Brainstorming final project- Norton

I’m not sure the scope of my final project for this course, but I’d like to focus on Minnesota history for my project. MN history is my least pedagogically integrated course and suffers a bit of Franken-course syndrome, with assignments bolted on to suit particular interests or needs. I also think my MN history course is the least attentive to the threshold concepts that students need to work productively with evidence.

Fortunately, MN history has the easiest to access sources of all my courses and there are known issues of historical contention that would allow me to assess if students can demonstrated historical thinking. For example, the 1862 Dakota - US Civil War has a decent source base, strong secondary sources, and at least one fictional account, all of which could be woven into projects. One issue I will face is what we call “Minnesota nice,” that is a cultural disposition away from open verbal conflict or explicit offense on the part of a privileged group. Only privileged groups practice MN nice, because only those with privilege can avoid the conflict of being out of step with culture.

As with any state history, I’ll need to confront the lionizing elements in the secondary literature and to help student problematize the whiggish historical narrative of most histories produced by our state historical society.

There are no good textbooks, so how do I supply sufficient background information to allow students to operate without imposing a master narrative on the whole course? How can I help students move beyond contemporary notions of race to engage conflicting notions of difference? Minnesota has been historically very white, but what it means to be white, to whom, and when is, as with all history, situational. Moreover, there is greater diversity to MN than has generally been acknowledged. I’d liked to foreground that diversity in some way. I admire the twitter feed medieval people of color for its work highlighting people of color in European art. I wonder if my class do something similar, but with data? That is, could we highlight in data the racial complexity of our state in ways that haven’t been before?

In all of this brainstorming, I want to keep in mind that there is no pre-requisite for MN history. Students can be in developmental reading and writing and thus I need to consider how to ensure there are helping way stations along the course for those who need prompt succor.

POSTSCRIPT: Week 3 History Curriculum Discussion

Kelly's framing of doing history as making, mining, marking, and mashing echoes some elements of historical curriculum thought. For example, I see echoes of Becker's notion of Everyman making history in Kelly's call for students to make their own history, rather than receive it from experts. At the same time, there's a participatory element, almost a participatory democratic pedagogy, that Kelly presents that past thinkers fail to address. Most of the readings for this week focus on what teachers write and say. Kelly's notion places the practice of of history more in the hands of students.

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