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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
