Social Reading and the Online Classroom (Part I of II)

In an April 9, 2017, article in Salon, Martin Harris explored the potential implications of the rise of social reading and story creation. He proposed, “Our stories are going social and, as new platform technologies remake the reading experience into something increasingly interactive, we now must ask what we’re giving up in the bargain.” With crowdsourcing…

Embedding Content Goals within Teaching Methods

In my Honors seminar in History, a class drawn from many majors (with few History majors), we are studying the Modern American Presidency. Using the teaching tools compiled by Kathryn Cramer Brownell at the Miller Center at UVA, students will be reading primary and secondary sources to consider the evolution of the institution over time,…

Podcasts as Models for Historical Essays

My U.S. Economic History course begins again this spring, and it is a popular course among history secondary education and middle school education students here at Fitchburg State. But it also draws from students in Economics and Business, particularly Marketing and Accounting. As such, I’m tasked with making the course useful to more than the…

Teaching the Recent Past with Music

This semester I’m teaching America in the Nuclear Era: 1945-1968 (syllabus linked). I recently divided my 1945-present elective into two halves to allow for better exploration of the moments in the years covered and develop a more thematic approach. As with all my courses, I include a significant amount of popular culture. For the previous…

Using Facebook Live for Online Discussion Recaps

This semester I took an experimental approach to the dreaded online discussion board. Unless discussions are significantly scaffolded, it can be troublesome to effectively facilitate back-and-forth among students. While a mediated discussion does resemble survey-level discussions in class, with the professor usually acting as the conduit to connect student points, an online environment seems to…

A Game-ified U.S. Survey using Greenwich Village, 1913

Teaching the U.S. survey in an blended/hybrid format offers certain challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, it is a chance to flip the classroom and have students get a hands on experience with big questions, deep textual analysis, and interactive in-class work, having had a lot of time outside of class to engage with…

A Thematic U.S. Survey (Second Half) Model

For quite some time I have been tinkering with my ways of teaching the survey (the second half, AKA USII). I’ve flipped, I’ve themed, I’ve occasionally flopped, I’ve blended, digitized, and problematized in the some thirty-odd sections that I’ve taught in the past seven years. (I have not yet backwarded or role-played, but I’m sure…