From August 2004 to October 2007, I served as the Associate Director of Education Projects at CHNM. My first foray into this field consisted of designing the conceptual framework for a set of teaching modules for the NEH-funded Women in World History project. These modules provided a full range of carefully contextualized resources and classroom supports for teachers wishing to improve their attention to gender in their world history courses. The fourteen modules each included an introductory essay and a set of 10-12 primary sources with annotations written by a scholar in the field, as well as discussion suggestions, a lesson plan and a document based question to enable secondary teachers to use the materials in their classrooms. At the same time, I began my work with the local Teaching American History grants on which CHNM partnered with surrounding school districts to improve teachers’ historical content knowledge. Over the course of working with six grant projects, I specialized in improving teachers’ effective use of technology and digital resources in the context of creating real historical investigations for their students.
Much of my interaction with these individual teachers was informed by my work on Historical Thinking Matters (HTM), which was a collaboration with the Stanford History Education Group with funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. HTM is directed at both students and teachers, and ultimately aims to improve history instruction in the schools by providing teaching materials that facilitate the development of the habits of mind that historians exhibit when they do history. The site is centered on four rich student investigations from the core of the 20th century U.S. History curriculum. In addition to presenting students with authentic inquiries and careful scaffolding of sources, the site also includes a full array of support materials for teachers including lesson plans, examples of student work, Spanish translations, and historiographical introductions. Winner of the American Historical Association’s 2008 James Harvey Robinson Prize for Best Teaching Aid, HTM takes advantage of all of the things we know about the psychology of teaching and learning history, and all of the things that we know about using new media to facilitate the teaching and learning of history. At the same time, HTM aims to prepare students to grapple with the problem of abundance created by the exponentially increasing availability of digital history resources by teaching them the skills they need to analyze those resources and to apply them to real historical problems.
A focus on historical questions and practices also informed Object of History: Behind the Scenes with the Curators of the National Museum of American History (OOH), which was a collaboration I directed with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. OOH answered a need to find a low cost way for students and teacher of U.S. History to have access to the museum’s collections and the expertise of the curators. As a result the materials on the site are designed to improve students’ content knowledge of standard topics in U.S. History and to improve their ability to understand material culture objects as types of historical evidence. Centered on six key objects from NMAH’s collections, the site provides teachers and students with an opportunity to consider material culture items as object in and of themselves, as objects in an historical context, and as objects that do cultural work in the interpretive space of the museum. OOH was funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Thus, the project team drafted and released a “Guide to Creating Object Lessons” and an accompanying suite of software to enable other public history organizations to easily produce their own versions of Object of History.
Finally, my work on educational resources culminated in the National History Education Clearinghouse (NHEC), which is a central place for information on history education. The site includes access to history content on the web, best practices in teaching history, a discussion of relevant policy and research matters, information about the activities of Department of Education Teaching American History grants, and a gateway to professional development opportunities for teachers. NHEC is funded by the U.S. Department of Education. As co-director of NHEC, I played an integral part in the conceptualization of the project from the proposal stage, through the initial design and launch, through the most current iteration of the site. More than simply a logistical challenge of gathering disparate strains of high quality resources for teaching U.S. History, the Clearinghouse has the challenges of making this breadth of content easily accessible, serving the needs of practicing teachers while also introducing them to best practices and cutting edge resources. My contribution to the daily life and content of the Clearinghouse involved the design and development of the infrastructure for the site using Drupal as the content management system for over 30 types of content and 9,000 individual pieces of content. In addition to managing this tremendous conceptual challenge, I spearheaded the effort to focus thoughtful instruction on how to integrate digital tools into the history classroom. All of this work built on the groundbreaking materials and tools developed for HTM. Finally, in 2010 I am directing the next phase of this project, as we build a prototype for the Teaching History Commons, an open, social space for teachers to discuss and share their curriculum materials and promising pedagogical practices.
My work on cutting edge digital pedagogy and improving the teaching and learning of history has been supplemented through numerous conference presentations, invited lectures, and published articles. For example, in April 2008 I gave the Paul Gagnon Keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the National Council on History Education, entitled “The Future of Teaching the Past,” about integrating the research on cognitive science on how people learn and the newest range of digital tools. Similarly, I chaired and commented on a panel on the important pedagogical interventions of digital storytelling at the 2008 American Studies Association that resulted in the publication of a productive set of articles, including my commentary, in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.
Together, my efforts to improve the teaching and learning of history have made significant contributions to the field by enabling and encouraging instructors to design learning experiences that require students to address real historical problems. This work will result in a generation of learners who are equipped to assess evidence, draw reasoned conclusions, and to develop their own sense of critical problems.
[Next]