Last week’s planned return to campus after three and a half semesters of remote teaching/learning was foiled by Omicron. Instead of meeting in person with students, I found myself lecturing to a screen full of black rectangles. Our college will spend the first four weeks of spring semester completely remote. Most of my students, it seems, are fatigued from on-camera class meetings and so it was that I appealed to any last sympathies they might have for their professors. “Please, don’t make me lecture to a screen with black rectangles and face-less names,” I pleaded. “When we meet in person next month it will be much less awkward if we are familiar with each other’s faces.” My pathetic begging resulted in about half the students turning on their cameras. A (very) small victory.   This afternoon I participated in a time management seminar for students run by our college tutoring center. While the number of students who attended was small, their willingness to participate in such a program during the second week of the semester reiterates the importance of recognizing that students generally start out the semester hoping for success. Attendees of today’s program, just by being present, were acknowledging the challenge of managing academic demands with family and work responsibilities. Likely they have struggled with balance in the past and are hoping that this semester things will be different. Their presence made me wonder how many of my students are, in fact, engaged in this juggling while their cameras are off during my lectures.    In my head I know that there are many reasons students do not turn on their cameras. Perhaps they feel uncomfortable having strangers see into their homes/workspaces. Maybe they are still in their pajamas and sipping their first coffee of the day during my 1pm class. Or they are shy and unwilling to have their images broadcast via the internet into their classmates’ private spaces. Or maybe they are texting or gaming or doing anything but listening to my lecture.   I’m trying hard right now to convince myself that it’s not all about me. I have been working with college students since 1994. Nonetheless, the hour before my first remote lesson of this spring semester I was an anxious mess. It was as if I had never taught a class before in my life. Although by this point in the current pandemic I have attended dozens of remote events, I found myself overcome by nerves before opening that first meeting. I played with the backgrounds, adjusted and readjusted my speaker and microphone, and changed my sweater twice. There is something about teaching through the lens of a webcam that is incredibly intimidating even for the most seasoned professional. The screen of black rectangles intensified this anxiety for me: were the students listening and taking notes? Or were they logged in to class but doing something more interesting instead?    All of this angst surrounding teaching remotely has made me even more nostalgic for the return to traditional in-person learning. But then, I wonder, how much will have changed? What will the new normal look like? I’m desperate to hear from those of you who are back in the traditional classroom. What has changed? For better or for worse? Please share. ... View more

With so much focus this past year on COVID-19 I asked some of the young people in my life (high school and college-age students) to tell me which news stories from 2021 they wished they knew more about. While we have been necessarily hyper-focused on the pandemic as we live through it day-to-day, what do today's students think future generations will need to know about the year 2021 to fully understand its history?   Topping their list of lessons for students of the future is the removal of US troops from Afghanistan and the rebirth of the Taliban. Many young people have never known a time when the US military was not active in the Middle East. For those born after the year 2000, the “War on Terror” is to them what the Cold War was to children of the 1970s like me. While it’s likely that it will likely take decades before historians fully understand what went wrong with US policy in Afghanistan, I’m hopeful that future generations of students will have access to government and military documents that provide a more complete picture of our nation’s policies overseas.   The students I spoke with also emphasized the importance of future generations studying the environmental crises of 2021, both natural and man-made. From wildfires, hurricanes and tornadoes to oil spills and air pollution, today’s young people see climate change as a fundamentally important topic of study for their lifetimes. Perhaps more than any generation before, students in 2021 have been charged with generating tangible changes that will benefit the environment. Issues relating to sustainability are becoming part of the business school curriculums and today’s students see the socially active young people of today as critical to the future of our environment’s survival.    Finally, I was heartened to hear today’s students emphasize the changes in public discussion about mental health that have taken place around the pandemic and spread into nearly all aspects of American life as critical to understanding the year 2021. One student cited the Summer Olympics as a flashpoint in the way that we as a society talk about stress. US gymnast Simone Biles’s decision to withdraw from competition led to other athletes and nationally known figures publicly acknowledging the mental toll that anxiety, depression, and stress have taken on their lives. The measurable surge in demand for counseling services for people of all ages during the pandemic will add to the importance of future generations looking to 2021 as a time of significant challenges (and hopefully progress) in the field of mental health.    Without question, COVID-19 with all of its variants has remained the most talked-about news story of the year. As a nation we’ve debated vaccinations (Moderna v. Pfizer v. J&J) and boosters (which to choose and when). We’ve seen major economic challenges as a result of the virus – job losses and creation, career changes inspired by the pandemic, unemployment, and work-from-home have all been part of public discussion. It could be argued that not one single aspect of American life has been untouched by the pandemic. As the year comes to an end, many of us find ourselves again facing COVID-based restrictions and shutdowns and wondering when this chaos will finally dissipate – hopeful that in 2022 the pandemic will move from being a current event to a topic for the history books.    Happy New Year!   ... View more

