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…
A recent Los Angeles Book Review piece argues that the digital humanities’ “most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university.” The article has series flaws, and insightful reactions have come from Matthew Kirshbaum, Alan Liu, and (I have to acknowledge UTD graduate) Michele Rosen. I am participating this…
And now the semester is over, and my methods course is over and done with. Another group of budding young historians is all ready for whatever research comes their way (I hope). This semester, I’ve been using my posts to talk about the progress of the course from its conception, how I teach footnotes, in-class research exercises, and…
In 2012, a study of news habits revealed that those who watched the partisan outlets Fox or MSNBC were actually less informed about current events than those who watched no news at all. Those who were well-informed listened to NPR and watched The Daily Show. In other words, a liberal bastion full of fake news…
It’s the end of the school year here in Toledo. We’ve just begun to emerge from a Winter that was so long all we needed was a White Walker invasion to cap it off. (Side note: Game of Thrones is back on.) While the weather has improved, the atmosphere on campus still feels noticeably tempestuous,…
Throughout my teaching career, I have learned–mostly the hard way–that classroom challenges often stem from problems in course design. Students not seeing an activity as important as I think it is? Maybe I haven’t tied it to very many points in their grade, and it thus looks low-priority to them. Everyone bombs the first essay?…
