teaching

15 Minute History – Climate and Environmental History in Context

Guests: Megan Raby, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin & Erika Bsumek, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin

How do historians teach Environmental History in an age where stories of climate change and catastrophe fill the headlines? Megan Raby and Erika Bsumek, both History Professors and Environmental Historians discuss what drew them to the field, how they talk about environmental history with their students, and the 2021 Institute for Historical Studies Conference, “Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented” (April 22-23). “Among many other questions, the conference will ask: Can history offer an alternative to visions of the future that appear to be determined by prevailing climate models, and help provide us with new ways of understanding human agency?”

Episode 131: Climate and Environmental History in Context

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Mentioned in today’s episode:

A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles. By Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry (2018)

by Bryan Sitzes

Environmental history is an approach that broadens our historical scope by acknowledging how the human and non-human worlds have interacted and shaped each other’s fates over time. Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry have produced a guide that teachers with diverse historical interests can apply in high school, undergraduate, or graduate classrooms. The authors envision teachers using A Primer for Teaching Environmental History in two ways: creating an entirely new course on environmental history or integrating environmental history into a more general history course. Despite their environmental focus, the disciplinary skills and pedagogical techniques they share are applicable in any history classroom. Whether you are looking to update your high school US history survey or conduct a graduate seminar on colonial histories of water, Wakild and Berry offer relevant advice on identifying course objectives, course structure preparation, communicating and engaging with students, developing disciplinary skills through activities and projects, assessment, and a great deal more. They pair these general concepts with examples from their own classrooms and suggest how other teachers might tweak the techniques to fit their own class.

A particular strength of Teaching Environmental History is that the authors repeatedly show teachers how to structure activities, units, and an entire course so that earlier lessons provide foundations for later, more complex ideas. The first tip in the book suggests asking students to think about their lunch – a tangible and personal object – and consider what processes were necessary for this sandwich or energy bar to arrive in their possession (farmers growing grains, rainfall watering agricultural fields, extracted oil powering global trade networks, etc.). Once students familiarize themselves with the various processes and relationships that make their lunch possible, Wakild and Berry show how teachers can historicize this concept by having students consider the history of bananas. Students listen to a 1922 song about a banana shortage in NYC and wonder, why was there a banana shortage? Students learn about globalization and teachers might choose to explore US foreign policy in Latin America, integrate economics by considering consumerism or labor, discuss the meanings of nature and natural, or begin interdisciplinary approaches by sharing papers on genetic engineering. A multitude of possibilities allow teachers to tailor the banana to the needs of their own classroom. Along the way, students learn to find sources, connect discrete information, and communicate what they found through writing assignments with topics they had a hand in choosing.

A Selection of Environmental History Books (see our article on teaching Environmental History)

The initial section on connecting students to environmental history also relates to a concept Wakild and Berry introduce at the end of their book: environmental justice and marginalized communities. Although teachers may want to avoid such a complex idea at the outset of the semester, the extremely visible effects of nature on contemporary society can also help students connect with course material. Wild fires in California, undrinkable water in Michigan, and hurricanes on the coasts are all issues students may already be familiar with. Teachers could use Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the American Shore (2018) since she considers the effects of sea level rise and transmits the voices of affected coastal communities in California, Louisiana, Florida, and New York.

The second part of Teaching Environmental History shows how teachers can connect the various units in their course together through field excursions, human connections to space, and centering a semester around energy. Wakild and Berry consider the unique benefits and challenges of field trips, whether taking students to Latin America for a month, walking along a river that cuts through your local community, or creating assignments for distance-education students to go explore the outdoors in their areas. Students of today connect to spaces far beyond their local community through technology, and so helping students develop a sense of place can utilize the skills they already have. Teachers can pair Instagram or YouTube with diaries of travelers of the Oregon Trail or Indian Ocean to help students develop deeper feelings for places than if they only read a text.

Wakild and Berry end their primer by considering issues relevant to nearly every classroom: integrating technology and conducting assessments. Accordingly, approaches to incorporating environmental history take a backseat to discussions of general teaching philosophy in these chapters. Both technology and assessment actually appear throughout the book but receive extra attention in conclusion. The relative absence of environmental history discussions in the final chapters is a clue to the relevance of technology and assessment in all classrooms. They acknowledge the challenges these issues present while focusing on the immense benefits for students. Technology and assessments do not necessarily form pedagogical speed bumps or road blocks. With creativity, we can integrate institutional demands while continuing to imbue students with the skills necessary to critically reflect on the past and become well-informed global citizens. That is the primary objective Wakild and Berry want to help other teachers achieve.

In their epilogue, Wakild and Berry anticipate criticisms that their examples might skew too heavily toward modern histories and that too many “extra-disciplinary” approaches like environmental justice or natural science research risks diluting the requirements of a history course. I do not find either of these potential criticisms very problematic. Examples from the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries help demonstrate the relevance of environment history to students unfamiliar with the discipline, and the techniques the authors share can be translated to use with earlier histories if some teachers desire. As for diluting the historical discipline of the class, environment history thrives best when traditional skills of historians are combined with other approaches. Interdisciplinarity also allows teachers to engage more of their students, since some will surely be more interested in literature or the natural sciences. Any environmental historian who intends to teach should read A Primer for Teaching Environmental History, and teachers of all kinds will probably find it useful in preparing for their next semester.

Teaching with Wikipedia

When Public History is done so well, we want to celebrate it! In Fall 2018, our colleague in Art History, Dr. Stephennie Mulder, had her students rewrite articles on Wikipedia to be more accurate and based on up-to-date scholarship. To be honest, I’ve thought about doing something like this in my classes, but I would never have done such a creative and thorough job. Now the instructors among us have a model and a roadmap we can all use. And the rest of us can sit back and watch some great teaching unfold because Dr. Mulder recently recounted the process on Twitter. Enjoy! ~ Joan Neuberger

by Dr. Stephennie Mulder

Read on Twitter

This semester in my Arts of Islam survey, I decided to scrap the research paper and have students collaborate to re-write @Wikipedia articles. It ended up better than I could have imagined & transformed how I think about teaching #StudentsOfIslamicArt #IslamicArt #MedievalTwitter

I was hesitant about shaking up a popular class that had worked well for years, but one statistic finally convinced me: 90% of Wikipedia articles are written by men – and largely by men from Euro-American contexts.

