historical Argument in an Online American History Survey Course

For the past year, I have taught an American history survey course online. I inherited the basic structure and assignments of the course from other instructors I underwent a learning curve during the first semester. One of the main obstacles I faced during the first semester was that I found myself frustrated over the number…

Fears of Change and a More Equitable Society

Last October, Jennine Capó Crucet gave a talk at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, GA. The university chose her novel Make Your Home Among Strangers (2015) as the campus-wide first year experience book. Crucet’s novel chronicles a Cuban American woman’s experiences at an elite college as a first-gen student and daughter of Cuban immigrants. After…

Incorporating Digital Projects

As a warm-up the first day of my youth cultures class, I asked my students to write down the characteristics, habits, and spaces that they thought of when I said “youth” and “youth cultures.” While I expected them to write down social media and the internet, I did not expect these words to fall into…