Lately it feels as though every article or news story I see about higher education is highlighting a negative: budget cuts, contentious debates about academic freedom/free speech, and arguments about the perceived value of a college education. This year is my nineteenth at a community college and my twenty-fifth as a college professor. While there is no shortage of issues to worry about my goal for this week is to accentuate the positive. Here are three bright spots from my first month of the school year:  1. Enrollment in Latin American History doubled at my college this semester! Two years ago I agreed to add the course to my load when the college was designated an Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). This fall we filled two sections of the course. It hasn’t been easy to reacquaint myself with material that I had not studied since graduate school but now two years into the challenge it is thrilling to see more students taking advantage of the opportunity to learn about this critically important area of the world. Many of my students are first-generation Americans, which makes teaching the class even more rewarding. 2. More students than ever before are taking advantage of peer-tutoring! Once again this semester I am fortunate to have an embedded tutor in my 7-week intensive courses. Students this semester seem more willing than in previous semesters to both ask for and accept help. My peer-tutor reports to me that on a weekly basis she is seeing a higher number of students this semester than in the previous two. Given that my attendance has remained steady since the start of my current 7-week intensive I am sensing a correlation (hard numbers to follow at semester’s end) between increased visits to the Tutoring Center and potential positive student outcomes. 3. Two students thanked me for requiring them to participate in class! When we are in small groups in my US survey classes each person is expected to be engaged in the conversation and prepared to answer for the group if called on (in other words, no “spokesperson”). Last week as one of my classes reluctantly formed groups of 4-5 students I gave them a mom-style lecture (no other way to describe it) about organizing themselves so they could see, hear, and interact with all group members. They had to start by introducing themselves. There was a lot of groaning … a lot.  As the class period went on, however, the room grew louder. By the time we needed to come back together as a class the students were actually talking to each other – not just about the nonimportation movement of the 1760s but random things such as which math professor they have. As they were leaving two students individually approached me to say they were glad that they had been forced to interact with their classmates. One even asked if we could do another group activity the next week. In this era of digital/virtual/online the students’ expressed enjoyment felt like a huge win for human interaction! So I’m taking these three personal victories with me on the journey through the next two and one-half months of school. I’m using the positive to, as much as possible, block out the negative noise all around me. How about you? What’s giving you reasons to smile this semester? Please share!  ... View more

It’s always a good time to refresh the course curriculum. This fall I’m learning as much as I can about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (aka, Columbian Exposition) with the plan of incorporating discussion of the events of that year to my spring sections of US History since 1877.   The motivation to incorporate Chicago 1893 into the course curriculum came in part from my recent reading of Erik Larson’s best-selling 2003 work The Devil in the White City (Vintage). Although the book has been out for quite some time I was not exposed to the stories that Larson expertly wove through the narrative until summer 2024 when I visited Chicago. I’d never heard the city called anything but “windy” and the book’s subtitle Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America caught my attention as someone who is interested in the concept of madness in American history.    Time Magazine’s Ruth Nelson opines that contemporary America could perhaps benefit from a World’s Fair. “Once again in 2024,” Nelson writes,  US society is deeply fractured and many Americans fear for the future thanks to growing geopolitical conflicts, polarization, climate change, the rising specter of authoritarianism, and the proliferation of AI. An epic world’s fair – an event that, historically, has provided visitors with a glimpse of a glorious future – could offer an antidote, or at least a balm, for this cultural storm. (Time Magazine, 13 September 2024)   What was it about these fairs that, as Nelson argues, “boosted morale” in the worst of economic and political times? In a survey-level US history class students could use the Chicago 1893 Fair as a framework for analyzing the challenges facing the country in the late 19th century and then consider the ways in which the Fair’s exhibits offered distraction from those daily stressors.     If you haven’t read Larson’s book it is an excellent starting point for gathering content about how the city secured the rights to host the Fair as well as the political wrangling that took place amongst planners, architects, landscape artists, unions, business owners, and politicians to build out the fairgrounds. In addition I’m using The World’s Columbian Exposition by Norman Bolotin and Christine Laing (National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1992) to gather facts, figures, and illustrations of the Fair. Several web sites have digitized images from the Fair. See, for example, The Atlantic’s “Photos of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair” for a spectacular image of the Ferris Wheel as well as the crowds that gathered in Chicago throughout that year. Still looking for more resources so suggestions are welcome!   Do you have a topic that you have recently added to a history class or are considering adding? If so, let’s brainstorm!  ... View more

