Jessamyn Neuhaus conducts an interview with historian and scholar of teaching and learning Kevin Gannon about a first-day classroom activity he calls "A History of Your Day."
Many public and private college and university teacher preparation programs across Michigan are facing dramatic declines in the numbers of students. Alternative certification programs have given history and social studies preparation programs stiff competition in recent years. Using Michigan Department of Education data and a survey conducted by the Michigan Council for History Education, this essay explains the history and current status of these developments and provides insights into how Michigan's college and university programs have responded to this market pressure. Competition from alternative certification requires Michigan's public and private teacher preparation programs to provide stronger evidence to potential teachers of their excellence and relevance in teacher preparation.
By collaborating with public history entities and applying Kolb's Experiential Learning Model in my public history classes, I developed meaningful hands-on learning experiences for my students. Field trips, reflective discussions, label writing, and exhibition development allowed my students to learn first-hand about the work of public historians while contributing to the needs of their community. These opportunities made public history come alive for my students while they gained a meaningful understanding of the field and their own potential.
Teaching Byzantine history offers educators a fascinating opportunity to explore how the Roman Empire continued from antiquity into the late Middle Ages. As with any history course, standard lectures and discussion of primary sources are essential to teaching effectively about Byzantium. Via lectures, instructors can explain complicated subjects such as Chalcedonian Christology and the Byzantines’ relationship with the Kyivan Rus’. Through primary source discussion, instructors can guide students into analyzing historical evidence in texts like The Secret History by Procopius and The Alexiad by Anna Komnene. In addition to these traditional teaching methods, I have adopted another strategy for my university-level Byzantine Empire course: incorporating food and food history into the curriculum. During a class meeting dedicated to “Byzantine Cuisine,” I bring in six Byzantine foods for my students to sample: barley rusks, olives, feta cheese, pork sausages (loukaniko), bougatsa (a pastry), and the sweet Easter bread called tsoureki. I also pass around five of the Byzantines’ favorite spices – rosemary, cinnamon, anise, mastic, and mahlep – so that students can inhale their aromas. A significant learning outcome of this lesson is that students will be able to explain a fundamental aspect of daily life in Byzantium: what and how people ate and drank. More specifically, as students sample these foods and smell these spices, they are adding gustatory and olfactory experiences to the historical facts they have learned.
Academic historians tend to silo their research and teaching. As a result, we read deeply, but not necessarilywidely. Secondary teachers, whose curricula are much broader, rarely have time to delve deep into the latestscholarship. Holly Miowak Guise’s Alaska Native Resilience, therefore, is not a book I likely would have picked upon my own as either a teacher or a researcher – much to my detriment. This book’s approach, content, and even itspitfalls, are a wonderful reminder of the perils of drawing hard boundaries. Guise’s goal was to understand the Alaska Native experience of World War II – no easy task given the diversityof the region’s population. Guise points out that the United States currently recognizes 228 tribes in present-dayAlaska. These Nations can more or less be categorized by geography and language into three umbrella groups –Iñuit, who historically inhabited the Arctic Circle and Alaska’s western coast; Aleut, from Alaska’s many westernislands; and Alaskan Indians, whose ancestral homelands are further inland. Through significant archival researchand over ninety(!) oral history interviews, Guise has constructed a personalized story that first and foremostacknowledges the diversity of her subjects. Different tribal groups experienced the war differently – but so diddifferent individuals within the same Native Nation. This book’s first lesson for educators, then, is the importanceof avoiding the overgeneralization that can result from overcategorization.
In 1866, a year after the end of the American Civil War, school children encountered a new textbook entitled,A Youth’s History of the Great Civil War in the United States. Attributing the war to an anti-slavery conspiracy thatinvolved British efforts to undermine American democracy, A Youth’s History argued that Republicans forcedthe South to secede despite a harmonious slave society that included benevolent masters and loyal, contentedslaves. The authors, John H. Van Evrie and Rushmore G. Horton, were northerners and their book was yetanother example of an immense and sustained effort in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to shape a nationalwhite identity via a white supremacist historical narrative. In the recently published Teaching White Supremacy:America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of National Identity, historian Donald Yacovone examines schooltextbooks and other historical accounts to argue that “northern white supremacy,” rather than slavery, became“the more enduring cultural binding force” that dominated history classrooms until the 1960s (5).
In the Preface of Red Dead’s History, Tore Olssen notes, “one thing a History PhD can do is ruin a great deal ofhistorically themed pop culture” (x). As a historian who is often guilty of ruining pop culture but who is (at best)a hesitant gamer, I approached Olsson’s book with curiosity and a bit of uncertainty about how to engage a bookabout a wildly popular video game. Fortunately, one of the great strengths of Olsson’s work is in how he invites inall kinds of readers to the virtual historical world of Red Dead Redemption II, including “diehard gamers,” studentswho have not previously found history classes engaging, and history instructors who have not yet consideredvideo games as pedagogical tools (6).
