History Classroom Research Articles

Building an archive for 'future pasts': Undergraduates document their local Covid-19 'moment' in World History

A substantial body of history teaching scholarship links student archival engagements and primary source work to various desirable educational outcomes, among them an enhanced capacity for historical thinking and imagination. A related scholarly literature considers the interface between pedagogy and public memory-making. This article enters and links these points of discussion by reflecting on a collaborative classroom project of digital archivebuilding, using the online Dublin Core-complicit platform Omeka. At the University of Johannesburg, during the first six months of 2021, first-year students in an online world history classroom produced, submitted, and categorised a body of primary sources-both textual and visual. These submissions reflected their own, ongoing experiences of Covid-19 and of lockdown policies. They used photographs and wrote in their home languages to convey the disruptions, innovations, hardships, and resiliences felt as young people within diverse lifeworlds. Aligned to photovoice methodologies, the exercise promoted a reflection of historical consciousness in two ways: first, by situating the pandemic of the present within a broad global history; and, second, by considering 'future pasts' as a politics of memory, research, and representation. The article describes the production of the archival database, 'Joburg21', and considers the pedagogical challenges and rewards of building a digital 'archive for the future'.

Digital Scholarship in the Field of Church History

Digital Scholarship in the Field of Church History Laura Morreale, Jennifer Paxton, Joel Kalvesmaki, Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, Miri Ribin, and Stephen M. Koeth C.S.C. HMML Authority File. Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. HMML Authority File. 2002. https://haf.vhmml.org. Julia Hillner, Dirk Rohmann, et al. The Migration of Faith: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity. 2018. https://www.clericalexile.org. Rowan Dorin. Corpus Synodalium: Local Ecclesiastical Legislation in Medieval Europe. 2021. https://www.corpus-synodalium.com. Maria Mazzenga. The American Catholic History Research Center. The Catholic University of America. American Catholic History Classroom. 2022. https://cuomeka.wrlc.org. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the economy of knowledge exchange is now securely situated in the online medium. As the landscape of academic knowledge sharing continues to shift, scholars now rely upon the online medium in their everyday working lives, even if they do not consider themselves digital scholars. Every time a scholar searches through a database or internet-based catalogue from the library, he or she is entering into a computer-based approach to knowledge acquisition and production. The powers afforded to us by digital tools in turn shape our expectations about how we work; likewise, the more born-digital material we consume, the more likely it is that we will expand upon and express our scholarship in digitally-inflected formats. Online academia has changed how we receive, reuse, and cite scholarship in our own subfields. Nowadays, we are more likely to follow up on a footnote by searching for pdfs in an online library than to spend hours in the periodical reading room of the brick-and-mortar one, searching out those same materials. Additionally, we also rely upon born-digital finding aids, curated online corpora, and even projects that explore a particular research question that might open the door to other avenues of scholarly activity. Electronic communication has transformed how we share knowledge because it is both instantaneous and remains open to ongoing modification. No matter how analogue one’s practice may be, scholarly ideas are now shared, refined, and expressed in a digital world. Like colleagues in all scholarly communities, historians of the Church have witnessed the proliferation of computer-based work, and many have come to depend upon resources and research outputs that are available only in online formats. Although this scholarship does indeed trace its origins to traditional forms of research and learning and shares many of its same motivations, digital work is distinctive in a number of ways. With the power to organize and present large amounts of data, it is also interactive, communal, and team based, and it promotes accessible and open knowledge sharing. Given the importance of digital scholarship, it should [End Page 132] be more fully incorporated into systems of rewarding scholarly productivity, and those who produce it should be granted due recognition. With this in mind, the editorial board of the Catholic Historical Review is adding a review section for born-digital scholarship that addresses the journal’s purview, that is, “the history of the universal Church.” What is digital scholarship?1 Since peer review remains fundamental to all serious intellectual endeavors, the CHR section dedicated to born-digital scholarship both recognizes these newer expressions of knowledge and integrates them within the more traditional format of the scholarly journal review. Digital work is not an either/or proposition. It does not replace previous forms of scholarship, but rather accompanies and relies upon them even as it ushers in and facilitates new ways of considering, aggregating, and analyzing the materials that serve as witness to our collective pasts. Digital scholarship transcends mere digitization or database construction; instead, scholars are now using online tools and resources to study previously unknown or inaccessible materials and to use older sources in ways that were previously unimagined. Like many approaches to scholarship, machine-aided historical analysis has its own backstory. An AHA-sponsored blog post from the early 2000s put forth an early definition of digital history with an emphasis on the analytical possibilities of the medium as well as its power to disseminate information.2 Over time, the origin story of digital history has...