I have the privilege this year of parenting two students in their senior years: one in high school and one in college. As a result, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about higher education and the paths to undergraduate and graduate degrees. In particular, I’m hearing about the stress of making seemingly enormous decisions at the tender ages of 18 and 22. While I’m quite certain my own children are tired of hearing my personal story for the thousandth time, I think as faculty it’s worth sharing with the students in our lives why and how we made the decisions we did regarding education.    I can only vaguely recall being a high school senior with a handful of college acceptances. I remember not wanting to move far away from home and knowing with certainty that I would be limiting the number of math and science courses I took to the bare minimum. I emphasize how little I remember about this decision-making process because so many of us as parents and educators want to see young people quickly and assertively make decisions about their academic and career paths. When we reflect on our own, however, we are reminded of how foggy and unclear it all seemed in the moment.    As a professor at a community college, I’m perhaps even more sympathetic to the challenges of academic decision making than most parents. I see first-hand, regularly, how the college search process can go wrong. Teaching in a state with a program that offers free community college to recent high school graduates means I have a lot of fresh-faced 18 year olds in my classes each fall. I also, however, work with just as many students for whom the first choice of their college search process did not work out as planned. Students have found themselves too far from home or with financial aid complications or at a university/college that was too big/too small for their learning style. Community college for those students is an opportunity to re-group and re-think their futures. Oftentimes, it is in our classrooms at the community college that these students find the path that they did not know they were searching for.   As we approach the semester’s end, let’s do our best as faculty and teachers to help guide our students through the challenges of decision-making and path-building. Being open and honest with our students about the right/wrong choices we made along our own journeys can be enormously helpful to both young people just starting out as well as to those non-traditional college students seeking a life reboot. With all of the stress and challenges facing students today, let’s do our best to show empathy for how difficult it is to make decisions amidst the turmoil of the pandemic. No matter our academic discipline, the students we teach amidst this chaos will remember us in the future for our kindness.  ... View more

I recently had the opportunity to view the film “Loving” (2016), a dramatization based on  Loving v. Virginia (1967) in which the Supreme Court struck down state laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage. For those who have yet to see the film it is a fictionalized account reportedly inspired by “The Loving Story” (2012), an HBO documentary. In addition to the obvious significance of the case in the history of civil rights, viewing the feature film reinforced for me the many areas of US history that can be enhanced by class discussion of the Loving case.    Watching the entire film in class is not always optimal timewise but there are some excellent online resources to introduce the case to the class in its place. Encyclopedia Virginia offers a summary of the key people and events, which can be assigned in conjunction maps and figures documenting the history of interracial marriage in the United States. Both the ACLU and vividmaps.com have accessible visual aids to help students understand the geographical component of the debate. While general histories of the case often portray its importance within the broader movement for civil rights, in-class or online discussions may branch out to include such diverse topics as the civil history of marriage in the colonies and the States, miscegenation laws, the 14th Amendment, and the post-Civil War rise of Jim Crow. Students may also wish to discuss connections between Loving v. Virginia and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which guaranteed marriage equality.   The Loving case offers an opportunity for students to talk historically about inter-racial relationships and the challenges faced by black and white families who sought to navigate friendships and marriages amidst brutally restrictive racial customs enforced by state laws. It also sheds light on the hypocrisy of a culture that long accepted sexual assault against black women (free and enslaved) by white men but believed that consenting adults should not have the legal right to create interracial unions. These conversations are no doubt difficult in the classroom but meaningful for students to fully understand the foundations and lasting-legacies of slavery and racism in our national history.   I find the Loving case to be particularly relevant to students because, at heart, it is about the right of two people to create a family of their own choosing. It is sometimes easy to lose sight of the human beings behind Supreme Court rulings, but it is these historical actors that many of our students will engage with most willingly. Encourage them to read interviews with Mildred and Richard Loving, and to watch some of the short video clips of news coverage of the case. In learning about this case many students will be able to see connections to their own family histories and to reflect on how their lives may have been different without the end of miscegenation laws that Loving v. Virginia brought about.  ... View more