Female scholars are marginalised on Wikipedia because it’s written by men | Victoria Leonard

The oft-maligned #Wikipedia is the now the world’s most frequently-consulted source of information & fifth-most visited website. Because anyone can be an editor, it’s on us to make it the best resource it can be. If you think Wikipedia is bad, look in the mirror. Wikipedia is us.

So this assignment quickly took on a much deeper significance than a research paper. It required them to develop many of the same research and writing skills as a research paper, but it also came to have a strong #civics and #SocialJustice component, and the students responded.

To emphasize the collaborative, real-world applicability of the assignment, I set it up as a partnership with a museum and another Islamic art class via my brilliant

colleagues @lk_michelsen @hi_shangrila and @AlexDikaSegg @Rutgers_Newark shangrilahawaii.org

The assignment asks them to imagine they’re hired as consultants for a major museum to improve the public’s knowledge on Islamic Art, in advance of an exhibition. Their task? To assess an article for the quality of its sources and content and then research, write, and improve it.

I have almost 50 students enrolled in the class, so I made the assignment collaborative and divided the class into 15 groups of 3-4 students. I then preselected #IslamicArt articles I knew were important but underdeveloped on #Wikipedia. They had 3 weeks to research & 3 to write.

The assignment was set up on @WikiEducation‘s terrific website. Students had to complete a training module/week. Through this and discussion in class they learned how to determine quality of sources, the value of peer review, and improved research methods.

Wiki Education — Connecting Higher Ed and Wikipedia

In addition to the online training modules, @WikiEducation mailed me hard-copy pamphlets to give the students: one general one on Editing Wikipedia and another new one on editing Art History topics. These were super helpful.

New Resource Helps Art History Students Improve Wikipedia

I also drew on @artandfeminism‘s amazing quick guides which are brilliant for edit-a-thons.

But on top of these crucial online resources, I wanted to highlight continuing value of analog sources so students could gain experiential knowledge of benefits of both types of sources. I pulled in our brilliant #librarians Becca Pad and Gina Bastone from the UT Fine Arts Library @UTFAL and UT Libraries @utlibraries

Becca and I created a research guide for the assignment that pointed students to both digital and hard-copy sources within @UTFAL and @utlibraries.

I also spent a day in the library with students, walking them through basic research methods. I thought this might be too basic, but the day walking them through the physical library was inspired by a comment made by one of our brightest Honors Art History undergraduates in a meeting of the UT Provost’s Libraries Task force (on which I currently serve):

“Many faculty and librarians don’t realize that it’s not that undergraduates don’t *want* to use the libraries, it’s that we are SCARED of the libraries.” She explained that many students no longer receive the basic training needed to know how to use the libraries. So they don’t.

Here’s Eleanor Garstein’s and Dea Sula’s revamp of the Pyxis of Zamora

The UT Library system is one of the United States’ great research collections, but the vast majority of undergraduates test out of basic Intro to Rhetoric and Writing-type classes that used to train them in basic research methods. So the libraries just look intimidating and baffling.

Just getting them physically in the library was revelatory. They were astonished at the range and quality of sources that did not turn up on a Google search. It really lit a fire under them, sparked their curiosity and made them want to dive in. This was revelatory for me too!

We talked about what a privilege it is to have access to depth and reliable quality of knowledge in a top research library. We talked about how access to knowledge controls the way we see the world and our place in it. Again and again, students spoke about feeling empowered.

Zain Tejani and Tarik Islam improving the article on Islamic Gardens by replacing some of the more subjective aspects of the pages on the Islamic gardens with entries on the surviving gardens and sensorial experience. They later found their edits reverted by another editor – a valuable lesson about how to work within Wikipedia’s editor community (they’re still in negotiations on the Talk page!)

Yesterday [December 12, 2018] we met for an upload party. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but it turned out to be one of my favorite days as a teacher EVER. I am so proud of my students and of their hard work. I am amazed at how seriously they took the assignment and what a terrific job they did.

There were challenges: the sometimes-difficult collaborative aspect of a group assignment, the fact that some topics had few sources, the challenge of learning to write in a neutral, unbiased style. But they had something real on the line: an article out there in the world.

And in the end, these smart students have now contributed 15 better-sourced, better-written articles to the most frequently-consulted body of knowledge in the world. And they’ve learned key research and writing skills that will be applicable in a range of fields.

And of course, they’ve deepened their knowledge of #IslamicArt. Just listen to my student Gabrielle Walker speaking confidently about the complex history and historiography of Raqqa Ware, a type of medieval Islamic fineware pottery.

There is room for improving even important and significant topics on Wikipedia. Carla Bay, Sukaina Aziz (@SukainaAziz), and Yasmeen Amro (@TheYasmeenAmro), made major improvements to the article on Muqarnas, perhaps the most distinctive form of Islamic architectural ornament:

In short, this assignment did all a traditional research paper does: deepening knowledge, research, and writing skills – but it also left them feeling empowered to be active contributors: shaping global knowledge and redressing imbalances that shape the way we see the world.

So if you’ve ever wanted to have students do a Wikipedia article writing project, I would encourage you to jump in and follow Wikipedia’s motto: #BeBold. Your students will learn, and you will all feel like you made the world just a tiny bit better place to be.