Developing a Game-Based Learning Pedagogy for Teaching History using Napoleon Total War

Current digital game-based learning (DGBL) methods for teaching history require a significant outlay in information and communications technology (ICT). This, in effect, constitutes a significant obstacle in implementing DGBL in the South African and Zimbabwean school context. Most schools do not have the infrastructure to equip entire classes with gaming-capable computers or sufficient access to electricity or the internet. This paper investigates how access to DGBL can be improved in challenged teaching and learning contexts by designing a pedagogy that is more readily adaptable to challenges presented in South African and Zimbabwean classrooms. The research uses a design-based research design where compatibility issues of DGBL are analysed with the aim of developing a more integrated approach that is then tested and evaluated in order to redesign the approach. The primary research question was: "How can Game Based Learning techniques and traditional history pedagogy be integrated to promote the use of Napoleon Total War in Southern African secondary school history classrooms?"

Piloting Historical Thinking Lessons to Address Climate Change

To demonstrate how the history classroom could become an important site for addressing climate change, this article describes the piloting of three lessons. Our qualitative case study occurred in an elective environmental education course with teacher candidates who participated in the lessons and were invited to provide feedback. We describe the lessons and their development, and share results from surveys and an interview. Participants identified several educational benefits and expressed feeling better prepared to teach both history and critical thinking in general. Our findings suggest that these lessons may serve as useful examples for developing new resources to support educators in teaching climate change alongside critical and historical thinking.

Using eyewitnesses to promote students' understanding of empathy in the history classroom

Empathy is important in our digitized and polarized world and an important aspect of education. What contribution can history teachers make to develop this in their students? In this study we investigated whether a lesson unit making use of eyewitnesses and designed from six pedagogical principles, resulted in more confidence in the ability to empathize, attributed importance to empathy and understanding of empathy by 10th grade students. In addition, we investigated the differences between two conditions: the use of a guest speaker versus eyewitnesses in a documentary. In this quasi-experimental intervention study, we used a pretest-posttest-follow-up design. The data were collected via questionnaires containing closed and open questions. The results showed that students (N = 97) in both conditions gained confidence in their ability to empathize and improved their ability to explain what empathy means and why it is important. After two months, progress on these items was still significant. In the condition with the guest speaker students scored significantly higher on understanding empathy than students who participated in the lesson unit with the documentary. This study contributes to the understanding of developing empathy through the use of eyewitnesses in history classes and the measurement of students’ understanding of empathy.

From the Gestell to the Reprogestell: Notes on the Technological Continuum

This article casts a retrospective glance at the technological continuum from which the art history slide lecture springs. The article focuses specifically on the copy apparatuses widely used to make transparencies for art-historical consumption, circa 1930 to the early 2000s. The ways in which these once prevalent technologies developed to frame and disseminate visual materials by means of light was instrumental in shaping the widespread illusion of epistemological transparency in the world’s art history classrooms. In reference to the work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) on technological determinism, the author provides a chronology of slide reproduction technologies in which artworks ultimately appear as self-luminous technological ‘images’, or simulated entities that speak as if beyond history.

Nature of Literacy Instruction in Elementary School History Lessons

This paper examines literacy-related practices existing in elementary history classrooms and asks to what extent these practices are compatible with the ideals of historical literacy, i.e. disciplinary literacy specific to history. A total of 50 hours were spent observing nine Finnish classrooms. Data sources included numeric data, field notes and classroom artifacts. The results show that the most common text type used was the body text of a textbook while primary sources were few. The textbook was typically addressed as a neutral source of information. Teachers used visual texts only briefly and to support an existing narrative. None of the teachers modeled reading strategies specific to history. The teacher profiles suggest diverse approaches to literacy but the practices used by teachers point more to content-area and cultural literacy than disciplinary literacy. Implications for elementary literacy and history instruction are discussed.

Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States by Sara Austin

Reviewed by: Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States by Sara Austin Joseph Michael Sommers (bio) Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States. By Sara Austin. Ohio State University Press, 2022. The literary construction of the monstrous child is a thing that, as a reader, frightens me. And while that may be the point, as a horror enthusiast and generally a devotee of that which goes bump in the night or stares at you from the corner of the bed while you sleep, it is somewhat ironic to admit that the concept and depiction of the young as a lurid thing of contempt and/or grisly detest honestly puts me off. I chalk it up to parenthood and the never-ending unknowns that define it. How wonderful then to find such a well-articulated, longitudinal discussion of the concept of the monstrous youth (from the mid-twentieth century until its end) in Sara Austin's Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States. A multi-modal and multi-medial exploration that spends as much time in a history classroom as it does a literature one, Austin's work nimbly moves about a myriad of topics and age ranges as she constructs an argument for such frightful things and why it scared us and why they might scare us differently today. Her project follows in the footsteps of Paula Fass and Michael Grossberg's work in Reinventing Childhood after WWII with her thesis being a simple, elegant extension of their account for the shifting of that cultural moment (5). She writes: I argue that direct marketing of monstrosity to teens as a potential identity began in the 1950s with comic books and drive-in horror films, and continues to evolve within American children's culture. Since teenagers are visibly similar to adults, teens of the 1950s were the first group to use monsters as a point of identification to gain agency. (4) Austin sees the 1950s as an inflection point for an exchange in values of teens and the adults who still possessed a degree of control over the orthodoxies of their youth en route to adulthood. The give and take between the two groups, the acquisition of and limitations upon the agency of either provide for a judiciously-considered explanation of the cause and effect. Chapters are devoted more or less decade to decade (the 1960s and 1970s are rightly collapsed together given what she finds to be a binding thematic of "racial anxiety" in the "racial coding" of picture books) in a manner that shows the causal effect of the response from the decade prior (52, 53). As Austin posits early on, both monsters and children are "floating signifiers" created to give [End Page 418] "physical form" to cultural fears (… but am I describing the monsters or the children?), and she wisely builds off the recent efforts of those such as Ebony Elizabeth Thomas adding further to her work by looking at how the literary monster "narrates difference within children's culture" (2, 4). One of the most generous aspects of Monstrous Youth comes in Austin's straightforward composition and generous explanation surrounding her project. Crafting possibly my favorite new literary term, "enfreakment" (18), to begin her rich discussion of the pulp and horror of EC Comics and their eventual legislative downfall in the 1950s, Austin illuminates a well-trod discussion in the comics community for young adult and children's scholars with a breviloquence that should become the standard in cultural studies discussions. This material is well-traveled in different discourse circles; however, this might be the first time I've read such a well-constructed history of comics such as The Vault of Horror (1950) and Tales from the Crypt (1950) in the context of children's and young adult scholarship, and it is entirely refreshing to see this material not only not elided over but given a replete treatment within the context of children's literary studies. As such, Austin provides one of the most complete treatments of all manner of material in children's and young adult literature from the spinner rack to, in...

DIGITAL DOPING FOR HISTORIANS: CAN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND HISTORICAL THEORY BE RENDERED ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT?

ABSTRACTArtificial intelligence is making history, literally. Machine learning tools are playing a key role in crafting images and stories about the past in popular culture. AI has probably also already invaded the history classroom. Large language models such as GPT‐3 are able to generate compelling, non‐plagiarized texts in response to simple natural language inputs, thus providing students with an opportunity to produce high‐quality written assignments with minimum effort. In a similar vein, tools like GPT‐3 are likely to revolutionize historical studies, enabling historians and other professionals who deal in texts to rely on AI‐generated intermediate work products, such as accurate translations, summaries, and chronologies. But present‐day large language models fail at key tasks that historians hold in high regard. They are structurally incapable of telling the truth and tracking pieces of information through layers of texts. What's more, they lack ethical self‐reflexivity. Therefore, for the time being, the writing of academic history will require human agency. But for historical theorists, large language models might offer an opportunity to test basic hypotheses about the nature of historical writing. Historical theorists can, for instance, have customized large language models write a series of descriptive, narrative, and assertive histories about the same events, thereby enabling them to explore the precise relation between description, narration, and argumentation in historical writing. In short, with specifically designed large language models, historical theorists can run the kinds of large‐scale writing experiments that they could never put into practice with real historians.

The Un-essay in the Music History Classroom

This essay discusses use of the un-essay in music history classes including its design through Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). It provides details for how the un-essay is used in music history and core music classes and discusses outcomes and challenges that the un-essay has brought to these classes. Ultimately, the un-essay provides benefits for assessing in a discipline that is both writing and performance based.

