Lessons from Online Teaching

During the course of this semester, I have turned our attention to the topic of teaching U.S. history online. In this last discussion of this topic, I intend to reflect on how my online teaching experiences and the discovery of new tools have shaped my teaching in the Face-to-Face (F-2-F) format–particularly how I call upon…

Reciprocal Visibility: Teaching U.S. History Online

In my last post on the topic of teaching U.S. history online, I weighed the importance of instructor accessibility and visibility for students. I received some really good comments that have stimulated my thinking even more. I would like to continue with this topic, but this time, I am thinking about the ways that online teaching…

Teaching U.S. History Online

When I began teaching online in my graduate history department in January of 2012, I became one of only three individuals to take up the challenge. At this point, I was encouraged to try this type of teaching because my dissertation required an extensive research agenda in Washington, D.C., and nearly ten U.S. cities. The…

Primary Sources and the End Game

Since the midterm, I have noticed that several of my students are continuing to struggle with primary sources. Of course, they know what primary sources are, and to a pretty good degree, how to extract information from such documents. Nevertheless, it is apparent that a great number simply prefer to deal with and to use primary sources one…

Thinking (and Writing) Like a Historian

Several months ago, I was online on a social media website when I noticed a colleague’s enthusiastic posting about the successfulness of an in-class activity. In preparing students to turn in their first written assignment in a freshmen English course, he elected to have them participate in a peer-review process that would also teach the fundamentals of…

Teaching History through Homespun Heroines

More often than not, I encounter Hallie Q. Brown’s 1926 publication of Homespun Heroines and other Women of Distinction in the footnotes of the publications that I read on African American women’s history. In fact, I heavily cite this work in my ongoing dissertation likewise calling upon it as encyclopedic reference for details on the…