Every year around this point in the semester -- past midterms, almost at Thanksgiving Break, and starting to think about final exams -- I find myself needing some additional inspiration to push through the last weeks of fall courses. I can feel my motivation lagging and the early sunsets only add to my lethargy. I’m taking some time for reflection this week in hopes of reinvigorating my mental focus so I can finish the semester with the same (or close to ) enthusiasm I had the first week of September.   The first step in my reinvigoration process has been to take some time to think ahead to next semester. Half of my course load is different in the spring so I looked back through some of the notes I kept from last spring to remind myself of particular changes I want to make to those courses. Giving my brain a future project to think about, even briefly, gave me a momentary break from the weight of the current semester. I like to make at least one significant curriculum change each time I offer a course. Reviewing my notes from last time around reminded me of ideas I had for spring 2022 and gave me an opportunity to feel excited about their implementation.    Next I spent just a handful of minutes today browsing the current registration numbers for my spring courses. Registration just opened this past Monday and already my US Women’s History class is full. To know that there are so many students interested in the subject matter made me more excited to think about topics I will be teaching in the spring and how to better connect them to my students’ lives.   Finally, as a last bit of motivation, this morning I pulled one of my all-time favorite books down from the shelf. Many years ago as a graduate teaching assistant at Boston College I was assigned to a Western Civilization II course. As a US history major I remember dreading the shift in focus to European history for so many precious hours of the week. The professor assigned Pat Barker’s brilliant Regeneration (1991) for the students to discuss as part of their World War I materials. While I cannot remember anything about leading those discussion sections, I have reread Regeneration every single year since that fall semester in 1999. The book itself is now in its thirtieth year of publication. Each time I read Barker’s fictional account of a British asylum for soldiers during the war I am reminded of how the book initially led me to read more about World War I when the course finished, and then many years later inspired me to start researching asylums in the United States around the same period of time. As I reread the book now I’m hopeful that some new inspiration and motivation will grow from the familiar story.   How do you handle late-semester fatigue? Suggestions welcome.   ... View more

I’m getting my COVID booster today and am feeling very hopeful. If enough people in my neck of the woods follow through with vaccinations and boosters maybe, just maybe, I will be able to return to campus in the spring. Student reluctance to register for on-campus offerings has meant a third semester of all online teaching. I’m starting to optimistically think about what I might take back to the brick and mortar classroom space with me from this three semester-long remote experience.    A colleague noted this week that she plans to continue using her online discussion board even when she is teaching in-person. Students who are reluctant to speak up in a traditional classroom space often submit eloquent, thoughtful discussion posts in online classes. My colleague is wise to take advantage of this reality and I plan to as well. I’ve also thought about using a chat-style system during my in-person lecture so that students who might be shy about raising their hand will still get their questions answered in class. Perhaps an open “chat” during my live lectures will allow me to engage more students in classroom meetings than I have in the past. While my attention span is too short to allow a scrolling chat to interrupt me during lecture, I can foresee looking at the chat in the last couple minutes of class to catch any questions that need to  be addressed.    I’m planning to continue to use the journal-based research assignment that I first wrote about in a blog this past spring (see “Summer Project: Assignment Reboot” ) in which I break down a traditional research project into sections and grade each separately. I designed this project because I felt my students were fatigued from online learning and not fully engaged in their semester-long projects. Forcing them to submit the project in sections has enabled me to keep tabs on their progress while providing feedback along the way, and has significantly reduced the problem of procrastination on the students’ end. I also find that the grading process for me is quicker (shorter chunks of work submitted at a time) and that I’m writing more comments.   And finally, I’m planning to continue to take advantage of the abundance of human resources that are available virtually as a result of the pandemic. I encourage fellow faculty to follow the social media feeds of historical and cultural organizations that relate to the topics you are teaching in class. On November 1st, for example, my students will be attending a virtual artist talk by Nikole Hannah Jones titled “Examining Slavery’s Modern Legacy,” hosted by Massachusetts College of Art & Design ( register here ). Later in November they will be assigned to view (live or via the post-event recording) a talk by Gayle Jessup White hosted by the National Archives. “Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant’s Search for Her Family’s Lasting Legacy” will be moderated virtually by historian Annette Gordon Reed ( register here ). I have no doubt you’ll be amazed by the access your students can have to fabulous speakers and resources with just a little time web surfing.   If there is something that you’ve brought back into the traditional classroom with you from your experience with pandemic-era online learning, please share!  ... View more

