I’m frankly a little embarrassed as a history teacher that I was slow to take seriously the popular support for and acquiescence to the possible authoritarianism of President-Elect Trump (for more on Trump’s authoritarianism see @sarahkendzior and Brendan Nyhan). Despite extensive reading and research since I started teaching in 1990, America, its past and present, is always more racist than […]
Category: History
UPDATE: Resources for the lesson described in this post are now on this page. For high school history teachers, comparing secondary source treatments of historical events is no longer just a good idea, it’s the law. In Minnesota that’s state social studies standard 9.4.1.2.2, benchmark: “Evaluate alternative interpretations of historical events; use historical evidence to support or refute those interpretations.” This […]
Categories
DBQs for everyone
In a decade of teaching AP History, first Euro and now World, I have developed an appreciation for the Document-based question. Students will ultimately forget many of the historical facts that we cover in AP History. The skills developed practicing and writing DBQ should be much more durable and transferable, because students practice in my […]
Categories
Race, Space, and Privilege
Recent events have reminded me that as a white teacher engaging students in many racially tinged topics I need to foreground my own privileged social position. Part of this privilege is the possibility of dismissing race as something that happens elsewhere and to other people. My daughter just turned thirteen, and the guidance that I […]
Categories
Reading in between sources
As part of my summer reading program I recently finished Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for History. I found it worthy of the award: scholarly, insightful, and engaging. As many things do, it got me reflecting on teaching historical thinking. I particularly appreciated Taylor’s very transparent use of […]
In May shortly after returning to the classroom from covering a maternity leave elsewhere in the building. I facilitated student inquiry into the Montgomery Bus Boycott using SHEG’s activity I had been out when the trimester began and had not taught US History earlier this year. So, the students were all new to me, and it was […]
Contribution to April’s History Blog Circle: Historical thinking is important, but it’s hard, even “unnatural”. Likewise, assessing historical thinking is daunting, but very necessary. Both doing and assessing historical thinking require practice. Lots of it. This practice is worthwhile because reading and writing like historians are skills that students will use in college, career, and civic […]
Categories
Howard, Sam, Mitch, and Me
I have a somewhat deserved reputation for tardiness. Just after I finally read Sam Wineburg’s critique of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and began drafting some thoughts, Zinn and Wineburg were in the news thanks to Purdue University President Mitch Daniels. Then, I went on vacation…So, here are my belated thoughts on […]
Presenting at a stimulating Minnesota Council for History Education workshop this week, I stressed the importance of establishing classroom routines around historical inquiry. I know this is important, because I have yet to do it fully and know the consequences. Students still find the task of critically approaching sources strange and opaque. Establishing a frequently […]
Recently, I spent a period (67 minutes) on the Zoot Suit Riots with four classes of regular level, 10th grade US History students, using SHEG thinking like a historian materials and clips from PBS American Experience documentary, available on youtube. The documentary used a lot of witnesses to and participants in the events around the […]