I am a veteran high school history teacher interested in decolonizing history curricula, anti-racist pedagogy, and e-learning.
Lately, it seems, we are always returning. Returning to school, returning for a new term or to an old format that feels new. Like many folks, inside and outside of education, the past twenty-two months have disrupted time my sense of time. Transitions dominate my mental state, and judging from teacher Twitter tonight, I am […]
Reflecting on the disruptions to schooling over the past eighteen months, I keep drifting back to a pair of tweets to make sense of student response and to focus my attention on their education. One is from the early days of the pandemic, the time of emergency online teaching. For me, as a teacher, the […]
Students used multiple sources to draw defensible conclusions about the plague
After introducing students to the historical processes around understanding plague pandemics yesterday, I guided my classes through primary sources on the Black Death in Europe and the Middle East today. This is such a work in progress that I added documents as the day went on. Like yesterday I used Slides with Pear Deck for […]
Today, I debuted a new lesson on the Second Plague Pandemic. While it is definitely a work in progress, I was excited to do more than survive the day. For this lesson my goal was for students to understand more about the medieval Eurasian plague, while also wrapping their minds around how the construction of […]
Preparing to teach World History can be overwhelming, and this year’s uncertainty—for families, for schools, and for society—intensifies this. Attempting “coverage” of World History is a fool’s game in the best of times, and its impossibility is fully manifest amidst the disruption that is 2020. The evergreen lesson is simple: putting primary sources in front […]
Black Lives Matter, and so history teachers must ensure that students understand the agency and the resilience of African descended people in the past
Teaching the Haitian Revolutions reveals complexities that we should not avoid. Students should understanding that history is complicated, all simple answers are incomplete.
I am excited about my position with Fiveable, because it brings together the animating ideas from the beginning of this blog—the pedagogic possibilities presented by e-learning—with my current focus on globalizing and decolonizing World History curricula.
As intellectuals from the Caribbean have long known, to be historical agents is a pre-condition to political autonomy and the right to determine on’s destiny. They have known that one cannot determine the course of a story that one has not helped to create; whether we have in the future of the world in which […]