And super grateful to the fabulous @LaurenMacknight, our hardworking and incredibly on-it communications director @UT_AAH, for enthusiastically promoting our project on multiple platforms! You’re incredible. 🙂

From There to Here: Susan Deans-Smith

Map of England (via Wikimedia)

I came to Texas from England over thirty years ago, now. My prior experience of living in the U.S. had been during my year abroad as part of my undergraduate degree at the University of Warwick, embedded in the department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although unbeknownst to me at the time my experience in Madison proved to be pivotal and part of the chain of events that would result in my coming to UT-Austin and Texas. Two things happened as a result of my time in Madison. The first was exposure to an absolutely brilliant political scientist of Latin American history– Peter H. Smith. The second was my first trip to Mexico. After completing my year at Madison and before returning to England to complete my senior year at Warwick, I embarked on my version of Jack Kerouac’s road trip – in my case a Greyhound bus and its Mexican counterpart (solo, no less) from Madison to Mexico City. Mesmerized by my experiences in Mexico, I knew that I wanted to specialize in its history. During the writing up of my dissertation at Cambridge University, I was lucky enough to be invited for one year as a visiting professor in the History department at UT-Austin. That year was particularly memorable and as I look back I’m still not quite sure how I did what I did: prep for four new courses in a university system very different from that of Cambridge where I was used to the tutorial system; complete my dissertation that involved some commuting between Austin and Cambridge; and, oh yes, fall in love with the Texan who I would marry. In fact, in March of that memorable year, I flew to Cambridge to defend my dissertation (successfully), and flew back to Austin the next week to get married. Not bad! But, things got even better. As it turned out, the professor for whom I substituted for a year, decided not to return. I applied for the tenure-track position that opened up and was fortunate to be selected for the position. And, here I am at home in Texas and privileged to be working with creative colleagues, stimulating students, and phenomenal research resources. Plus, I never did like the English climate……

Also in this series:

Tatjana Lichtenstein
Julie Hardwick
Toyin Falola
Yoac Di-Capua

You’re Teaching WHAT?

Cross-posted from Chris Rose’s blog, where he regularly tells us Important and Useful Things and makes us laugh along the way. In addition to his many other accomplishments, Chris is the brains and motor behind our podcast 15 Minute History.

by Christopher Rose

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you … Terrorism and Extremist Movements. Ta-Da!The reaction that this has caused in a few people has been … well, probably predictable.

“You’re teaching WHAT?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Chris.”
“What does this have to do with your dissertation?” (I particularly like this question, as if any of the other courses I’ve ever taught have anything to do with my dissertation. In fact, I should like to meet anyone who teaches an undergraduate class on the topic of their dissertation.)

If there were one thing I would say that I didn’t think through on this one, it’s that maybe the semester I’m trying to finish writing and start revising my dissertation wasn’t the best time to also try and teach a brand-new class on material that I am not intimately familiar with.

I can do 20th century Middle East or the Rise of Islam in my sleep. However, that’s also the reason why I didn’t want to teach either of those courses again.

As an adjunct, I don’t get to innovate. I actually wouldn’t mind coming up with a class on The Middle Eastern Front in World War I, for example. There’s a lot of stuff to unpack there.

The issue is that I’m teaching a general education course under the topic “Challenges of Globalization.” For two semesters I taught a course on the 20th century Middle East in which I framed the topic question of whether it’s fair to blame the Skyes-Picot Treaty and European imperialism for the state of the region today (in two semesters, my students never quite figured out that this question…printed front, center, and top on the syllabus…would also be their final exam prompt).

Egypt had the strongest naval fleet in the Mediterranean at the time Spain discovered the New World, but most high school students don’t learn about that. To be fair, I didn’t really understand this until I was in grad school—and yet, I realized I was teaching undergraduates as if this were common knowledge.

A thoroughfare in the medieval quarter of Cairo. Egypt had the strongest naval fleet in the Mediterranean at the time Spain discovered the New World, but most high school students don’t learn about that. To be fair, I didn’t really understand this until I was in grad school—and yet, I realized I was teaching undergraduates as if this were common knowledge. (Photo: Chris Rose)

However, it was the aforementioned ability to recite this material in my sleep that, it turned out, was the problem. I realized about four weeks into my first semester of teaching that the problem wasn’t my students, it was me. I assumed a lot of background knowledge. Way too much background knowledge.

Here I was talking about the inner workings of the Ottoman Empire when I knew from years of experience that the Texas world history curriculum barely mentioned it. (Trust me, I know.) I was speaking in shorthand and my students didn’t have the answer key.

I quickly went into revision mode, changing my approach for the rest of the semester. The next semester, I revised the curriculum further, tightening the focus and narrowing the amount of material covered.

I also realized that it might be best to get away from the material for a bit. After two semesters of teaching it (and the extra hours both doing prep work as well as writing a dissertation), I was bored with the material and recognized the dangers of what this might mean in terms of my attention to the class and my propensity to shorthand.

What might help, I thought, would be a new subject entirely.

First, I dumped the long academic course name with the colon (yes, I did that).

Then, I decided to focus on student expectations. My university has a strong criminology program, as well as a strong political science program. How do I appeal to those majors?

So … the idea of doing a course on terrorism sprang to mind. (I honestly don’t remember why). It would be comparative; after all, despite popular memes to the contrary, terrorism is not just a Middle Eastern phenomenon. I wanted it to be global in focus. But, other than South Asia, in which I do (terrifyingly) have the requisite number of credit hours to pass myself off as an expert … was I qualified to teach a globally focused class?

The first modern terrorist groups formed in tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century. One group, The People’s Will, assassinated Tsar Alexander II in hopes of sparking a popular revolution.

Then I had an idea: what if I didn’t teach the entire class? What if the class, working in groups, each took responsibility for a particular movement in a particular global region, and contributed to the learning environment? The more I thought about this, the more I liked it; and others that I shared the idea with were enthusiastic.

So, I put a proposal together and it went on the course schedule and I did what pretty much everyone does: I forgot about it until about two months beforehand when the campus bookstore started prodding me for my textbook choice.

Despite what seemed like insurmountable odds and a few nights of lost sleep, I produced a syllabus and guidelines for a class that I hope will be not only be successful but also interesting to my students.

I was honest with my students the first day: this is an experiment, and if this isn’t what you’re looking for in a course and you’re not on my roster at the end of the week, no hard feelings. I lost a couple, but the vast majority stayed put.