Every educator – no matter the age of their students – should revisit their first day plan before the start of each new school year as it sets the tone for the entire semester. Our students change, our disciplines change and, even if returning to the classroom in September feels like putting on a comfy cardigan, we should approach the start of the semester as a time ripe with new potential and opportunity. Here are some tips for a smooth start to the semester:   Syllabus  Before you even meet your students, you need to refresh the syllabus -- and I don't mean simply changing due dates! It is especially important to check in with your department chair or administrative support staff to ensure that any new requirements set forth by your college or changes in federal law are addressed in your syllabus. ADA accessibility for documents like course syllabi is one area that has changed with updated software. Also, check for outdated web links. My college, for example, moved the web host for student requests to borrow a laptop for the semester. A test-run through the syllabus’s hyperlinks can catch such problems before they cause confusion for students.    Office Hours If possible, post your current office hours before the first week of classes. At my college students schedule appointments through Starfish (a student/faculty support software) and we are expected to physically post our office hours as well. Students are understandably frustrated when they arrive at a faculty member’s office only to find hours listed for the previous semester or a “to be announced” sign. Do your best to post the information in an obvious location and keep it up to date. I include my email address on the office hours information sheet with a note about contacting me outside of regularly scheduled hours.   Respond to Emails Some students will email faculty with questions before the semester starts. I’ve found the best way to handle common questions with relatively little work on my part is to have an autoreply set for the two weeks before school starts with a general message that includes: Date that online course materials will be available Bookstore information A note about requests for “early” access to course materials (Sorry, no!)  Date that office hours begin Think about First Day Introduction Give some thought to what you want students to know about yourself and your discipline. Even at Year 25 of teaching college students I still get super nervous before my first class meetings. A single card of bulleted notes helps to keep me on track and to make sure I provide the same details to each group of students through those busy first meetings.   Finally, engaging students in an informal conversation about how studying history will help them in any academic/career path on the first day is also a great way to underscore the importance of our field. Check out Patryk J. Babiracki’s recent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “A Plan to Rebuild History’s Brand” (12 August 2025) for some timely suggestions.   I would love to hear from historians and other teaching faculty: what topics are on your mind for the 2025-26 school year? Please share!  ... View more

Warning: blog is admittedly self-indulgent     This summer I had the opportunity to travel to the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. It has been 26 years since I last went to Europe. That same year, 1999, I was introduced to the writing of British novelist Pat Barker, winner of the Booker Prize, as a teaching assistant in a Western Civilization II class. It was Barker’s Regeneration that first introduced me to the horrors of the First World War and trench warfare. As a US History major I learned all about industrial mobilization, war bonds, and sedition acts. I studied the labor movement and the quota system that began to police our nation’s immigration process during the interwar years. Like most history majors, I understood a slice of the world in great detail and the rest in broad sweeping themes.    Each year since 1999 I have reread Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. The titular first book in the series is a fictional account of soldiers’ 1917 and 1918 experiences at Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart Military Hospital based in part on the personal papers of Dr. WHR Rivers. Barker’s characters reference the horrors of war-time experience by simply identifying the town in which they were injured. The volume of injured, dead, and missing British soldiers from battles in French and Belgian towns meant that no further contextualization was needed. The names – Mons, the Somme, Reims – had deep meaning for Barker’s characters.   In my visit to western Europe this summer, therefore, I chose to spend a day – July 4th coincidentally – experiencing how Belgians commemorate World War I by visiting Ypres (Ieper), a city in the Flanders region of Belgium. For this week’s blog, I’ll share some of my observations and images from that experience.    As we walked towards the town center we were greeted by a metal sculpture depicting children offering thanks to soldiers (Figure One), which foreshadowed the themes of the day ahead. Arriving in the city center on foot we were immediately struck by the beauty and scope of the Menin Gate, a tribute to the more than fifty-thousand British and Commonwealth soldiers missing from the Battle of Ypres. (Figure Two) A visit to the In Flanders Field Museum documented the physical artifacts of the war in the region – the military history (uniforms, weapons, equipment) while writings about the war are interspersed among videos revealing the experiences of nurses and doctors. Pre and post-war images of Market Square and Cloth Hall, the location of the museum, provide visitors with evidence of the breathtaking scale of work required to reconstruct Ypres when the war ended.    Physical remains of the fighting that took place in Ypres can be explored at a number of locations around the city. For example, just 5k from town visitors can walk through an area of trenches discovered in an excavation during the 1990s (Figures Three and Four). For me, the boulder-lined trenches were the most vivid record of what had happened in Ypres more than a century ago. Walking along the trenches gave me chills – thinking about the lives lost in that location was overwhelming: a stark reminder of the physical space in which the war took place and the inconceivable loss that resulted. The visit to these trenches was a fitting end to my day.   I plan to share my experience in Ypres with my students this fall and hope to elicit discussion about the way in which we in the United States remember wars. For those like myself who teach in New England there are markers indicating battles from King Philip’s War and the American Revolution, and a couple well-known battlefields on which commemorative events are held. The centuries that separate our contemporary society from those long-ago conflicts, however, definitely holds them at a distance in our daily lives. I couldn’t help but wonder while exploring Ypres if students in the Flanders region of Belgium think more about the consequences of war because of the daily reminders they see in their communities.    Thoughts? Similar experiences? Recommendations of places to visit in the future? Please share.     Images by author   Image One Image Two Image Three Image Four                         ... View more

