History instructors have access to an extensive array of resources for teaching history at the university level, focused on the development of history pedagogy, innovations for introductory level history survey courses, and active learning and service learning strategies for history classrooms.
Journals and Websites
Articles and Papers
American Historical Association. (2016). AHA History Tuning Project: 2016 History Discipline Core.
Introduction: “The following document represents the AHA Tuning Project’s effort to describe the skills, knowledge, and habits of mind that students develop in history courses and degree programs….Grounded in the excellent work already done by the AHA and scholars of teaching and learning, we offer this document as a reference point to stimulate conversations within history departments and other relevant units of colleges and universities….Our aim is to establish an ongoing collaboration with a wide set of stakeholders about the essential nature of history in higher education and the breadth of skills and knowledge that history students bring to the table.”
Excerpt (Page 1-2): “This essay outlines the methods through which my colleagues and I at Long Beach State developed a new introductory course, in response to my active participation in the [American Historical Association’s Teaching Division’s] Tuning initiative. The Tuning process can help us reimagine the introductory history course, address gaps in student knowledge, and in response, develop innovative courses that meet disciplinary objectives, institutional requirements, and student needs.”
Excerpt (Page 254): “This article describes the design and implementation of a service- learning project and the role the university library and other campus professionals can play in supporting service-learning initiatives. The article then analyzes the successes and problems with the course design and makes suggestions for improvements. It shows that relationships among librarians, archivists, and historians can play an instrumental role in incorporating service-learning into the study of history. In the process of this examination, the article offers an example of how to engage the past and the present, and even more importantly, how to teach undergraduate students about the connections between the two.”
Excerpt (Page 1052): “The time thus seems ripe not simply for a reconsideration of the coverage model but also for a serious disciplinary examination of alternatives to coverage. The perspective that we offer here is deeply influenced by SoTL [scholarship of teaching and learning] and, in particular, by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe s concept of ‘backward design.’ Backward design is an approach to curriculum development that begins by asking what we want students to ‘know, understand,’ and, crucially, ‘be able to do.’ Having first identified clear goals for a given course or curriculum, the instructor then designs a set of learning experiences that will systematically move students toward mastery of the requisite skills and knowledge. We argue that historians need to apply this backward design principle to the introductory history course to develop effective alternatives to the coverage model.”
Excerpt (Page 399): “The following overview of my experience with clickers in a U.S. history survey course points out potential pitfalls and highlights what has been helpful in the larger audience response system literature. This literature is at somewhat of a remove for historians because the vast majority of CRS adopters (and thus most published studies) have been in the hard sciences, especially physics, engineering, and medical education, where different teaching methods, chiefly application and problem solving, dominate. Nevertheless, as will be clear below, some of their insights about the best sort of questions to ask and how to ask them have come to influence my own approach. My relative success in using clickers to teach critical thinking skills occupies the second part of the essay, including a brief case study of my strategy in teaching slavery at the survey level.”
Excerpt (Page 1360): “Now that cognitive scientists have developed a basic consensus on the principles of learning, and now that historians are playing a significant role in efforts to field-test and expand this research through a scholarship of teaching and learning, it is a good moment to remind ourselves what the introductory [history] survey could be (and what it already is for some teachers) if we replaced generic pedagogies of coverage with teaching and learning marked by the distinctive signature of history. This essay will describe such a course, a U.S. history survey I have been teaching and studying since becoming a Carnegie scholar in 1999. But my course is not unique. Other courses laid out along similar lines are being developed by teachers at many different types of institutions. So much experimentation is going on, in fact, that one wonders whether historians might not be close to establishing a new ‘signature pedagogy’ for the introductory history course.”
Excerpt (1171-72): “The goal of this article is to examine efforts to bridge the chasm between these two aspects of historical practice. It will seek to define what a scholarship of teaching and learning history might look like, and it will review the efforts of scholars to introduce into the realm of teaching history some of the rigor that marks our activities in the realm of research. Finally, it will consider arguments for and against this line of inquiry and suggest directions for future research in this area.”
Abstract: “Group role-playing and collaborative exercises are exciting ways to diversify college students’ classroom experience and to incorporate active learning into your teaching. This article reports the results of two experiments that compared the effectiveness of role-playing and collaborative activities to teacher-centered discussions and lectures. Using both history and political science classes, we show that the students who participated in the role-plays and collaborative exercises did better on subsequent standard evaluations than their traditionally instructed peers. Presented here is a discussion of active learning, descriptions of the two experiments, and an explanation of the outcomes and implications of the study.”