When I was 22 I made it through only half of the movie “Pulp Fiction” in a theater before leaving. I couldn’t see past the violence on the screen to the creative story being crafted underneath. I was simply too uncomfortable to see anything artistic through the blood and gore. Nearly three decades later my son, an aspiring filmmaker, convinced me to give the movie another try -- reminding me of a lesson that I have forced on him many, many times: discomfort can be a tool for learning.   I’ve been thinking a lot about my (admittedly simplistic!) example of a personal life lesson lately as public debate abounds about the teaching of critical race theory and the level of discomfort by which many white people approach discussions of race. I’m heartened by the fact that since the death of George Floyd more white students at my college are taking Black History and courses that examine race and ethnicity through the lenses of sociology and literature. The students’ willingness to confront discomfort makes me hopeful in spite of news stories that highlight the hatred and ignorance that still festers in so many predominantly white communities and institutions in the United States.    This week’s coverage of the resignation of NFL coach John Gruden’s over racist, homophobic, and misogynistic emails is a reminder of how far our society still needs to go to move the needle on hate and discrimination. Gruden’s flimsy explanation that he “never meant for [the emails] to sound that bad” reminds us that many white Americans in positions of power -- Gruden had a contract that paid him $100 million over ten years -- are incredibly ignorant of history and the context through which racism, sexism, and homophobia have negatively impacted countless people. As history teachers, we need to continue to work to ensure that the next generation of leaders in business and industries, like the NFL and so many others, do not enable the acceptance of hate speech.   In spite of all the negativity present in our current world, as an educator I have to remain hopeful for the future. I welcome fellow history teachers to share such hope with their students and academic communities. This month I’m encouraging my students to identify stories of hope and inspiration from black history by entering this year’s “Black History, Black Stories” video/writing competition sponsored by Macmillan Learning. Visit the Macmillan Learning web site for details and consider assigning the video/essay prompt as an extra credit assignment. Learning more about who/what inspires our students can be a great help for curriculum design and can give us deeper insight into the lives of the young people in our classrooms, which can only lead to greater compassion and understanding.  ... View more

I’m excited this fall to be co-designing a team-taught, cross-discipline experimental course. Wow! That is a mouthful! Since transfer agreements are such an integral part of our curriculum at a community college, the opportunity to create a new course comes infrequently and with numerous challenges. This week I’ll share my experience with the early stages of this process from the history side of the course in hopes that Macmillan Community members will chime in with ideas and suggestions.   The idea for our new, as yet unnamed, course came about before the recent pandemic began. Several years ago, a colleague in the Biology Department expressed interest in my US history students’ study of the 1918 Influenza outbreak. Wouldn’t it be great, we concluded, to have a course that linked biological crises with their historical origins and context? Both of us were busy with our 5-5 teaching load, so we filed the idea away until spring 2020 when the COVID-19 Pandemic hit the United States. Amidst the chaos of moving all of our courses online, we knew we needed to revisit our idea. Students were asking questions that required complex and thoughtful answers: had this kind of crisis happened before? When? Why? How did previous generations respond?    As excited as we both were about the idea of creating such a course, reality took the reins. Where would this course be housed at our community college and how would it transfer? As much as we wanted to dive right in and think about the curriculum, we had to stop and first consider logistics. I started the conversation with my department chair who suggested at least a dozen more questions we had not considered, including the hurdles that would be necessary to clear our course on an experimental basis (two semesters) with the college’s Curriculum Review Committee. Undeterred, we continued to ask colleagues for advice and to gather materials we believe will be useful material in the course.   Our vice president for Academic Affairs suggested that we start the process by working with the department whose students would benefit most directly from the development of such a course. At our college, nursing students are required to take just one course in the Humanities or Social Sciences. Generally the students take whatever course best fits their schedule because none of the classes are designed to specifically enhance the nursing curriculum. Here, it seems, we have found our stride. As we move forward with the course design process it is with the intent of providing nursing and other health sciences students with a course that better connects their fields to history while maintaining a significant degree of scientific learning as well. We are hopeful that by studying history and biology together, health care students will recognize the interconnectedness of those seemingly distinct fields. We hope, too, that we can help our college to increase offerings in courses on public health, which seem particularly valuable in current times.   Now that we are in the planning process, I would love to hear from anyone who has co-designed/taught a course that covered two distinct disciplines. What unexpected challenges did you face? Please share!  ... View more