ClioVis is online software that provides a multi-visualization tool for creating digital mindmaps, timelines,and presentations in the classroom. University of Texas-Austin historian Erika Bsumek created ClioVis tobe used across academic disciplines, but its use as a timeline tool lends itself well to engaging students in thehistory classroom. ClioVis is designed to be collaborative, allowing students to edit and contribute to a timelinesimultaneously. There is a no-cost basic version, while other versions are available with flexible paid subscriptionoptions. Instructors can embed ClioVis in Canvas or other LMSs (typically in the paid version), but instructorscan reach out to the Bsumek and her team and discuss different use cases that can be made available through freetofee-based options.
This article describes an assignment used in a 100-level college world history class that requires students to produce history essays using ChatGPT and then annotate and assess those essays according to how well they analyze topics covered in the course. The article first demonstrates how the assignment has proved a useful tool in promoting student learning objectives and assessing their mastery of course content. The second section of the article offers quantitative analysis of the content of the 57 ChatGPT essays submitted by students in the spring semester of 2023. That data demonstrates that ChatGPT produces history essays with a strong Eurocentric and Anglocentric bias. This essay thus has two conclusions: first, that ChatGPT can productively be used in a college history course to encourage student learning and critical thinking. Second, that it is imperative for educators to impart to our students the significant limitations of generative AI’s knowledge-production abilities, as algorithms trained on large language models (LLMs) reproduce historic inequalities.
In January 2024, Critical Humanities published “AI Meets AI: ChatGPT as a Pedagogical Tool to Teach American Indian History” from Jeffrey Washburn and Jennifer McCutchen. The following interview expands on the ideas covered in their article and provides additional thoughts for our readers on the growth and future of AI, especially as it relates to the history of marginalized peoples.
This reflection essay describes my work designing and adapting a series of learning activities with a focus on role-playing for students who enrolled in a class about colonial Latin America in fall 2021, when the mode of instruction was still synchronous online. I describe the activities that I created based on one criminal court case and reflect on what I would do in the future to improve the activity for my students.
This paper explores the potential of AI image generation as a creative learning tool to enhance traditional source analysis in history education. By integrating AI generated visualizations into the interpretive process, students can unlock new narratives and perspectives, furthering their understanding of historical dispositions. The proposed assignment and protocol guide students in crafting prompts that synthesize descriptive details from source materials, critically evaluating AI capabilities and limitations, and iteratively refining their outputs. This process fosters the development of essential skills such as contextual analysis, ethical reasoning, and an understanding of how data inputs shape AI-generated outcomes. Furthermore, the assignment encourages students to interrogate the credibility and responsible production of AI images, situating these visualizations within broader discourses on innovation ethics, human experience, and desirable technological change. By engaging with shared readings and reflecting on AI's societal impacts, students contribute to the training of algorithms that produce more equitable representations of humanity's diversity while respecting educational objectives and cultural sensitivities. The intersection of AI image generation and history education cultivates an invaluable combination of interpretive analysis, creative expression, and critical thinking about society and progress. This approach positions students as both creators and critics of AI imagination, fostering digital literacies and equipping them to become ethical, innovative AI citizens. As AI capabilities rapidly evolve, exercises like this keep humans in the loop and contribute to the ongoing exploration of whether AI-generated images can challenge colonial or neocolonial biases by incorporating diverse perspectives and imagining an inclusive past.
This article details an experiment conducted during a spring 2023 course on the history of sexuality in the United States where students used ChatGPT to enhance their understanding of course material. I created bonus assignments that allowed students to engage with and ask questions about the week's lectures and readings to generative AI. Students submitted ChatGPT's responses and critically analyzed the accuracy and depth of the AI-generated answers. While initial reactions were favorable toward the technology, students later expressed concerns about the historical accuracy of responses and the lack of citations. I end the article with a short discussion on the pedagogical potential of integrating generative AI into higher education.
Egyptian and Arab attitudes toward Israel remain negative, and anti-Semitic myth-making would seem to preclude a nuanced historical engagement with Zionism and Israeli society. Yet a popular history course taught at the American University in Cairo (AUC) is titled “Zionism and Modern Judaism.” A poll of students who took the course suggests some prior skepticism toward portrayal of Jews in Arab media, and desire for a knowledge of Jewish history that transcends stereotypes. In this context, an ethical imperative is empirical: circumventing prejudices by confronting students with Jewish voices, by using primary sources in discussion and research. Comparison is made between the experience of teaching the course in Egypt and the U.S., highlighting an enormous disparity in ethnoconfessional backgrounds and assumptions made about the existential position of Jews/Israelis, but also a striking commonality in the engagement of students’ families with the curriculum.