Opportunities to practice historical thinking and reasoning in a made-for-school history-oriented videogame

Building on the education community’s longstanding interest in videogames for learning, and in response to continued calls for more engaging pedagogy in history classrooms, some developers have introduced history-oriented videogames designed specifically to fit within the institutional and resource constraints of traditional classrooms. Nevertheless, little empirical evidence exists concerning such made-for-school history-oriented videogames. Leveraging a view of game mechanics as a form of language, and guided by the assumption from discourse analysis that language operates as a tool offering affordances and constraints for doing work in the world, we conducted a content analysis to identify opportunities to practice historical thinking and reasoning in the made-for-school history-oriented videogame Mission US. We found several in-game moments that invited the use of disciplinary skills, though few that required them. Confirming previous research on videogames for learning, our findings suggest the game may be more appropriately leveraged not on its own but as one part of a broader teaching and learning ecology. We highlight two mechanics, those pertaining to in-game, map-based navigation, and in-game, historically relevant trading, as holding promise for the design of future made-for-school history-oriented videogames. We suggest these findings are valuable to teachers, teacher educators, developers, and researchers.

Opening the Door: Using Pluralism as a Philosophical Lens in the Jazz History Classroom

An introductory jazz history course is an opportunity to create meaningful dialogue with students that adds a necessary nuance to the common narrative of jazz history. To capitalize on this opportunity, instructors must understand the limitations of a traditional approach and realize that their student body does not enter the classroom deficient. Instead, a shift in perspective from fine arts to humanities allows students to bring their own backgrounds to a philosophical discussion that centers on jazz history. Using pluralism as a specific philosophical lens allows a diverse and inclusive understanding of jazz that can be extrapolated to a larger human experience. Instructors can use the breadth of pluralism at specific landmarks in their curriculum to allow jazz to be observed through sociology, culture, and the human condition. The exclusionary barriers formed from over-simplification can be eliminated by this cognitive understanding of jazz and instead students will synthesize the wide array of opinions associated with the music. By opening the philosophical door, students will have a more well-rounded introduction to jazz history that will serve them as musicians and human beings.

HISTORICISM IN ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION IN BANGLADESH

Even in today’s postcolonial conditions, architectural education in Bangladesh remains profoundly influenced by the western pedagogic framework introduced originally by Texas A&M University in 1961. Especially the history part of the undergraduate architectural curricula suffers heavily from a lack of contextual orientation as western scholarship heavily dominate the classroom lectures. It is against this backdrop; this paper aims to investigate the problems underlying the history/heritage (theory) stream of courses from the architectural curricula in Bangladesh. In order to comprehend the problems, the concept of historicism has been used, which provides a framework to assess historicism in terms of contextuality, continuity and positionality. Using this framework, a review of history/ heritage courses of 12 architectural schools in Bangladesh has been conducted. It is found that modern western scholarly contents for history education are often inadequate for students’ understanding of their own context (both past and present). It is also argued that there is a lack of continuity due to the segmentation of historical architectural evidences in geographic and temporal terms. Additionally, the uncritical delivery of scholarly materials in the history classroom is further exacerbated by the overwhelming occurrence of western authors’ narratives on architectural events, theories or examples on, about or being in the nations of the west. Four propositions, including the need for being critical to the contents and processes of the western scholarship, and the need for incorporation of more locally produced reference materials (published by local authors) alongside the western ones have been put up.

A Translanguaging Perspective on Teacher Contingency in Hong Kong English Medium Instruction History Classrooms

Abstract A growing number of studies have explored the ways how teachers contingently respond to students’ unexpected responses or a lack of student responses in second language classrooms. From a sociocultural perspective, teacher contingency involves a departure from the lesson plan in local response to the unexpected or unforeseeable actions in the classroom interactions (van Lier, 2001). This study adopts translanguaging as an analytical perspective in order to examine how a teacher employs various resources to contingently respond to students’ initiatives and reformulate his utterances in order to prompt student participation. The data are based on a larger linguistic ethnographic project in a Hong Kong English-Medium-Instruction secondary history classroom. This paper reconceptualizes the notion of teacher contingency and argues that the process of how the teacher contingently responds to the unexpected outcomes that arise in real-time interactions is a process of translanguaging. Such a process requires the teacher in orchestrating the available linguistic and multimodal resources to construct pedagogical actions on the spot, instead of being planned in advance.

A longitudinal study of beginning elementary teachers’ beliefs and inquiry-based practices in the history classroom

ABSTRACT This article reports the results of a six-year longitudinal interpretative case study on the development of five elementary teachers’ beliefs and practices related to historical inquiry. Using activity theory as the lens, the researcher found: (1) the teachers’ conceptual tools remained relatively consistent over time, and they believed inquiry was the instructional method best aligned with their beliefs; (2) although the teachers occasionally used historical inquiry, it did not become a regular part of their practice; and (3) the teachers described their school contexts and a lack of practical tools as major barriers to implementing inquiry-based instruction. This study highlights the need for more support and time for inquiry-based history instruction at the elementary level.