This past weekend marked the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attack. As I reflect on my personal memories of that tragic day, I find myself, again, thinking about the US history survey and how recent history fits (or doesn't fit) into my semester-long sections of "US II." In a previous blog, Up-to-date? Where to End the US Survey (2017) , I discussed the challenge of getting through as much content as possible and my avoidance of teaching topics that I had lived through. One astute reader reminded me back then that just because I witnessed a historical event doesn’t mean that students are familiar with it. So, here I am four years later, and the question still perplexes me. Do I need to get to 9/11 in a course that starts in 1877 and is already bursting at the seams with content? Is it time for me to officially abandon my quest for "coverage"?   As a mom to college-age children it is impossible to escape notice of how dramatically things have changed since 2001. My children have grown up under the cloud of the War on Terror in the same way my youth was influenced by the Cold War. And yet, so much of what I know about the Cold War was learned in adulthood, not as a college student living through the collapse of the Soviet Union. My college history professors ended US II with Watergate and the fall of Saigon, and I’m still ok with their choices. Had they tried in the early 1990s to teach the historical meanings of the Iran Hostage Crisis or Reaganomics, students would have been left with an incomplete understanding of complex topics that had not yet been fully examined by historians.    The longer I teach the more I find myself wedded to the notion that the passage of time enables a deeper, more thoughtful understanding of events. Not without bias, but certainly with additional data and facts to temper extreme partisan perspectives. That being said, while I don’t see myself incorporating study of 9/11 into my US History II sections any time soon, I do believe that providing students with the tools to begin their own study of a recent event or contemporary topic can be helpful. Over the course of a semester they come to rely on their professors as experts. Offering them a starting point for exploration of topics we cannot “fit” into the time frame of our 15-week courses, therefore, makes sense.    The knowledge my students gain about how to study history, I’ve concluded, is more valuable than coverage. Finding new ways to train our students to think as historians -- evaluate sources, look for bias, search for contradictions in the written record -- will prepare the college students of today to both analyze events as they occur around them now  while also enabling them to think critically in the future about what they have experienced. As someone who teaches mostly STEM and health care majors, the process of learning history feels more important than ever.   In 2021, with US History II needing to cover more and more material, how are you training our next generation of historically-aware citizens?    ... View more

Whenever I allow students in my US Women’s History classes to choose their own research topics they automatically default to biographies. In an effort to move away from the kind of history that focuses solely on the accomplishments of individuals, this semester’s research project requires each student to study a social movement in which women were significant participants, if not the leaders. Since my course covers the period 1600-1900, I’ve created a list of suggested topics that includes abolition, temperance, and voting/political rights, as well as mental health, public health, and education. My hope is that students see groups of women as significant actors in the development of our modern-day ideas and institutions, rather than singling out specific women for their individual achievements and ignoring the communities around them. I was inspired to discourage students from writing biographies this semester in part by my spring-semester students’ desires to focus on women with whom they were already familiar. Rosa Parks, for example, immediately came to mind for students when they were assigned a research project for US Women Since 1900. Since I had not made a blanket “no biographies” rule I tried my best to steer students towards women such as Ida Wells and Ella Baker, who were significant as civil rights activists but not staples of middle-school history curriculum. Anyone who remained committed to Rosa Parks as a topic had to study her work aside from the Montgomery Bus Boycott. While at first students were unhappy about my “rules,” ultimately they seemed pleased by semester’s end to have expanded their understanding of Parks’s work or to have learned about women that were previously unknown to them. I’m hopeful that by studying women’s participation in 19th-century social movements students will engage in deeper thought about both the motivations of these women and the challenges they faced forging a space for themselves, and others, in the public sphere. How did their families/communities respond to their desire to be publicly active? Did the women view their work as political, or were they inspired by moral or religious beliefs? Who did they lean on in their public and private lives for support? Students will need to acknowledge the privilege that enabled upper-class white women to work for social causes while servants and enslaved women managed the heavy responsibilities of their masters’/employers’ households. Ultimately, I want the students to see that women’s social activism during this period of our history required more than the desire to make change. While some women wrote abolitionist pamphlets or toured decrepit institutions for the “insane,” the day to day toil of other women in private homes made the work of social pioneers possible. Communities of women made change possible then, as now.  What are you doing to expand your students’ understanding of how the individual fits into the larger picture of our national history? Ideas and suggestions are welcome.    ... View more