So, here’s to an experiment. I look forward to sharing how it goes.

More from Christopher Rose on Not Even Past:

Search for Armenian Children in Turkey

Mapping and Microbes

Exploring the Silk Route

The Public Archive: Frederic Allen Williams

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider. Based in New York City, he became known for his talks on Native American art delivered in his midtown studio using magic lantern slides, an early type of image projector. By digitizing a sizable collection of Williams’ prints, negatives, lantern slides, and other ephemera held at the Harry Ransom Center, Jesse Ritner‘s digital project not only makes these materials accessible to wider audiences, but also reflects on using photography as historians and teachers.

More on Ritner’s project and the Public Archive here.

Also by Jesse Ritner on Not Even Past:

Death, Danger, and Identity at 12,000 Feet
The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin
Paying for Peace: Reflections on “Lasting Peace” Monument
What Makes a Good History Blog?

“Doing” History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles

Originally posted on Process History on September 5, 2017.

by Christopher Babits

Near the end of the spring semester, my department asked me to teach a summer session of U.S. History since 1865. I had a short time to think about what I’d teach and how I’d teach it. For me, it was important for students to “do” the work of historians. This meant more than reading primary sources, though. In addition to this, students would engage with “essential questions” that are key for understanding the United States’ recent past. Moreover, in lieu of assigning a traditional textbook, which might not fully align with these essential questions, I decided that my students would read, analyze, and critique articles from the Journal of American History.

My first preparatory task was to frame the course around the essential questions. I wanted to create questions around a broad range of potential student interests. I chose four topics: 1) America’s role in the world; 2) economics and labor; 3) women and gender; and 4) comparative civil rights. These topics covered some of the important themes of post-Civil War U.S. History.

The questions I crafted (see Figure #1: The Course’s Essential Questions) were beneficial on several levels. Initially, they helped me with one of the most daunting challenges of syllabus creation—picking and choosing content to cover. These essential questions narrowed what I would focus on; lectures and in-class activities would always have to answer (at least) one of these questions. On top of this, I used the four questions to pick articles from the Journal of American History. From a content standpoint, these articles would provide additional detail that my lectures and in-class activities might not be able to cover in depth.

Selecting academic articles for an introductory survey can be tricky. I had to think about whether students would have enough prior knowledge to truly engage with the secondary source. At the same time, I needed to be cognizant of whether the article covered a fair amount of time, which might then help students understand important historical concepts, like change over time and contingency. Moreover, if I could, I wanted the articles to be useful for answering more than one of the course’s essential questions.

The Journal of American History, March 2014

I ultimately chose fifteen articles from the Journal of American History to help students answer the course’s four essential questions. (See Figure #2: Academic Articles for a complete list.) Erika Lee’s “Enforcing the Borders,” for example, helped students compare and contrast a wide-range of racialized lived experiences from the Chinese Exclusion Act through the 1924 Immigration Act. Her article complemented lecture material on and primary sources about the history of white supremacy. Julia Mickenberg’s “Suffragettes and Soviets,” on the other hand, highlighted the interconnections between domestic and global events. Mickenberg’s article proved useful for students interested in women’s and gender history as well as those fascinated by the events of the First World War. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s classic, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” was one of my students’ favorite articles. Hall famously critiqued the “classical” phase of the Civil Rights Movements in her article. Yet, for the purposes of my course, Hall’s article also helped students better understand the history of African Americans, the intersection of race and gender, and racialized economics. Hall’s seminal article, then, could assist students with three of the course’s four essential questions.

Students who are used to reading textbooks, however, can find reading academic articles challenging. To have them gain the skills necessary to successfully engage with these academic articles, I devoted a fair amount of in-class time to reading, interpreting, and analyzing these sources. I viewed my role as an encouraging coach who kept his approach to the analysis of academic articles straightforward and accessible. For the first three articles assigned in the class, I had students (re)read the introduction and the conclusion with a partner or in small groups. I asked students to underline and annotate where the historian(s) articulated their argument. Sometimes this meant that students had to mark several parts of the introduction and conclusion, trying to make sense of complex arguments which had multiple supporting parts. At first, this was a tough task for students, consuming upwards of 20 minutes of a 75-minute class. However, as we spent more time on this skill, students slowly gained more confidence. I was able to go around the room to work with small groups of students, focusing them on specific parts of introductions and conclusions. After a couple sessions, I asked students to paraphrase arguments in their own words. Students’ confidence grew the more they worked with one part of “doing” history—understanding historical arguments. Over time, what had taken 20 or 25 minutes soon dwindled to 12 or 15.

Students were required to write an analysis for two of the academic articles they read. To ensure further success, students were provided a fair amount of scaffolding on these assignments. To assist with article analyses, I created a reading grid that asked students to: research the historian/scholar; note and critique the sources used in the article; make historical connections to lectures and/or primary sources; and reflect on how the source could answer one of the course’s essential questions. I had detailed questions for each box of the reading grid, providing a fair amount of guidance for students to understand what they should be looking for when analyzing an article. Figure #3:The Reading Grid displays the course’s emphasis on scaffolding the analysis of academic articles.

By the end of the term, I could see that the focus on teaching with and analyzing academic articles worked on several levels. The most important, in my opinion, was how students improved from their first to their second article analysis. They had a much more nuanced understanding of historical argumentation in their second analyses. In addition, students wrote more critically about the historians’ source bases and felt more comfortable critiquing “master narratives” they had learned in high school. For those afraid of using academic articles in their surveys, I want to offer a simple reassurance: students never shied away from this hard work. My provisional course instructor survey scores indicate that students recognized article analyses as a core part of their learning. I already have a strong sense of which articles students enjoyed, but I hope my course instructor surveys include constructive criticism about the articles students viewed as least helpful for answering the course’s essential questions.