On April 26th I had the honor of being a judge at Rhode Island History Day, a regional qualifying event for National History Day, which seeks to engage students in grades 6-12 in history education through research, presentations and performances. The program’s website defines their mission as “Studying the past to inform the present and shape the future.”    After twenty-five years of teaching college students, the exposure to middle and high school-level historical research was nothing short of invigorating. In addition to experiencing the vibrant energy of younger students, History Day was a reminder to me that a good chunk of the motivation to learn for young people comes from the contagious enthusiasm of teachers. Every student I spoke with identified a specific teacher from their school whose excitement about studying history had motivated them to undertake historical research. The experience was a reminder of the importance of my own enthusiasm in the classroom, but also the need to foster that energy amongst today’s college students – not necessarily to create a room full of history majors but to encourage engagement with history outside of the confines of course requirements.    Rhode Island History Day participants studied everything from civil rights activism amongst black Americans and LGBTQ+ groups to the alliance system in the era of the World Wars. Some of the projects focused on local issues specific to RI cities and towns, while others examined the better-known histories of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson in the state. Nearly every student I spoke to completed the research in addition to classroom assignments. In other words, they were motivated by their teachers to do historical research on their own time as an extracurricular activity.    The future of National History Day will no doubt be impacted by cuts to federal grants to the National Endowment for the Humanities. If you’re interested in being part of your state/region’s activities, please visit Find Your Local Affiliate - National History Day to identify the non-profit organization that works with students in your community. Get involved as a judge, an organizer, or a mentor. Participation is one small way that we as history faculty can provide support for those in K-12 who are working hard to educate the students who will populate our college classrooms in the future! ... View more

Students in my introductory-level US History since 1877 class are currently engaged in research projects based on randomly assigned photographs from the period 1890 to 1970. Images range from Japanese “picture brides,” to actors James Dean and Clara Bow, to migrant workers in the era of the Dust Bowl. The topics that students are most excited about, however, are those of sports figures from the time period.   Biographical study of sports figures can be a fun way to engage early-career students in academic research. Since people’s lives have definitive start/end dates biographical study feels manageable to students from the project’s onset. Once they have identified the time period in which the subject lived they can align the person’s life with historical events, forging an understanding of historical context and significance. A student studying Satchel Paige (1906-1982), for example, researches not only Paige’s personal story but also race relations and the history of professional baseball.   Here is a list of sports-related topics from my current students’ projects. No doubt there are many more possibilities -- and lots of famous athletes not on this list. Suggestions of great sports/history research topics for first-year students? Please share below:   Roberto Clemente Althea Gibson Jack Johnson Satchel Paige Wilma Rudolph Marshall “Major” Taylor  Jim Thorpe Carlisle Indian School basketball team ... View more

