Last year I began thinking about compiling a survey of approaches to the US survey. I conducted a poll, in which more than 50 people kindly participated, and began gathering my thoughts. (And then I had a baby, which derailed things for a bit…they are so high maintenance!). So as I turn back to this…
In a recent New York Times article, Frederick Logevall and Kenneth Osgood bemoan the decline of political history. Arguing that universities have essentially stopped hiring political historians and offering courses in the subject, Logevall and Osgood suggest that the broader shift toward social and cultural history in the past 40 years has limited students’ knowledge…
Much to my two survey classes’ delight, I have now, in week three, mastered their names. I have only tripped over the podium twice and have only one chalk incident to report. It is the beginning of a banner year! I spent some of time on the blog last year puzzling how to ensure my…
A recent article in the Washington Post highlighted how many low-income students struggle in school due to their lack of access to technology that, in our digital age, is essential. It raises an important question for all of us as educators. For me, it poses the ongoing challenge to my philosophy of using OER in…
This post is the first in a series at TUSH this year on the relationship between research and the classroom. You can look out for several pieces from regular and guest contributors on a wide range of subjects in the coming months. It’s hard to convey the precise look of horror that spreads across students’ faces…
Welcome back to the new school year! Here at Michigan State, we’re making our way into the third week of the term and I’m trying to learn the names of my students. It promises to be a good semester, but there is also a sad absence. Regular readers of the blog might remember my post…
The start of a new semester may not be the best time for deep existential questions, but I like to ask them anyway. Why are we here? I’m not asking metaphysically, however, but rather in the more immediate sense. I return to the question every time I start a new set of classes, largely because…
I had the recent opportunity of facilitating a GIS teaching session for the Digital Humanities Bootcamp at the University of Nebraska Lincoln in April of this year. The Digital Humanities Bootcamp is put on by UNL’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and explores technologies and recurrent tools in the DH world in an…
It’s a new day, yes it is. Summer has come and gone, and whether I or my students are ready, a new semester is upon us. On one hand, this is always an exciting time. Whether it’s the same U.S. survey course I’ve taught dozens of times or a class that everyone forgot was on…
I look at my syllabus, it shows the wear and tear of the semester: dates are crossed out, notes are scribbled across the tops of pages, the corners are dogeared and chewed. It looks like I feel. Our semester ended a little over three weeks ago, and I’m just now starting to feel like I can…
The beginning of a semester is usually when we have a chance to reflect on the big goals of a course. The end of the semester is taken up with grading and other last minute details. Often, we are too burned out by course deadlines to be thinking about how our course fits into a…
Interdisciplinarity is a popular yet challenging idea in higher education. For all the important attention it receives, actually bringing different fields together in the classroom can be much harder than it looks. But research with primary materials, be it in a library, digital database, field site or laboratory, is something that, regardless of our disciplines, most teachers…
This month I’m reflecting on an experimental grading practice that I implemented in my Historical Methods class this semester. In this offering, in addition to introducing students to the nuts and bolts of historical research (archives, primary sources, citation, paragraph construction, etc.), I focused heavily on developing their historical thinking. I emphasized the 5 C’s…
As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been teaching with the American Yawp online textbook this Spring semester. At the conclusion of the semester, I had my students complete a brief survey about the course, which included questions about Yawp, what they liked about it, and what they didn’t. The results were very…
For the last day of my American Revolution class, I asked the students to send me a youtube clip, meme, or other pop culture reference to the revolution, founding fathers, etc. I organized the material so that we covered political comedy, political usage of the founders, memes about the founding fathers and sex, and so…