There were other outcomes to using academic articles. Many of the articles I selected emphasized U.S. History in a transnational perspective. As a result, students had to think about the United States as a place which influences—and is influenced by—others parts of the world. By carefully selecting articles, I also made it so I did not have to assign a traditional textbook. Lectures, primary sources, and the articles covered enough material for students to understand the American experience and to walk away with their own informed interpretation of the nation’s history.

As an educator now weeks removed from the course I taught, I see an even greater purpose to teaching with academic articles. As we navigate a period of deep political division, one that is fraught with fear for many, teaching with academic articles has the possibility to instill crucial civic skills in our students. By respectfully challenging those who came before them, each scholar I assigned demonstrated that disagreement is a core part of the democratic experience. Using academic articles instead of a textbook allowed my students to see that disagreement does not need to be hateful or vitriolic. Instead, it can be a productive way to move forward, pushing in the direction of the “more perfect Union” enshrined in the Constitution.

Figure 1: The Course’s Essential Questions

America’s role in the world	Determine how the United States’ foreign policy changed and/or remained consistent from the Spanish-American War through the Cold War. How did the U.S. confront the challenges it faced around the globe? Are there core tenets (or beliefs) that have guided American foreign policy? If so, what are they? If not, how do foreign policy conflicts differ from each other?
Economics and labor	Evaluate the ways the American economy has changed over the past 150 years. How did “big business” alter the landscape of U.S. industry? Why did Progressive Era and New Deal reformers pass the reforms they did? Have Americans found a way to balance economic growth and workers’ rights in the post-World War II period?
Women and gender	Analyze the political and economic fight for women’s equality. To what extent has the role and status of women changed over the past 150 years? What have been landmark victories for women’s rights? Why have various political factions opposed women’s and feminist groups? Is there work left to be done?
Comparative civil rights	The continued fight for equality has, in many ways, defined the American experience. Compare and contrast the struggle for civil rights that two of the following segments of the population experienced: 1) African Americans; 2) women; 3) Mexican Americans; 4) Asian Americans; and/or 5) LGBTQ individuals. Are there commonalities that you see in the political rhetoric and tactics of these two groups? How would you describe the unique challenges these segments of the population faced? What are the arguments, agendas, challenges, etc. that have made coalitions difficult to form, both within and between different rights movements?

Figure 2: Academic Articles

Author	Article title	Year of publication	Essential question(s) answered
Erika Lee	Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882-1924	2002	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Richard White	Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age	2003	Economics and labor
Jürgen Martschukat	“The Art of Killing by Electricity”: The Sublime and the Electric Chair	2002	Economics and labor & comparative civil rights
Julia L. Mickenberg	Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia	2014	America’s role in the world; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Lisa McGirr	The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Global History	2007	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; & comparative civil rights
Julia C. Ott	“The Free and Open People’s Market”: Political Ideology and Retail Brokerage at the New York Stock Exchange, 1913–1933	2009	Economics and labor
Rachel Louise Moran	Consuming Relief: Food Stamps and the New Welfare of the New Deal	2011	Economics and labor & women and gender
James J. Weingartner	Americans, Germans, and War Crimes: Converging Narratives from “the Good War”	2008	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Thomas A. Guglielmo	Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas	2006	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; & comparative civil rights
Elaine Tyler May	Security against Democracy: The Legacy of the Cold War at Home	2011	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Nancy Bernkopf Tucker	Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China	2005	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall	The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past	2005	Economics and labor; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Michael B. Katz et al.	The New African American Inequality	2005	Economics and labor & comparative civil rights
Kevin J. Mumford	The Trouble with Gay Rights: Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia, 1969-1982	2011	Women and gender & comparative civil rights
Michael H. Hunt	In the Wake of September 11: The Clash of What?	2002	America’s role in the world

Figure 3: The Reading Grid (PDF)

Also by Christopher Babits on Not Even Past:

Finding Hitler (in all the Wrong Places?)
The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)
Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self by Jessica Grogan (2012)
Another perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

A Revolting People: Three Lesser-known Makers of the American Revolution

By Robert Olwell

Last spring, I divided the students enrolled in my course on the “Era of the American Revolution” into groups of four and assigned each group the task of researching, writing, and then producing a four-five minute “video essay.” (For more on the video essay form see “Show & Tell: The Video Essay as History Assignment.”)

I called the project “A Revolting People” playing off a line from the Marx Brothers’ film “Duck Soup.” Someone tells Groucho that the “peasants are revolting!” and he replies, “They certainly are, and they’re rebelling too.”

Each group was given the name of a lesser-known participant in the events of the American Revolution. My teaching assistants, Ms. Signe Fourmy and Ms. Jeanne Kaba, and I sat together and watched all of the thirty-three video essays that were submitted. We were pleased with the quality of research and creativity that most of the student groups achieved.

Now, in the spirit of this summer’s Olympics, I would like to present (with the permission of the students producers) the three video essays that we deemed to be worthy of the “gold,” “silver,” and “bronze” medals.

Bronze Medal
Topic: Jemima Wilkinson
Produced by: Nancy Trinh, Rebecca Swan, Noah Villabos, Albert Zhao

Silver Medal
Topic: George Robert Twelves Hewes
Produced by: Emma Meyer, Garret Mireles, Letitia Olariu, Nikole Pena

Gold Medal
Topic: John Laurens
Produced by: Jordan Gamboa, Logan Green, Nicholas Klesmith, Alexandria Lyons

Digital Pedagogy: THATCamp Comes to UT Austin

By Ece Turnator and Hannah Alpert-Abrams

Logo courtesy of Melany Klopp, St. Edward’s University.

More than eighty librarians, digital scholars, technologists, and administrators convened at the University of Texas at Austin in January to address the question: how do digital tools affect teaching and learning in today’s classrooms? The THATCamp on Digital Pedagogy took place on January 5-6, 2016 in University of Texas at Austin Libraries’ newly opened space, the Learning Commons. The organizers were digital humanists and librarians from St. Edward’s University, Southwestern University, and The University of Texas at Austin. The attendees hailed from various parts of the country, benefiting from the presence of the annual conference of the Modern Language Association in Austin this year.

