June 26th, 2010 §
The next two years frame the transition, at Wright State University, from quarters to semesters. Within the Department of Urban Affairs and Geography we have agreed upon revised requirements for undergraduate and graduate majors as well as certificates, fields, and minors. Now we move to redesigning expectations within courses and programs. In 2010-2011, still on quarters, I will teach Urban Society and Change, Sex and Gender in American History, The American City: Women and the City, Doing Oral History, and Readings in Oral History.
In an effort lead by my colleague Jennifer Subban, we have obtained a Pay it Forward-Student Philanthropy Initiative grant through the Ohio Campus Community Compact to support three courses in the coming year including The American City. The interdisciplinary,
service-learning intensive course will be cross-listed in URS, Women’s Studies, and History. The external funding permits the class to act as a foundation, researching and awarding funding to non-profit organizations. Students will profile Miami Valley organizations involved in issues and programs that impact on women and present these in class. Students will work with selected organizations to develop project proposals and budgets. The class will review the projects and select up to three to fund.
This will be the first time that I will teach the 400/600 level Doing Oral History course back to back with the graduate readings seminar in oral history and I’m looking forward to focusing oral history from planning to publications, documentaries, and exhibits across two quarters.
Along with three colleagues-Enamul Choudhury, Jennifer Subban, and Myron Levine-and with funding from an internal grant, I will be working on revising our core course, Urban Society and Change. Our goals are to: 1) build a digital resource bank to support distance learning, Web-enhanced, and traditional instruction and 2) integrate an international exchange/service learning assignment into the course.
I first taught the interdisciplinary course Sex and Gender in American History about fifteen years ago in response to LGBTQ student interest at Miami University and it always offers a rich opportunity for discussion of both shared readings and student research projects.
In 2011-2012, still on quarters, I will teach Urban Society and Change, The American City, Readings in Material Culture Studies, Digital History, and Community Development. Wright State will shift to semesters in Fall 2012.
One year into my transition to a new department home (I moved from the Department of History to Urban Affairs and Geography last year) and facing the transition to semesters, my goal is to not overload either myself or my students for the next two years. This doesn’t mean less work so much as keeping it simple and straightforward-something I rarely manage to do.
Read earlier Tell History posts at http://tellhistory.wordpress.com.
April 8th, 2008 §
In February, I proposed that history education in the middle childhood years should begin with good fiction and non-fiction books for children. College survey courses in American history at Wright State University are populated first by students in education, followed by history majors and a sprinkling of history enthusiasts from other departments. Many of the education students plan to teach middle childhood language arts. I’m looking for feedback on a “Stories First” assignment for these students—please let me know what you think.
My premise is that we will not serve future teachers well by diluting substantive history content in these courses. The Masters degree for future social studies teachers requires surprisingly little history relative to the courses that students will teach. The survey is often the last opportunity, before they enter their own classroom, to study many aspects of American history. While undergraduates are often focused on their career plans rather than the history content, teachers often wish they had studied history more deeply before launching their careers.
Reading children’s books is not the best use of the limited time college students have to give to American history studies; however, studying and writing about the historical context for these stories may encourage future language arts teachers to teach more history.
I am considering a collaborative wiki-based assignment option. Students, working in small groups, would either contribute to an existing children’s literature wiki or develop a Stories First: Reading History wiki for integrating historical study with language arts. Students will not summarize the children’s book; motivated students may read the story on their own time however, the focus of the assignment will be on explaining the historical context, events, and people. If students either contribute or build something of value, they will be able to return to it as a reference in their own teaching while other readers may contribute, correct, and extend what the students build.
I contacted Wikipedia and received an encouraging response directing me to the university projects page with some stipulations; as long as these articles:
The response pointed me as well to two other children’s literature wikis: see ChildLit Wiki; and Children’s Literature.
In the current American history survey course assignment, students develop a Document Based Question (DBQ) and then write a model essay answer. The students pursue an individual historical research project while discussing the historian’s craft in class; students identify a historical research question, review both primary sources and historical scholarship, selectively edit the primary sources related to the question, develop a thesis, build on past scholarship, interpret the evidence, and explain their conclusions. The assignment connects the classroom with their career plans—Ohio Content Standards for Social Studies Skills and Methods introduce primary sources in the fifth grade and then build, recursively on historical research skills through tenth grade—without diluting the study of history.
The DBQ assignment serves future high school social studies teachers effectively. Can an alternative assignment option work for the students interested in teaching middle childhood language arts? Will a student wiki project like this be of value to middle childhood social studies and language arts teachers?
Please share alternative assignments.
April 4th, 2008 §
Are you using or doing oral history in the Midwest? There are several regional oral history organizations but there hasn’t been one for the Midwest recently:
- Michigan Oral History Association
- New England Association for Oral History
- Northwest Oral History Association
- OHMAR – Oral History Mid-Atlantic Region
- Southwest Oral History Association
- Texas Oral History Association
Troy Reeves at the University of Wisconsin has restarted a long dormant Midwest Oral History organization. The group will have an organizing session at the upcoming 2008 Oral History Association annual meeting, October 15-18 in Pittsburgh, PA. Please join the Midwest Oral History Group online and share news about your work or discuss oral history practices and projects.