My paternal grandmother, Theresa, came to the United States as a teenager from Ireland, settled in the Boston area and married an American-born man of Irish descent. Together they raised their children in the Boston suburbs. She was "famous" in her neighborhood for being the mother of eight sons and undoubtedly received minimal recognition for the countless hours of chores she undertook daily to keep the household afloat through the Great Depression and World War II.    I think a lot about my grandmothers during the month of March as public attention turns briefly to women’s history. My maternal grandmother, Marion, wanted to be an artist, a profession that made no sense to working-class people hoping to marry their daughter to a man who could provide her a comfortable home. She painted as a hobby and I keep one of her works on a shelf as a reminder of not only her love for me as her first granddaughter, but also the opportunities that her generation of women were denied.   As a professor of US women’s history I see the value of all students learning about the many roles women have undertaken in the United States since our earliest colonial days. I worry, however, that students often see Women’s History Month as a time to acknowledge famous women while giving little thought to the quiet contributions made by women on a daily basis. A student once innocently commented that women “did the busywork” in colonial America: the domestic work, in other words. While their comment caused an uproar amongst students – particularly those who were shouldering household responsibilities while attending school – it provided a foundation for a conversation about reality versus perception.   A student publication at my college recently described famed anarchist Emma Goldman as “a strong woman.” I asked my students what made her “strong”: was she physically stronger than other women or was she “outspoken”? Perhaps, in the coded language sometimes used to criticize and condescend, “strong” meant she was “difficult.” Or it meant that she was politically-active in a time when women were not viewed as political agents. Would a woman who worked in a factory or as a domestic servant in early 20th-century America have been described as strong? Or did working-class women's daily grind pale in comparison to Goldman’s because their work was not political?   Women’s History Month is a fantastic time to have these conversations with students. Rather than focusing on the famous, ask your students to think about the lives of women through our national history. What kinds of challenges have they faced and how have they met with adversity? Such conversations provide an opportunity to help students to see how their personal experiences fit into the historical narrative. In other words, a woman does not have to be Oprah Winfrey or Rosa Parks or Margaret Sanger to have made significant contributions to her family, community, and the larger world. In fact, as I argued to my students, it’s the daily experiences of women that truly make the greatest marks on the time in which we live. If we can encourage this current generation of students to recognize the contributions of everyday women, then perhaps the accomplishments of the famous will become less remarkable and more commonplace. ... View more

Recently two of my classes began research projects. In one, a survey-level US History, I assigned each student a topic randomly. In the other, a 200-level US Women’s History course, I allowed the students to choose a topic of their own interest. For added context: US History I students are studying artwork from the 18th and 19th centuries. I gave each student an image to research and place in historical context using library resources. Students in US Women’s History were allowed to choose any women’s history related topic from 20th-century America – the caveat being that they could not do a traditional biography. A student who wanted to write about Oprah Winfrey, for example, had to narrow down their focus to a period of significance in her life.   My rationale for the varying approaches to choosing research topics stemmed in part from the different levels of courses. In my general US survey classes I have found that when students are allowed to choose their own topic they immediately move towards one they researched in high school. After I randomly distributed the images, for example, two students asked if they could instead study an image they were already familiar with from a previous class. I explained that one of the goals of the project is to study something unfamiliar. Allowing the students to choose an image that they had previously studied would, in my opinion, open up avenues for students to reuse materials from other classes and to fall back upon analysis that they conducted at an earlier point in their academic career. No one in the class, for example, is assigned Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the Boston Massacre because many students in New England study this image in depth during high school.   Allowing students to choose their own topics, however, comes with its own challenges. In my US Women’s History class students were assigned the task of identifying two possible topics for their semester-long research project. Admittedly, it was disappointing how quickly many simply submitted names of famous women as possible topics. I had hoped that the first few weeks of course material had opened students up to thinking more deeply about possible topics. I realized, therefore, that if I want the students to engage in something more than a traditional narrative biography I would have to help them to think more broadly about their choices. The students submitted their two ideas through the journaling tool in our course learning management system, which allowed me to then engage in some back and forth conversation with each student about their potential topic. Ultimately, with a lot of questions and answers, and some suggestions about starting the research and then circling back, each student chose a topic with which they were (seemingly) content.   So, here’s my question to the Macmillan Community: which approach do you find more productive? Have you had positive or negative experiences when assigning research topics? Do you have one method that works well in your classes? Please share in the comments below!    Looking forward to hearing about faculty experiences and sharing my observations from this semester's research projects in the next blog!  ... View more