In 2007 when I was first hired by the community college where I’m about to start my fifteenth year, the centerpiece of my teaching load was a course called “America’s Experience in Vietnam.” The class was very popular among a specific sub-group of students: recent veterans of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of them had permanent war-related injuries, while others were open with their classmates about their struggles with PTSD. Still others were physically and emotionally healthy but working incredibly hard to rejoin civilian life after an extended period of time in the armed forces. They added an element of realism to the course discussions that had been absent when I taught a similar course at a private four-year college.   As the years went on, and the turmoil in the Middle East continued to draw on the human and economic resources of our country, the “Vietnam course” as I liked to call it became more and more difficult to teach. Historians had a clearer picture than ever before of the errors in policy made in Southeast Asia and there was plenty of Vietnam-related data for analysis and discussion. My students, however, were beginning to see parallels between the war they were studying and the one in which they had been combatants. It was obvious to me that some were quite troubled by the proverbial notion of “history repeating itself.”   Class discussions became tangled in a question that I couldn’t answer with any authority: would a historian one day be making the argument that US military action in Afghanistan and/or Iraq had been misguided? I admittedly started to have a difficult time keeping the students on track because their concerns about the similarities between US policy in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, though decades apart, were so troubling. It seemed that every conversation about Vietnam ended with thoughts on the Middle East. Eventually I began to believe that a class focused solely on the war in Vietnam no longer made sense for a generation of students who were themselves living through a protracted military engagement overseas and needed broader historical context. I began to encourage student veterans to take general US history courses so that they could better understand how US foreign policy has changed over time in response to diplomatic and economic crises throughout the world.    I’m thinking a lot this week about those students I taught in 2007, 2008, and 2009 who were new to college but veterans of combat. My college is offering additional support to current student veterans feeling stress and anxiety over the situation in Afghanistan, but I know that those young men and women I taught more than ten years ago -- wherever they may be today -- are likely thinking back to our class discussions. It’s unsettling.    What do we say to students when we literally see history repeating itself in front of our eyes? I’m mulling this question as we prepare to start a new school year with the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to wreak havoc on our daily lives. In these immensely challenging times I want to find ways to be truthful in my classroom while also offering hope for the future. Seeking suggestions.    ... View more

This week’s blog is my 101st for the Macmillan Community! While I wish I had a provocative way to remark upon the experience of blogging about teaching history, instead, as I prepare to start a new academic year, I face my annual anxiety about what is to come in the year ahead. So, this week I offer more jumbled thoughts.   First, I’m thinking about how much I miss being on campus and lamenting that I will continue to long for a return to academic normalcy for at least one more semester. Enrollment at my community college is such that demand for online courses is outpacing on-campus offerings. The unknowns of the Delta variant, amongst other factors, means that all of my courses are running this fall as remote, asynchronous once again. I had such high hopes for being back in the traditional classroom that, admittedly, it’s going to take a little extra effort on my part to generate excitement for remaining full online. Are you on campus or online? What challenges are you facing as you prepare for either format or a combination of both?    Second, I’m thinking about the college search process and how overwhelming it can be for students. I’ve spent a good part of this summer prodding my youngest son to look at colleges. Our conversations in the car after campus tours have reminded me that students on the cusp of transitioning from secondary to higher education need our compassion just as much if not more than our content expertise. It has occurred to me several times during these visits that at 17 years old I had absolutely zero plans to be a historian. To paraphrase my son after one presentation: “looking at colleges is really scary.” No doubt! As a parent and professor I’m often just as confused about which college would be best when I leave the information sessions/tours as I was when we arrived on campus. It's no surprise to me that many of my students come to community college after spending time a four-year school that was not the right "fit." There has to be a better way. Ideas? Advice?   Finally, as a historian, I continue to reflect on how best to help my students place themselves within the context of this unprecedented time in American history. Just as we thought society was moving towards a new “normal” we find ourselves again facing mask mandates and engaging in debates about the value of vaccination. No doubt this is a confusing time for students and teachers alike. As always, I encourage fellow teachers to reference times in our history when we’ve faced similar challenges. I recently started listening to the inaugural season of the Intervals podcast released this year by the Organization of American Historians and available free of charge through Spotify . Subjects include yellow fever, smallpox, the influenza outbreak of 1918, and the use of disinfectants during the Gilded Age. It’s easy to get drawn in by the fascinating subjects of this fabulous series. Any one of the episodes could offer an early-semester writing prompt in a history or English class.   As we approach this new academic year, what are you thinking about? What challenges do you anticipate as we move into this new phase of pandemic-era higher education? Please share.     ... View more