A THATCamp is an “unconference” in which “humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.” Our THATCamp on Digital Pedagogy included sessions on a wide array of topics ranging from student involvement with digital tools to the evaluation and publication of public-facing student work. All in all there were about 25 sessions over the course of two days, as well as three workshops: one on Omeka, a tool for creating digital exhibits; one on Digital Pedagogy as it relates specifically to the Humanities; and a third on Social Annotation, or group markup of shared documents. The THATCamp sessions were devoted to discussions about best practices and the evolving landscape of tools for digital pedagogy.

Most sessions produced an extensive set of notes and resources that the reader can find by clicking on the session notes on the schedule here.

Photo of the participants of THATCamp. Courtesy of Elon Lang, Lecturer in Humanities at UT-Austin.

A number of sessions were devoted to the challenges and advantages of digital projects assigned as student group work. For example, “Teaching Digital Humanities in the Online Setting” underscored the value of thinking long-term about student work and giving students the opportunity to create their online presence. By using platforms such as Domain of One’s Own, for example, students can create a portfolio of their college work that can follow them into life after college, thus raising the bar for student responsibility and for the quality of the work completed. The portfolio gives students some concrete work-products that they can show to prospective employers. Other sessions touched on the management of interdisciplinary or collaborative projects, evaluation of student work, training instructors and students to use digital tools, managing the level of expectations of teachers and learners, as well as the difficulty of keeping a constant and open feedback loop in a classroom from the beginning to the end of the digital learning experience.

The challenges of assessing the quality of student work and of making it public – challenges exacerbated by complicated rules about student privacy in FERPA laws – were discussed in a number of sessions. Attendees found that various kinds of literacies that are involved in the creation of digital projects and discussed the importance of communicating the intended learning outcomes of class projects to students from the start. Students’ fear of failure, the session participants argued, sometimes gets in the way of the learning experience. Instructors discussed various ways to give students control over their work, to train them to become active learners and to incorporate a sense of play in teaching. They also emphasized the need to teach –and learn for themselves — comfort with failure. The session “Fail Stories” demonstrated that faculty comfort with failure can have mixed results: “productive discomfort” may be reviewed in a negative light by students, which might in turn have a negative impact on tenure decisions for faculty.

Ece Turnator speaks at THATCamp. Courtesy of Fatma Tarlaci, Student Affairs Director at UT-Austin.

The importance of building accessible digital projects was the subject of the “Access and Inclusivity” session, which sought to address the needs of everyone from blind users who depend on screen readers to students who lack computers in their home or whose racial, sexual, or gender identity comes into conflict with an interface design. A challenging session for all involved, it was apparent that underlying assumptions about the needs of end-users (whether they are students, faculty, or the general public) have a significant influence on scholars’ ability to reliably create accessible projects. The session produced a list of resources, including the Kairos special issue on web accessibility.

A number of sessions were dedicated to skill development and digital tools. These sessions highlighted important resources like DIRT and GeoDIRT (registries of digital research tools), as well as lesson plans, self-help articles, and detailed course syllabi for introductory-level Digital Humanities courses to help instructors, departments, and institutions forge their own paths in teaching with digital tools and creating more integrated learning experiences for their students.

Crowdsourcing and collaboration, especially student collaboration on digital projects, were discussed in multiple sessions. Along the same lines, “Networked Pedagogy” discussed networked learning environments, such as federated wikis and peer-review, especially in large classroom settings, as well as the challenges of providing structure to networked learning environments when the goals and outcomes are not well-communicated and understood. Whether active learning techniques such as the ones used in Reacting to the Past — a role-playing history curriculum — could be considered part of the networked pedagogy ecosystem was one of the interesting questions discussed in this session.

Other topics that produced lively and fruitful discussions included:

Digital Humanities and the Sciences
Gender, Diversity, Engaged Scholarship and Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities and the City
Metadata Training / Game Brainstorming
Digital Humanities and Entrepreneurship
Forming Productive Partnerships between Archives and Classrooms
Creating a Community of Practice on Digital Scholarship at UT

The Digital Pedagogy THATCamp offered scholars and teachers new to the field of Digital Humanities opportunities to share ideas and resources and network with others working in the field. It brought together a very active group of practitioners who focus on many facets of digital pedagogy and gave attendees a solid overview of the rewards and challenges of active student engagement in a classroom setting. If pedagogy in general is essentially about students becoming active learners, creators of scholarship, and critical consumers of information, the journey to reach these noble goals has advanced, thanks in no small part to digital tools and methodologies currently available and we all took several big steps toward those goals during our two days together.

History TAs on Learning to Teach

Even the most gifted teachers had to learn how to teach history and most of us needed a lot of help getting started. This month Not Even Past asked graduate students to reflect on their first teaching experiences as Teaching Assistants in History classes. They responded with insight, humor, and even a little hard won wisdom. Reflections here by Chloe Ireton, Cacee Hoyer, Jack Loveridge, Cameron McCoy, and Elizabeth O’Brien.

Chloe Ireton

As a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin, I have had valuable opportunities to learn how to teach history. Over the last three semesters I have worked as a Teaching Assistant in a lecture course on United States History since 1865. The 300+ students in the course listen to two hours of lecture a week and then participate in discussion sections of thirty-five students for one hour a week, taught by one of four TAs or Dr. Megan Seaholm who directs the course. The sections aim to create small learning environments for students to engage in sustained discussion and focus on important academic skills such as critical thinking, reading, writing, and discussion skills. Each seminar leader also creates a closed online social media group where students complete tasks, engage in graded online discussions about specific topics, and communicate with other students and the Teaching Assistant about the course.

