Creating history, openly. A blog about a history professor trying to create better courses.
Some faculty share their syllabi freely, others are niggardly with them. As I’ve noted, this project will share not just the syllabus but the lesson plans and sources for the entire course. I still haven’t figured out how to bundle the materials (or created the materials – gasp). But I have figured out the correct… Read more On how I’ll give away my course (and keep it from publishers).
From Mary Hermes writing in the Spring 2005 issue of Critical Inquiry, I note her analysis that “poverty and socioeconomic oppression are larger day-to-day factors in students’ ability to concentrate and succeed in school than are the differences between Native American and white cultures.” Hermes wrote about secondary level Native-American kids and their white instructors. This idea… Read more Does poverty matter more than race and gender?
I know I’m behind in my project, especially in talking with folks about suggestions. I got 0 comments on my last post, leading me to think I’ve either a hidden-setting blocking comments, or this blog is read even less than I thought (hard to conceive as I can see the single-digit stats). Still, as much… Read more I’m a big all over the map right now, but mostly it’s all small ball.
So, I’ve been talking with many about what I could do to help my poor students succeed in my courses. I’m at the point that I want broad feedback, so this post invites all to offer suggestions for how to improve my courses. [Addition] You can leave a comment, or use the hashtag #fixmycourse on… Read more And now it’s your turn: help fix my course.
Paulo Freire writes in his class Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “How can the oppressed. . . participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation?” He believed that the “pedagogy must be forged with, not for, the oppressed.”
I’m playing with Voyant Tools today, which is “a web-based tool for reading and analyzing text.” The software let’s you do what is called distant reading, or looking at large bodies (corpus) of texts to pull out themes. For example, consider the U.S. Constitution in Voyant.
My recent work has been away from the tech parts of my project, focussing instead on the literature on poverty and teaching. Surprising to me, most work on how to address poverty in the classroom comes out of k-12 research. For example, Paul Gorski’s approach in this article comes closest to the “get it done now… Read more Poverty is not easy.
I was reading this recent article from Science Magazine (abstract in link) and feeling wildly unprepared to apply the most recent scholarship from behavioral economics or from psychology to creating my anti-poverty course design principles. Not that the principles couldn’t benefit from such insights. For example, in the linked article above, the authors argue that “poverty may… Read more I’m not trying to raise your consciousness. . .
One of the aims of my course design is to introduce digital history tools at the introductory level. At Normandale Community College, these are our 1000 courses. Let’s dispense with the nonsense about digital natives being better with technology than digital immigrants. I fall squarely in the middle of these groups, graduating from my undergraduate… Read more How to teach Digital History at the introductory level.
I’ve decided on the categories of tools around which I’ll build my course. I’m trying to think like a student, so I’ve put everything into simple terms. In eight, two week lesson plans we’ll cover: History bootcamp: what are primary and secondary sources, how do historians use evidence and language. Words: Analyzing texts with both… Read more Walking before I run: a basic outline of tools for my course.