In Michael Bronski's 2019 book, A Queer History of the United States for Young People, the author offers a deeply humanizing, robust, and accessible account of LGBTQ+ history through biographical profiles of queer and transgender* 1 people.In my experience as a teacher of social studies and special education with expertise in queer theory (who is also queer and Disabled), this book offers something special for young people that I do not often see: content that gives teachers a chance to develop curriculum that grounds students' identities in connection with everyday queer and transgender* people from the past.In a political moment full of newly passed anti-queer legislation, it is comforting to have a queer history that is joyful and affirmational.Bronski starts with an excellent disclaimer about needing to frame queerness as the disruption of "normal" ideas about gender and sexuality (1) and writes a heartening and informative discussion about pronoun usage ( 9).The level of care Bronski offers is also evident in the book's glossary, which includes student-centered definitions of LGBTQ+ terminology and key vocabulary.Taken together, Bronski has provided teachers with a solid toolkit for teaching queer history.Throughout the book, Bronski is measured and careful about not employing a lens of queer presentism (projecting modern conceptions about LGBTQ+ identity onto the past).The book offers a counter-narrative to a common trope often seen in LGBTQ+ history and U.S. history (when LGBTQ+ people are included at all): that queer/trans* historical figures overcame some huge struggle in spite of -or maybe because of -their queerness to go on to do some monumental thing.Macro-level historical stories, like Stonewall (xii-xx, 259), have value but emphasizing the successes and struggles of everyday non-activist LGBTQ+ folks, as Bronski does, is also important.For many LGBTQ+ people, living authentically as your truest self has been and continues to be challenging because of cultural norms and social pressures.However, Bronski's book offers tangible examples of how everyday LGBTQ+ people from the past lived as their authentic selves and often in community with one another.In a time when many LGBTQ+ youth do not grow up immersed in their culture, turning towards LGBTQ+ historical figures as an example of how to be themselves is powerful -just as powerful as learning about pivotal movements like Stonewall.We see, for instance, love letters between Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown, two Black queer women writing to each other in 1859 (83)(84)(85)(86)(87).We learn about the stories behind selecting clothes LGBTQ+ folks felt would express their authentic selves, as seen in Gladys Bently, a renowned Black queer Blues performer (119-128).Bronski's book captures the historical breadcrumbs that queer and trans* elders left us about their lives, and which offers hope and optimism for a younger generation.It grounds us in their neighborhoods, for instance, pointing to how in 1920s and 1930s many leaders in Harlem were queer and their community welcomed them with open arms (126-128).For queer and trans* readers -youthful and older -the book gives historical insight
As university instructors grapple with the many challenges that generative AI poses for education, we must face the reality that AI-literacy will increasingly be an essential skill for students entering the workforce. This article examines the author’s experience in having students critique and revise ChatGPT-generated essays as a form of assessment. Used in place of traditional exams, this assignment is designed to assess learning, promote engagement with course materials, and educate students about the limitations and responsible use of AI. The results so far have been promising, with students demonstrating critical thinking, mastery of course content, and improved AI-literacy. Most significantly, the ChatGPT Exam shows significant potential for building confidence among first generation and minoritized students. (This abstract was written with assistance from ChatGPT).
This paper examines and catalogues my experiences assigning students to use large language models (LLMs) to engage with material from the history of philosophy. Following suggestions to make recursive assignments from Julia Staffel, the LLM centered assignment asked students to elicit two responses from generative AI with the same prompt and then evaluate which response was superior. Student performance on the assignments generally mirrored what they had done on traditional essay assignments in my classes, suggesting that the LLM assignment was appropriate for college level classes.
This paper introduces the HistoryLens framework, which leverages LLMs to create interactive, primary source-based textual “simulations” that involve students in the process of analyzing, comparing, and critiquing historical narratives. Three case studies from courses taught at UC Santa Cruz in 2023 illustrate the iterative development of HistoryLens, highlighting both its limitations and its potential to encourage student engagement, foster historical empathy, and develop both historical research skills and practical exposure to creative uses of contemporary AI systems. The paper also discusses the challenges and design considerations associated with implementing LLM-enabled educational games and simulations and surveys relevant literature in this emerging field.
The aim of the present research was to examine whether a film is considered a more accurate source of knowledge about historical times when it is compared to the graphic novel it was inspired by, a poem and primary historical sources that deal with the same events depicted in the film. For that purpose, we used the film 300, which depicts the battle of Thermopylae and the Spartan agogi, as well as the role of the ephors in the Spartan political system. The data analysis validated that the cinematic representation is considered the most accurate and pedagogically appropriate representation of the past by the students, even though the limitations of the medium are thoroughly demonstrated in the classroom.