Last year at this time I blogged about my observations of 2023 from my vantage point of a community college history classroom. At the top of my concerns for 2023 were student mental health and a general feeling that my students were disconnected from their peers, which I unscientifically speculated was fallout from the COVID years. A full year has passed and I’m again reflecting on what I observed over the past twelve  months. Here are some of my thoughts:   On one hand, the social disconnect prevalent amongst students that widened in the COVID years is becoming less noticeable in my classes.   The adjustments I made within my classroom to forge social connections at the start of 2023 appear to be catching on. At the conclusion of each semester this calendar year I felt as though many students ended my courses having interacted with several of their classmates. For some students my goal of increasing their in-class-interaction was limited to group work, while others seemed to create genuine bonds of friendship with their classmates that were evident as they came to class each day. In addition, I was particularly encouraged to hear that some students had enrolled in my sections of introductory courses because they knew they would be interactive.    While on the other hand, getting students to participate in campus-wide events remains a huge challenge.    Our campus has so many great events planned each year to engage students in areas outside of academics. Convincing students to attend such events solely for the purpose of expanding their understanding of the world around them remains incredibly challenging. Case in point: our college hosted two successful artists at separate events to showcase their work and talk about their career paths. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I had to beg and bribe students to attend (extra credit anyone?). The same held true for events related to academic success – in-person attendance at information sessions about majors and career paths, for example, were of little interest to students. “Can’t I get this information online?” was the common retort when I started my event-attendance sales pitch. Ultimately, those students who did attend on-campus events not directly related to class content almost unanimously reported positive experiences … getting them into those non-classroom spaces, however, was not easy.   History education is more important than ever before.    The 2024 election cycle proved, once again, that Americans need to be more informed about our national history. The proliferation of online news sources and social media channels have increased the spread of both information and misinformation. Our students need the tools to make informed, educated decisions based on what they read and see, coupled with a solid foundation in historical knowledge. There is no academic space better equipped to prepare them to be informed citizens than their history/civics classes. As we think about content coverage we also need to reflect on what lessons are particularly meaningful to the current times, which feel particularly unstable politically for many students.    One of the most important facets of teaching that was reaffirmed for me this year was that students need to feel comfortable asking questions. Even in the most difficult of political times when our nation is intensely divided ideologically, students must be able to pursue the study of history without fear.    Happy New Year! Looking forward to more collaborative conversations in 2025! ... View more

A shout out this week to peer tutors!   Last spring I was part of a pilot embedded peer tutor program at my college. My seven-week intensive US History II section had a student tutor employed by the college, chosen by me, at each class meeting. The tutor would participate in group activities, be present for lecture, and available for one on one appointments with students at the college’s Tutoring Center. In contrast to previous semesters when I often found students reluctant to seek help at the Tutoring Center, their willingness to work with our embedded tutor was far more positive.    This fall I’ve welcomed another fabulous peer tutor into my classroom. Here are some strategies I’ve adopted to help the students connect with our tutor:   Introductions  I’ve blogged before about my love of table tents (folded index cards with a student’s preferred name and pronouns). On the first day of class I bring markers, cards, and stickers. After going over the course syllabus and answering questions, I use the remaining class time for my tutor to introduce herself before we make our table tents as a group. This exercise allows the students to have a relaxed first interaction with both myself and the tutor. We have light conversation as we create our tents, the goal being to create a comfortable classroom environment from day one.   Encourage Engagement When I introduce the embedded tutor I ask her to say a few words about the courses she has taken with me, her experience as a student at our college, and her goals for the future. I want the students to recognize their own lives in her experiences. In past semesters students have been surprised to arrive at the Tutoring Center and find that they would be working with a student, which is less intimidating for some than the idea of one-on-one time with their professor. Having an embedded tutor takes away the feeling of uncertainty students may have before their first visit to the Tutoring Center: they know who they are meeting with and that first meeting feeling of apprehension is alleviated by their classroom interaction. At each meeting throughout the semester I include our class tutor in my pre-class announcements. I remind the students of her availability and give them the opportunity to ask her scheduling questions before we get started.    Ask for Feedback I meet with my peer tutor at least once a week.  She provides me with valuable feedback from her experiences working with my students, much of which is general – for example, if there is a common thread to the questions that students are asking at tutoring sessions I know that I need to review material that might not have made sense to students the first time through. Often, the kinds of questions students have for the tutor are specific to her previous experience in my classes. My peer tutor has successfully completed two introductory-level research papers under my instruction. She has the experience to answer students’ questions and to help them with drafts in a way that I’ve found even more effective than our college writing tutors. If my tutor tells a student that their research project needs the help of a librarian they take her advice!    Have you had a positive experience with peer tutoring? Please share!  ... View more