This US History course is the first large lecture courses in the History Department to carry an “Ethics and Leadership Flag.” All UT undergraduates are required to take at least one Ethics Flag course, which is intended to “expose students to ethical issues and to the process of applying ethical reasoning in real-life situations.” The Ethics Flag component of the course taught students to explore the ethical reasoning of historical actors and to interrogate contrasting moral values in different historical time periods. We focused on four key ethical themes: poverty in the late nineteenth century, eugenics and state-sanctioned forced sterilizations in the early twentieth century, the Targeting of Civilians during the Second World War and specifically the use of atomic bombing, and lastly Civil Disobedience in the second half of the twentieth century. In the seminars, students reflected on the ethical reasoning of historical actors through primary source analysis. What did each person see as the key ethical issue at stake? Who did they see as the key moral actor(s) responsible for solving this issue? Did they see any alternatives? Did they see a certain action as ethically required or permissible and why?

At the end of the course, feedback from many students referred to these discussions as hugely important in the development of their critical thinking skills and their understanding of others and of history in general. The majority of the students found it enlightening to engage in discussions with peers who approached the topics differently from themselves. As the discussion leader, I found that the ethical framework of these seminars encouraged a high level of student engagement and provided a space for students to learn important skills in primary source reading, critical thinking, argumentation, and discussion, but most importantly in developing a sense of historical differences. I was fortunate to collaborate in the process of planning and integrating of the Ethics and Leadership Flag into the course. The TAs, Dr. Megan Seaholm (History), Dr. Eric Busch (Sanger Learning Center), and Dr. Jess Miner (Center for the Core Curriculum) met every fortnight during three academic semesters to plan seminars and debate the most appropriate forms of assessment. In our fortnightly meetings, we took turns presenting seminar lesson plans, each of which we critiqued until deciding on the most appropriate format. This experience provided a crucial venue for professional development in discussing best teaching practices with experienced teachers.

In organizing discussion seminars for this course, I adhered to a pedagogical philosophy called “task-based learning.” It is broadly defined as student centered and often student led learning through students’ active engagement in relevant tasks, commonly in collaboration with their peers. Adherents of this pedagogy believe that when learners are actively engaged in a task they become invested in the outcome of their own learning and the skills that they acquire along the way. In task-based learning approaches, the educator acts as a guiding toolbox to aide students’ learning rather than as a vessel that carries knowledge and imparts it in a teacher centered learning environment. For one weekly seminar, I planned a task-based lesson on National Security and free speech in the United States during World War I, which aimed to elaborate on the theme of the lecture that week, develop students’ primary source reading and critical thinking skills, and abilities to analyze historical sources and themes. Students read The Espionage Act of 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 speech about the need to enter WWI in order to make a world “safe for democracy.” I provided guiding questions and divided students into small discussion groups, which identified a wide array of perspectives on what these sources signified and whether they could and should be read together. In these discussions, students engaged actively in the type of historical thinking skills that we wanted them to acquire. For example, since the class represented a variety of opinions about the significance of the readings when read together, students became aware of the importance of historiographical debate and the role of historians’ perceptions in their own interpretations. In the second half of the class, students read two court cases where individuals who publically spoke out against the draft during WWI were found guilty of charges under the Espionage Act. For example, students read excerpts from Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), a United States Supreme Court decision, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that those distributing leaflets that urged resistance to the draft could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft (a criminal offense) because they posed a “clear and present danger.” This activity helped to contextualize the meaning and effect of the Espionage Act and prompted students to revisit the original question of whether we should read President Woodrow Wilson’s speech on the need to spread democracy across the world alongside the Espionage Act. For the post-seminar online discussion task, students reflected on the questions and documents that they found most interesting. They also read a news article about the Obama Administration’s use of the Espionage Act in order to engage in a discussion on the differences between the use and purpose of the Espionage Act in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This semester I am embarking on a new challenge as I am working as a Supplemental Instructor for a large US History Survey course. This means that I am offering two hourly discussion sections every week for students in this course. These seminars are designed to help students with course material and also to develop the skills that they need to become successful and autonomous learners. We will be covering diverse topics such as reading and note-taking skills, writing skills, preparation for specific assignments, discussion seminars, debating skills, historical thinking skills, and reading and analyzing primary sources, to name just a few. All of these sessions aim to support students’ progress in the class. The challenging aspect of these seminars is that they are voluntary. As the discussion leader, I have to be prepared for attendance to vary between a handful of students and hundreds. The Supplemental Instruction program (directed by the Sanger Learning Center) also provides continuing professional and pedagogical support through biweekly meetings with a supervisor and Supplemental Instructors from other departments within the College of Liberal Arts. These meetings aim to provide a forum to discuss teaching methods and our classroom experiences over the course of the semester.

Completing my PhD at the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin has provided an unrivalled venue for developing as a historian. Excellent support of my intellectual trajectory and research project (which I have not discussed in this post), combined with the opportunity to teach on exciting and innovative History courses make this a wonderful department in which to train as a historian.

***

Cameron D. McCoy

I would like to start this reflection with a quote from a friend. When asked to describe his undergraduate experience at the United States Naval Academy, he replied, “It was everything I thought it would be and a thousands things I never imagined.” As a UT History Teaching Assistant for the course in the Black Power Movement, my friend’s words found a suitable place to rest.

I am sure TAs do not even cross the mental radar of students until after the first exam. We morph into something a little more than a disembodied e-mail solicitor by the midterm, and then two weeks before the final the TA becomes the end-all-be-all. Prior to this—according to most students—the teaching assistant is the class scribe, sends pestering e-mails, listens and deals with complaints, and is supposed to know the syllabus verbatim at a moment’s notice. Of course this all falls under “… and a thousand things I never imagined.” Anything unfavorable is the Teaching Assistant’s fault and anything favorable is the professor’s doing. I can always count on the behavior of the students to hit the same currents throughout each semester, which brings the comfort of knowing it is “everything I thought it would be” and the familiar chaos of “a thousand things I never imagined.”

Surprisingly, I discovered that I never had to sell history to the students. Neither was I under fire in attempting to defend the discipline and virtues of history. The professor designed the course in such a way that the material was palatable and fairly easy to consume.