What pulled you into teaching history, and eventually, becoming a history textbook author? I grew up with maternal grandparents who spoke German as a first language; my grandmother was born in the US but into a large German-speaking farming family and my grandfather emigrated from Ukraine (at the time we called it the USSR or Russia). This made me curious about European history and languages so I first studied German, then French, and finally ended up in French history because of my interest in the French Revolution. I loved studying history and also teaching it, both in large undergraduate classes and small seminars. It seemed to me then and still seems to me now that studying history gives you a new perspective on yourself, your family, your community and your nation and a sense of belonging to a wider world. Textbooks are essential because they provide an introduction to all the fascinating questions that could be studied in greater depth and they also, when they work well, give a sense of how things fit together, whether it’s different kinds of experience (war, economic change, cultural variations) or developments over time (how much we have inherited from the past). Can you tell us a little bit about the courses you teach/have taught and where you've taught? I began my career at the University of California, Berkeley teaching Western Civ, general European history and French history in particular. I have taught very large lecture classes (many hundreds of students) and small seminars, both undergraduate and graduate, and everything in between. Berkeley was somewhat unusual (aside from the fact that it was Berkeley, the home of radicalism) in that the history department required every major to write a thesis, not just the honors students. This got students involved in original research and writing and was often very rewarding both to students and their professors. After Berkeley I went to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, but I still taught the same variety of courses. Then I went to UCLA where I continued to teach a variety of courses. I still teach an online summer version of Western Civ. I loved all the places where I taught and found the students always very engaged (not every single one, of course!), though I also learned that students respond to their professors – if they sense enthusiasm and passion for the subject, they tend to feel the same way themselves. With The Making of the West going into best-selling 7th edition, and a new Achieve platform, what are you most excited about showing your fellow history professors this fall? The online component of teaching is only going to grow, and the most important thing is that that component reflect the same research and analysis that go into textbook writing and the research and writing of history more generally. What I like about the Macmillan platform for the 7 th edition is that it had great input from my co-authors and myself. It reflects our interests and priorities, not some generic template. At the same time, Achieve offers so many choices. No one has to do the same thing as everyone else; the customization possibilities are endless, as I discovered for myself teaching this course with Launchpad over the last few years. What are the biggest themes that you try to convey? What are the organizing principles of The Making of the West? Interconnection above all else: we have tried to bring all the different kinds of history (from military to women’s and gender history) together into a seamless (in so far as that is possible) narrative without privileging any one aspect or region. Interconnection in the sense, too, that Europe is part of a wider world and we would like to think that we were very much in the forefront of emphasizing that aspect of Western Civ. What has been the best "teachable moment" to emerge from teaching in the era of the pandemic? I am not sure that enough has been made of how the online format can actually increase professor-student interactions. If you teach a bricks and mortar version of Western Civ as I have, it is very hard to get to know individual students if you have a class of 150-500 students (except those in your own section if you have one). And it’s very hard to get students to come to office hours because they have busy schedules and are often convinced that no one will be very interested in their problems when there are so many other students. With the move online during the pandemic, students have been more willing to email their professors because it’s the only way to contact them. Yes, in synchronous classes, you can stay and ask a question after the lecture but in asynchronous ones, you cannot. But you can email the professor or attend his or her zoom office hours. Without this, I’m afraid that the pandemic would have been even more disastrous for learning. ... View more