The 2024 Presidential Election will undoubtedly be debated and analyzed by political scientists and historians for the foreseeable future. In the days immediately following November 5th when students asked me for my thoughts on the election results I resorted to humor: it hadn’t been long enough for me to comment on the election results. As a historian I will need at least twenty to thirty years to mull it over, examine the sources, and draw conclusions. And while I do believe that it will be decades until historians have a better understanding of how the election played out, the truth is that I did not want to engage in conversation with my students about the election results so close to the end of a volatile campaign.   Remaining neutral and unbiased when discussing difficult topics is a constant challenge in history education. I’ve addressed this topic in previous blogs and have encouraged faculty to keep the focus on civil discourse, which many public observers argue has significantly decreased in 21st-century presidential campaigns. As historians the presentation of information through evidence in the form of primary and secondary sources are critical to our field’s credibility and our ability to connect today’s students to the challenging lessons of our national past. But what if things are happening so fast that we don’t have time to be reflective? In other words, what do we do when we, the educator, feel overwhelmed by current events?    Election-related issues have inevitably leaked into our class discussions, especially as nominations for cabinet positions headline many news outlets. I’ve found that the best way to incorporate discussion of current events is to suggest that students do their own deep dives into issues of interest using the skills they are developing in class. Speculation about mass deportations of foreign-born workers, for example, leads to questions about historical immigration policies, detainment, and the use of the US military in World War II-era internment of Japanese-Americans. Discussions of rights for LGBTQ+ people opens avenues for discussion of the historical origins of civil rights. My advice to students is to engage in the research themselves so that they can develop their own educated opinions: in other words, rather than doom-scrolling, use the same library resources we are utilizing for our in-class research projects to examine the issues of personal concern.   As educators we have to constantly remind ourselves that our students come from a myriad of socio-economic backgrounds. We will never be in a classroom in which every student shares our political beliefs and it’s not our role to convince them that our perspective is the “right” one. The best we can do is to offer them the limitless tools of education: critical thinking, research, and reading skills so that they can continuously question the information that they are bombarded by each day and look for sources that provide them with the kind of evidence we use in history classes. Remind them that they have the ability to be knowledgeable voters rather than passive bystanders.    How are you talking with students about the 2024 Presidential Election? Please share!  ... View more

A short video to introduce/reintroduce myself to the Macmillan Community. I would love to hear from readers about topics of interests. What would you like to discuss with fellow historians and teachers? Respond here by commenting on this blog or email me: suzannekmccormack@gmail.com   Click here! https://youtu.be/VasAgXcpICw?si=SKt7joeVbp5W-5wl     ... View more

How is everyone feeling as we approach the Presidential Election? Are your students talking about the candidates or the information that is flooding their social media feeds?   My students have been noticeably quiet over the last few weeks. I think many of us are in a state of pre-election fatigue: overwhelmed by information, inundated with requests for donations, tiring of campaign advertisements. No doubt for some of my students there is a growing sense of concern for the election's outcome. Teaching at a Hispanic Serving Institution provides me with the opportunity to regularly interact with students whose familial origins stem from all parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. The increasingly anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been a hallmark of this election cycle is undoubtedly contributing to a sense of fear and uncertainty in the minds of some of my students.    This week I'm offering students a safe environment to express their pre-election concerns. I've tried to make our history classroom a space for open conversation, even about uncomfortable topics. As we enter these final days of the 2024 campaign I hope my students will offer their insights about the current state of political affairs so that I -- a Gen X'er -- can have a better understanding of how today's generation of college students are responding to the never-ending political rhetoric. I'm hopeful that our conversations about historical context are helping the students to better understand events as they unfold around them.    And, finally, a call for conversation -- I'm particularly interested in hearing from history teachers about how/if they will address the Trump Madison Square Garden rally in class this week. Thoughts? Share here in the comments or email me at suzannekmccormack@gmail.com ... View more