Toward Metaliteracy and Transliteracy in the History Classroom: A Case Study Among Underserved Students

ABSTRACT In the last twenty years, scholars have reimagined information literacy to better address an overly saturated world of information and the growing participatory culture of Web 2.0. Outside of library and information science (LIS), researchers have promoted transliteracy—the intersection between information, visual, digital, and other literacies—to help students find and assess information. Within the LIS discipline, metaliteracy has provided a foundation to rethink information literacy frameworks, redefining students as creators who produce and share information. Relatively few studies exist, however, on how to leverage literacies in support of student digital scholarship projects. Likewise, digital humanities professors promote metaliteracy in the classroom, yet fewer scholars create digital humanities projects or write case studies about them outside of research institutions, prestigious private colleges, and larger, well-established public history programs. This case study examines a class project for a small undergraduate Introduction to Public History course at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi (TAMU–CC), a regional university with a comparatively large population of historically underserved students. Working with one archivist, two librarians, and the professor, students established a digital home for the ongoing South Texas Stories oral history project. Through this project, students learned and practiced various aspects of primary source literacy, information literacy, visual literacy, and digital literacy. The authors argue that such digital projects promote both metaliteracy and transliteracy, offering students a holistic learning experience during which they can practice their skills and that these types of projects are feasible at all kinds of institutions, even those with largely historically underserved populations.

Analysis of Effective Teaching Strategies in Senior High School History Classroom Based on Core Literacy

Analysis of Effective Teaching Strategies in Senior High School History Classroom Based on Core Literacy

Starting a lesson as an interactional accomplishment

This paper provides a detailed description of a lesson beginning in a tenth-grade (ages 15–16) history classroom in a high school in Ankara. The teacher and students in the history class accomplish starting the lesson in approximately two minutes. This is a period that involves a series of interactional practices, and the classroom members’ orientation to these practices makes available for the participants that the lesson beginning is a locally organized and sequentially produced accomplishment. The interactional practices are explored using ethnomethodological and conversation analytic principles as applied to five successive stages of the lesson beginning: (1) the recess period, (2) the teacher’s arrival, (3) the greeting exchange, (4) the teacher’s administrative tasks and (5) the tying signal. The analysis of the interactional practices in the lesson beginning shows that this is the period of establishing and re-establishing the initial two-party classroom order. The findings also demonstrate that the lesson beginning can be viewed as a form of meeting opening. Finally, the discussion on the characteristics of the lesson beginning in the history class suggests that the beginning functions as a transition between the recess and the instruction.

Teaching history as an interpretation, by using textbooks in a diachronic perspective

History textbooks play an important role in the social representations of the past circulating within a society. Research shows, however, that textbooks often present their account of the past as 'the truth’: as a representation of what really, actually happened, leaving no room for different interpretations. This is at odds with the essence of history as being a matter of substantiated interpretation and construction, based on historical source analysis and considering multiple perspectives. If we want young people to deal critically with historical representations, it is necessary that they learn to use history textbooks in a critical manner. This article first reports on a diachronic narrative analysis of 20 secondary school history textbook series in Belgium since 1945, specifically focusing on the representation of the Belgian-Congolese colonial past. Afterwards a concrete didactical model is presented about how to transfer the results of this research into educational activities in the secondary school history classroom. It shows how history can be taught as an interpretation, and students can gain a deeper understanding of the constructive and interpretive nature of historical knowledge and interpretations.

Using of Digital Storytelling in the Teaching of History

The paper presents the results of an empirical study in which students (N=41) made digital stories in history classes in two different age groups. The aims of using digital storytelling in history classes were, on the one hand, to find and use relevant written and visual sources, and on the other hand, to create a personal connection to a historical person or event. The purposes of the research were (1) to clarify the conditions of applying digital storytelling in history classrooms in lower and upper secondary school levels and (2) to measure the impact of it on students’ learning competencies. The teachers wrote case studies, and students wrote learning diaries about their educational experiences. Students’ reading, writing, and listening skills were measured with pre- and post-tests. Throughout the project, the active involvement of students, their own learning activities, and creativity with digital tools were observed. We have found that the method creates a link between generations. Meanwhile, core competencies such as reading and writing were developed. The didactic limitations of using digital storytelling could be traced back to the lack of time, digital equipment and rooms.