I did find when grading exams that the students’ interpretation of the material varied. Each student personalized the material, from ultra-conservative to highly polemic, from rigid to liberal, and from nonchalant to finely precise. I found this fascinating and the variety assisted me in better understanding how students communicated. I also enjoyed reading essays that expressed the student’s growth from learning the course material. Several students’ views drastically changed throughout the semester, specifically concerning how the black power movement connected directly to how universities function and how many social issues of 2014 are direct descendants of the 1960s.

***

Jack Loveridge

Teaching History at a major public university in the United States means stretching outside of your intellectual comfort zone on a regular basis. Teaching Assistants (TAs) are often assigned to courses somewhat beyond their principal fields of study. Many unwitting Latin Americanists, for instance, might find themselves cast before a crowd of inquisitive undergraduates, struggling to cough up the basics of the Missouri Compromise. A historian of Russia might be cornered in a hallway and asked where everyone was running during the Runaway Scrape or what was so abominable about the Tariff of Abominations. These are our occupational hazards.

As a student of British imperial rule in South Asia in the twentieth century, I felt a nervous pang when I found myself TA-ing for Dr. James Vaughn’s course, entitled History of Britain: The Restoration to 1783. Though a bit closer to home for me than the assignments drawn by many of my colleagues, the long, gouty march of Stuarts and Hanoverians, punctuated by a decade of Cromwellian fun, is hardly my strong suit. Not only did the scope of the course predate my period of expertise, part of it also predated Britain itself. (England and Scotland did not tie the knot until the Act of Union in 1707. Incidentally, whether their marriage will endure the test of time shall be seen with a Scottish independence referendum this September.) Beyond that bit of Jeopardy trivia, what on earth did I know about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

My initial hesitation notwithstanding, I plunged forth into my first teaching assignment. I read the requisite materials and then some, devoured half a dozen BBC documentaries, and memorized the English monarchs since William the Conqueror for an added parlor trick. As it turned out, this period of English history helped to explain a great deal about the evolving British Empire and, more surprisingly, the contemporary global economy. Most of all, engaging with an unfamiliar period of history proved humbling, but it also gave me an opportunity to approach the readings and lectures as a student and not a teacher. This, in turn, ultimately helped me to address students’ questions with a bit more empathy.

On occasion, one of my many bright students would ask a question for which I simply had no good answer. At first, these instances embarrassed me. How could I, the respected TA, wearer of fishbone-patterned blazers, and sipper of tiny coffees, ever fail to answer a student’s question? Gradually, though, I realized that even when I didn’t have the knowledge my students sought, I typically knew how to find it. Moreover, I could teach students how to find and interpret that knowledge themselves.

The point for teachers of History of all stripes, I think, is to find comfort in the discomfort of branching out into the unknown. All of us are learning right along with our students and that’s how it should be. After all, the objective of any school or university is to build an open society that asks questions, fosters lifelong learning, and enables the sharing of knowledge. That’s what we do here and doing it well is as much about not knowing everything as it is about knowing anything at all. To be effective teachers, we must feel free to honestly say, “I don’t know,” and follow it up with a spirited, “But let’s find out.”

***

Elizabeth O’Brien

This semester I am TAing for a course designed to introduce students to the history of U.S. relations with Latin America. About half of the students are freshmen and most have very little knowledge of Latin American history. During discussion, some students requested information regarding the colonial “caste” system, which was mentioned in the readings but not explained. After class I decided to look online for some further reading for them.

It was very difficult to identify an accurate and academically rigorous article that was accessible for lower-division undergraduates. First, I looked at several websites, but I could not use them due to blatant historical inaccuracies. Then I skimmed a few full-length scholarly articles, but they were far too dense and lengthy for the students.

I realized that Not Even Past was a perfect source for the concise and accessible explanation that I needed. I found an article by Dr. Susan Deans-Smith, “Casta Paintings,” which clearly explained how seventeenth and eighteenth-century authorities sought to define, label, and categorize the offspring of Spaniards, Indigenous natives, and Africans. They developed an intricate “caste system,” which was represented in paintings that depicted mixed racial groups. Deans-Smith’s article was complete with images. For example, one painting showed a Spanish man, his Mestiza (Spanish and Indigenous) wife, and their “Castiza” daughter. Several students reported that they read the piece and emerged with a much better understanding of racial and social categories in the history of Latin America.

***

Cacee Hoyer

Top Five Experiences as a TA

#5: A student wanted to meet to discuss her exam. During the almost half-hour long discussion, the student contradicted every comment I had made on her paper. I coolly tried to explain why she had lost points for this or that and she consistently insisted I was wrong. Eventually, she gave up her debate tactics and just blurted out “well are you going to give me any points back or not!” I just stared at her and explained how I generally didn’t do that unless there was a blatant mistake. At which she responded, “then why are we even supposed to meet with you!” As she stomped away, I was saddened as I realized she was an honor student because she could play the game and work the system, however, she failed to learn how to love learning.

#4 A student emailed me to explain he was not able to turn in his assignment on time because he had spent the night in jail. After I explained this wasn’t a University sanctioned excuse, he eventually turned in the assignment. A few weeks later he approached me in class, introducing himself as the guy who had emailed about spending the night in jail. I thought I should point out to him that perhaps using that tagline earns him points with his friends, but that it doesn’t quite work that way with his TA.

#3 I was leading a discussion in class, which quickly ran out of control when one student who persistently claimed he liked to be “provocative,” made racially inappropriate references that set off another girl quite vocally. At one point I was afraid we were going to have an all out brawl! My head was spinning, and so was the class…right out of control. That was definitely a learning experience for me!

#2 On final exams, several students still refer to Africa as a country.

#1 A student practically tackles me when she gets her exam back. She had struggled on the first exam and had been working very hard, coming to office hours and emailing me constantly. She was so excited she almost knocked me down! But in a good way.

More to read on innovations in teaching history

Banner Credits:

Les Grande Chroniques de France (via Wikimedia Commons)

Gene Youngblood lecturing at Rochester Institute of Technology, 1982 (via Wikimedia Commons)

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