Following the Harris/Trump presidential debate on September 10th I hoped to chat with my students about what they saw, heard and felt after listening to the candidates. Few, unfortunately, had actually watched the debate. What was more common was for students to share what they had learned about the debate from social media. The conversation was therefore about what other people posted about the debate. And consequently, our “discussion” was a sharing of which snippets of the debate were trending as memes.   By now we recognize that social media has a huge impact on our lives as educators and human beings. As a historian I’m a bit nostalgic for the days when everyone watched the debate to learn about the candidates. I can’t help but wonder if the televised presidential debate format that was so consequential in previous decades is no longer relevant for Gen Z. For the current generation of college students it’s as if the “debate” is happening hourly on their social media feeds. From listening to my students’ views, I have to wonder if that barrage of information and mis-information may, in fact, lend to their feelings of apathy toward the political process. Is this trend reversible? Not likely.   More obvious is that my students are paying attention to celebrity endorsements. Female students specifically pointed to the Taylor Swift endorsement of Kamala Harris as an interesting development in the days following the debate. One student was able to give us exact figures on how many people had registered to vote within 24 hours of Swift’s Instagram post. And while it is sometimes difficult to know how students really feel when discussing political topics with classmates, the fact that several brought up the Swift endorsement leads me to believe that it caught their attention in a way that endorsements from well-known Republican politicians simply did not.   As we approach the October 1st debate between the candidates for vice president, how can we best prepare our students to be critical observers? And, what about voting? Are faculty talking about it with students? Do you feel comfortable encouraging students to vote? Or is the topic off-limits? With just six weeks until the general election, what’s happening in your classroom? Please share! Comment here or email me at suzannekmccormack@gmail.com ... View more

In “Facing My Fears of AI” (June 2024) I blogged about my desire to find ways to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into my classroom assignments in a way that will enable students to learn to use new technological innovations, while also respecting academic integrity. While still a work-in-progress, I plan to share the ups and downs of my experiences as they develop.   In my summer courses I assigned research projects that required the use of library-based databases and materials. Knowing that students are increasingly likely to use AI, even when discouraged or even prohibited, my assignment instructions included the following statement: “Students should submit their own original work and cite all sources using MLA format. While use of AI is discouraged, any use of artificial intelligence should be cited as a source.”     We discussed as a class what it meant to submit original work and the importance of using each assignment in our introductory-level history course as a stepping stone to the challenges that will come later in their college careers. The vast majority of students followed my instructions and submitted work that was consistent with that of typical first-year students at my college. Several students came to me for help or consulted our college librarian outside of class for additional assistance.    Unfortunately, 10% of the students submitted work that was AI-generated and none of those submissions cited any AI-tool as a source per my instructions. I ran all student submissions through an AI and plagiarism detector and in each case it was determined that the work was 90% or more AI-written.    I reached out to each of the students to discuss the use of unattributed material as an academic integrity issue. Approximately half of the students did not respond to my email and accepted a zero for the assignment with no discussion. The other half denied any use of AI. When confronted with a detailed report from the detection tool, however, they changed their stories. They admitted to having used AI tools such as Grammarly and Brainly, they said, but not software that “created content.”    I learned a valuable, if not confusing, lesson from this experience: my students see a marked difference between tools such as Grammarly and Brainly, versus Chat GPT and the like. And so here is my quandary: is there harm in allowing the use of grammar-checking AI versus content-producing? Or, do they both create a product that is not the student’s original work?    My initial feeling was that grammar-checking tools can be helpful in “cleaning up” student work. In speaking with students, however, I realized that in a 3-4 page short essay they were accepting, without much thought, upwards of 30-40 suggested changes by Grammarly or Brainly. In other words: they were changing their entire paper based on suggestions from the AI tool.   As such, I’ve realized that either my instructions are going to need to be more specific or I need to re-evaluate my comfort level with grammar-corrective AI.    Some faculty reading this blog might ask: “I use Grammarly … why can’t my students?” This question is certainly valid. The difference for me, however, is that many of my students struggle with grammar. A tool that corrects their errors without requiring them to understand the fundamentals behind the mistakes is, in my view, unlikely to progress their writing skills.   I’d love to hear from others in the Macmillan Community about AI policies: how are yours evolving with new technology and new challenges? Please share.   ... View more