Since it is women’s history month and I am a women’s historian I figured I should post something, but what to choose? Last Friday’s post at the AHA Blog of this amazingly awesome picture inspired me to talk about suffrage: Our student’s often come into the classroom knowing that most women did not have the…
In the fall, I will most likely be teaching the survey online. One of the difficult parts of teaching a a large lecture course online or onsite, when both time constraints and classroom size discourage discussion, is ensuring that students are doing and understanding the reading. While some instructors prefer to simply wait for paper…
Recently, I noticed a blog post on the flipped classroom that frustrated me. (For those who need a refresher on flipped classrooms, click here). The author is an academic whose comments I normally agree with; I’m guessing we share many of the same political, social, and even pedagogical values. But I have a really hard time…
Historians were once a fractured state in the academic nation. They published or perished in their own clannish enclaves. Oddly, they were less divided by chronologies and geographies than by styles. There were intellectual historians, political historians, social historians, environmental historians, and others. A generation has risen, however, who seem less obsessed with the Balkanization…
As discussed in an earlier post, my second half survey this spring focuses on changes in media. In three assignments, I am asking the students to evaluate the relative impacts of commercial photography, radio, and television. The survey at Rice divides at 1848, a great luxury for the first half, but a considerable strain…
As you well know, teaching controversial topics can be tricky. Negative, knee-jerk reactions from students do little to broaden their understanding of American history and hamper their intellectual growth. I have devised a small assignment to encourage my students to carefully examine “unpleasant” individuals and groups that influenced American history. The assignment is below: In…
Like most first-time teachers, I think too much, I plan too much, I want to do too much in every class session. This has been one of the most difficult aspects of teaching so far. How am I supposed to cram ALL of the American Revolution into two 50-minute class sessions? When there is…
We are thrilled to have a guest post from Christopher R. Versen of Bridgewater College who shared his insights at the AHA as to how we should teach the Native American Church controversy. He shares an abbreviated summary of those remarks here. Finding ways to get students to engage the complexity of American Indian…
It’s a classic question of job interviews, isn’t it? How do you combine your teaching and your research? Next week brings my Religion and American Politics course up to the foreign mission movement, and I will find myself talking to my students about a subject that has been the focus of most of my scholarly…
I have been lucky to have many wonderful mentors in my life, but for this post I’m going to choose someone who we will all be familiar with: Tim Gunn. Currently, he is hosting a spin-off show called Under the Gunn (pun intended, it’s Lifetime people). The format is similar to Project Runway, but with…