In May I described my plans for a deconstructed research project to be assigned during my six-week summer intensive course in place of a traditional writing assignment. (See “Summer Project: Assignment Reboot” for details.) My goal was to have the students complete the key elements of a research project in structured sections, due over four weeks, rather than handing in a finished product at the conclusion of the course. Having just finished reading spring-semester research projects, I hoped that with this new approach the summer projects would be academically stronger if they were broken up into sections even though the summer students would have less time to complete the project than the spring semester students. Thanks to everyone who wrote to me after the blog was published to share their experiences with deconstructed projects!   So what did I find? Here are some observations from my first experience assigning this project with a class of 24 online students.   First, seasoned students who had completed research projects in other courses were initially confused about “the point.” I had a handful ask if they could “just write the whole paper” instead of breaking down the projects into my four step process. Although some students clearly already knew how to complete a research project, I explained that all students could benefit from slowing down the process. Part One of the project asked students to explain their topic and identify three secondary sources in MLA citation form. Right away some students hit a roadblock because they did not know where/how to locate secondary sources and/or they were unfamiliar with MLA. Since they had only seven days to complete the assignment, however, there was no time to procrastinate. Anyone who needed assistance with the sources had to immediately schedule time with our reference librarian, and the majority of students did just that.   Having students focus Part Three of the assignment on primary sources provided an opportunity to once again offer help. Part Two asked students to summarize the basics: who/what/where/when/how. Part Three required them to find primary sources to illustrate the details. In semester-long research projects I have consistently seen students ignore the differences between primary and secondary sources as they rush to complete a project in the crunch of a deadline. In the deconstructed project the students had seven days to identify three primary sources. For most students, successful completion of this part of the project meant brushing up on what a primary source is -- I provided links to several online resources as well as a sample of my own work for students to mirror. Again, I reminded students of the short window of time and encouraged them to ask for help. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many students booking virtual appointments with our college librarians and the college Writing Center.   Finally, Part Four required students to submit two paragraphs on the historical significance of their topic along with a final Works Cited page in MLA format. I provided several prompts to help the students to think more broadly about their topics and to draw connections to contemporary issues when possible. Once more the students had seven days to complete this part of the project. No time to procrastinate.   Ultimately, my trial run with a (time-sensitive) deconstructed research project was a success. The vast majority of  students completed all four parts of the assignment on time and I was pleased with the effort put forth. It’s difficult to judge whether the results will be the same during a semester-long course because in my experience students who take summer-intensive courses are extra motivated by the need to earn those last few credits that will allow them to graduate and/or transfer. I’ll try the project in a semester-long format this fall and am considering whether or not to maintain the same four-week plan. I’m curious to see if the four-week approach reduces the amount of procrastination that tends to seep into semester-long research projects.   Thoughts? Suggestions? ... View more

As I’m thinking about the start of the new school year I’m brainstorming the return to campus. At my community college, a return to campus in September will mean students in the physical classrooms after nearly eighteen months of remote learning. I’m wondering how to help students reconnect in that physical space after working independently for so long. Usually the first day of classes is spent discussing the syllabus and course expectations. While these tasks will still be part of my plan, I’ve decided to also have students group-share on that first day to discuss how their working lives have changed as a result of the pandemic.    Here are some of the questions I will have students address in small groups:    Did you work before the pandemic began? If so, what did you do?  How did the earliest months of the pandemic impact your personal work life or the experiences of those with whom you live? Did you change jobs during the pandemic? If so, why/why not? What was your experience seeking work during the pandemic? How could a historian document your pandemic work experience? What artifacts may exist that could help tell the story of your experience in the future? What do you want students one hundred years from now to know about your pandemic-era work experiences?   I’m inspired to start the semester with this discussion because I believe that the majority of my students or their families will have experienced some significant work-related changes during the pandemic era. We spend a great deal of time in my US history classes studying the changes that came about during the First and Second World Wars in regards to work. The most recognizable icon to students on the first day of US History II is always “Rosie the Riveter” -- even if they cannot explain her significance they are able to link her to World War II. I’m hoping to help students to see that their experiences during the pandemic will one day be the subject of study in history classes.   In addition, I’m hoping that by focusing on work rather than health issues during the pandemic I can help the students connect to each other without delving too deeply into painful personal experiences/losses that may have occurred as a result of COVID-19. I want the students, from the very first day back together in the classroom, to be reminded of their shared experiences as a society over the past eighteen months.    Do you have any plans for re-integrating students into the physical classroom this fall? Please share. ... View more