April 2nd, 2008 §
Each summer, the Ohio Humanities Council sponsors The Oral History Training Institute for historical organizations, teachers, and others interested in learning the skills to develop an oral history project. Learn more about oral history June 3-5 at Kenyon College.
The Ohio Humanities supports summer teachers institutes across the state. For more information, see K-12 Programs in the Humanities.
- “Inventors and Innovators: The Ohio Chautauqua Teachers Institute” is presented by the Ohio Humanities Council in collaboration with Muskingum College, June 24-28 and a second institute in Westerville with Ohio State University, July 2-6. The intensive five day institute is wrapped around and features scholar/performers from the Ohio Chautauqua public program with additional sessions by academics.
- “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Race in 19th Century Ohio,” July 6-11 at Ohio University-Athens.
- “Holocaust Studies for Educators,” June 16-20 at Hebrew Union College-Cincinnati.
- “Ohio Japanese Americans: Immigration, Internment, and Reconciliation,” June 23-27 at the University of Akron.
- “Understanding and Teaching Jewish Texts: Exploring Collaborative Text Study,” July 27-August 1, at The Center for Studies in Jewish Education and Culture at the University of Cincinnati.
March 13th, 2008 §
In an essay, “Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?” Tom Scheinfeldt suggests that the field of history is seeing a shift from a century of theoretical questions framed in monographs to a greater emphasis on methodology, collaboration, and organization. Over a century ago, he notes that bibliography was central to the academic enterprise in many areas of history. Folklore, as a field, was also focused on methodological and organizational concerns. Scheinfeldt points to models provided by online applications like Zotero and Wikipedia as part of this new direction. Scheinfeldt is the Managing Director of the Center for History and New Media. You can read his blog at Found History. His argument is worth considering in relation to previous discussions of scholarship and both the land grant colleges and the New Deal. Departments of history that see themselves as disciplinary silos, working unto themselves to defend “standards,” may not be much aware of, much less addressing this change quite yet.
February 4th, 2008 §
My views of middle childhood education come both from raising two children (college graduates in their twenties) and from serving as co-director of two Teaching American History grant projects. On one hand, I understand the impulse in No Child Left Behind to make inequality visible and to hold schools accountable. Unfortunately, in a world of local school districts serving widely different populations, the implementation of No Child Left Behind leaves a lot to be desired. NCLB gave a stronger hand to itemizing knowledge and skills in a way that is often at odds with nurturing a love of learning about the past in practice.
The Ohio Social Studies Standards for middle childhood learning should be scrapped in favor of integrating language arts and history in 4th, 5th and, perhaps 6th grades. It’s not that the standards address the wrong content, its that there isn’t time to teach the wide content encompassed by the standards effectively while engaging young learners. Putting the many indicators first makes for a checklist approach to learning. Merging with language arts, to some extent, will expand the amount of time given to the study of history over the paltry hours it receives as part of integrated social studies and it will strengthen language arts.
Stories should be at the core of this curriculum. These are the years when children come into their own as readers and love to immerse themselves in new worlds. They also like to master information. A literature based approach to history integrates these two powerful interests. Children today are the beneficiaries of well-researched, imaginatively written children’s fiction and non-fiction literature by writers like Avi, Susan Campbell Bartoletti, and Louise Erdrich. Building a curriculum on stories will foster new contributions to children’s literature. In addition students are more likely to imagine themselves as future writers and historians if they read good books than if they read textbooks designed to address long lists of indicators.
Instructional designers should read deeply of this literature and consider activities that will extend student understanding of both the past and of social studies skills and methods in relation to children’s literature. Students can still construct multi-tiered timelines, maps, and pie-charts but around the history connected with these stories (and with the standards). They can read primary documents including first person accounts and photographs and compare these to the information in the stories. These works, explored in detail, serve as a vivid basis—the post-holes–for future studies. Young students love for the past will be nurtured through stories rather than strangled by benchmarks and indicators.
A merger with language arts brings more opportunities for creativity into the study of the past. Poetry, like Alice Walkers’ “In Our Mothers’ Garden” also immerses students in the drama, challenges, and emotions of the past. In Minneapolis, for example, we made quilt squares based on a reading of Walker and a study of African American quilts from John Michael Vlach, The Afro American Tradition in Decorative Arts. Students also learned how African Americans built schools and institutions in the wake of slavery. In early elementary classes, students turned the picture book, The Ox Cart Man into board games by identifying obstacles and opportunities both in the storybook and in New England life. More detailed “chapter books” lend themselves to such collaborative, creative projects.
Students can learn by doing – producing their own works of fiction based on a careful reading of selected first person narratives and other historical research and evidence. Students can publish their work in school magazines and websites and by making their own books, using blank books (our son’s sixth grade teacher used Bare Books with great success), or going on-line for a publishing service like Lulu.com. The National Museum of Women and the Arts offers up tremendous resources for simple to complex bookmaking projects for kids. Public libraries can host displays of children’s books. A National History Day competition for middle childhood students could offer a book-making category.
As they research, write, illustrate and construct books about the past students will learn more about what it means to be both an historian and a writer.