Category: Classroom Activities

Storytelling and Interpretation: A Classroom Activity

Jonathan Wilson

Some days ago, my world history survey course covered the First World War, and I came up with a new idea. I wanted to do something I hadn’t managed to do yet, at least not very explicitly: engage these students in building basic historical narratives themselves, in order to learn how narratives are constructed as vehicles for historical interpretation.

Before we met in class, my students had already studied a textbook chapter that focused on the war. So I set up a small-group activity to review that part of the reading.

I asked students to form groups of three or four, and I set a timer. (Four minutes seemed to be about right.) I showed each group a matrix that looked like this:

BackgroundWarEffects
Key Thought
Example(s)
Historical Narrative Matrix for the First World War

I asked each group to try to identify just one key thought they wanted to communicate about the war’s background (including either context or causes); one key thought about the war itself (in its nature, conduct, evolution, etc.); and one key thought about the war’s effects or aftermath. For each main thought, they should also come up with a few illustrative details—examples that would clarify or justify the thought or that would simply make it more concrete.

Toward the end of the time, I encouraged groups that had already finished in the matrix to do one more thing: Try to distill their three key thoughts into a single overall point to make about the war.

When the time was up, we compared notes as an entire room. And the answers were really, really good.

Each group, I pointed out, had explained what we need to understand about the First World War in the form of a simple narrative. This narrative had a beginning, middle, and end; it also had specific factual content. But its fundamental purpose was to convey a larger idea, not simply to describe a sequence of events.

With this exercise done, I offered students my attempt to do exactly the same thing. We spent the rest of the class period on my interactive lecture. That students had already gone through the work of constructing a similar narrative on their own made everything in my account more intelligible and useful—as well as easier to consider critically.

Two Reflection Activities for the Age of Revolutions

Jonathan Wilson

For the past two weeks, my world history survey course has covered the revolutions that made modernity. Last week was about politics in the Age of Revolutions. This week is about the Industrial Revolution.

Impressionist image of boats, workers, and possible factories along an industrial waterfront, with the center of the city rising in the distance
J.M.W. Turner, Dudley Castle from Tipton Canal (c. 1830)
Image courtesy of Black Country Museums (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Over the weekend, coincidentally, I caught the latest episode of the Harvard EdCast. It’s a conversation with the social psychologist Geoff Cohen on the “crisis of belonging” among American youth. In this conversation, Cohen spoke about the wide-ranging educational benefits of inviting students to discuss their values together:

And in a number of studies that my colleagues and I and others have done, we found that the simple act, for instance, of just asking students to reflect on, what is core to you? What are your most important values? What would you stand up for? What would you die for? What is really dear to your heart? Giving students the opportunity to write about their core values in the classroom has been found, under some circumstances, to have these wide-ranging benefits, closing achievement gaps in GPA, even after just a few sessions of doing these kinds of activities, improving health and well-being, leading to greater retention throughout high school and college. And this has been replicated in several studies. 

It doesn’t happen all the time, but in schools and classrooms where there are resources and pathways to success, if I now feel like this is a place where my whole self is accepted, I’m more likely to seize those opportunities. So these are just examples of many of little things we can all do to make the situations a lot better. 

This comment helped nudge me to plan the activities with which I began each class this week.

Continue reading “Two Reflection Activities for the Age of Revolutions” →

90-Second Recap Activity

Jonathan Wilson

The energy levels in my classes—including my own energy level—have been pretty low this week, so yesterday I put a new spin on something we’ve done before.

At the beginning of each class, I displayed a simple 90-second timer that I had created in PowerPoint (by applying a wheel exit animation to a circle), along with a pair of key terms from our previous lesson. Then I asked everyone to grab a partner, get something to write on, and make a list of as many things as they could remember about each key term before the 90 seconds ended. “Annnd … go!”

A PowerPoint slide labeled "retrieval practice," with the terms "Qing Dynasty" and "Ottoman Empire" next to a blue circle that has a growing slice disappearing from it.

Afterward, I asked the groups to volunteer their list totals, and then to call out specific things they’d come up with.

This activity resulted in a lot of animated discussion. Better yet, the high energy carried over into other discussions later in the day’s new lesson.

Potosí, Then and Now

Jonathan Wilson

This week, in my modern world history survey course, we discussed 16th-century empires in America and Asia. In the week’s second lesson, we focused on the role of silver—and especially silver production controlled by the Spanish empire—in early modern Asian history.

To bring clarity to the concept, I played about half of a 2014 BBC News short film about the miners who still work in the mountain at Potosí. Cerro Rico was the most important site of silver production in human history, as well as a crux of Spain’s imperial power:

This film is a good way to make a contemporary connection. And it’s a good way to humanize an abstraction. Viewers get to see and hear extensively from actual miners at Potosí. That means this film is also a good way to get students thinking about the ethics of historical narrative, including the “presentism” question.

For my purposes this week, it’s a good thing that this film—while acknowledging the mine’s early modern history—is mostly about Bolivian society and politics in the 21st century. I had already assembled plenty of ways to talk about the 16th and 17th century; I wanted to add a story about our own world. Then we talked. I trusted my students to be willing to think about the right and wrong ways to connect these stories.

Class at a Historic Site: Inside Hollybush

Jonathan Wilson1 Comment

This Tuesday, on a freezing morning, with Thanksgiving on everyone’s minds, fifteen students joined me in Hollybush, a nineteenth-century mansion on the main campus of Rowan University.

As planned, we assembled there to talk about primary sources related to the Glassboro Summit of 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin held two days of talks in Hollybush. Tina Doran, the operations coordinator in Rowan’s Office of University Events, had very graciously helped us reserve the building and had given me an advance tour.


Supervised by a portrait of the current Rowan president,
Ali Houshmand, in Hollybush

Before our field trip, my students prepared by exploring the Glassboro Summit Collection, a project of Rowan’s Digital Scholarship Center. The DSC coordinator, Michael T. Benson, had visited my class a few days earlier to help students understand the collection, and to explain the work of archivists and digital humanists more broadly. I gave students an assignment that involved browsing the collection and then selecting three primary sources (a photograph, an audio or video recording, and an artifact of another kind) to write about before they visited Hollybush in person.

On Tuesday, now that we were inside the house, I gave students permission to explore the first floor of the house on their own. Then I distributed worksheets for students to use—first in pairs and then in larger groups—as a basis for discussion.

The questions on these worksheets asked students to compare their expectations with the reality they found when they arrived on site; to evaluate the house itself as a primary source; to reflect on additional information they would like to have in order to understand the 1967 conference better; and ultimately to talk about how visiting Hollybush in person, in conjunction with examining primary sources, has affected their thinking about the larger Cold War.

The responses I heard to that last question, when we compared notes as a full class, suggest to me that this project did help students conceptualize the Cold War in new ways. Just as importantly, it brought home the larger fact that history is not some distant thing—that one’s own backyard can be the focus of world events.

Revising for Clarity and Brevity: A Worksheet Activity

Jonathan Wilson

This week, in a course for new college students, I decided to bring out one of my all-time favorite writing activities. This exercise has proven particularly effective for first-year students, especially if they’re reasonably comfortable writers already. It’s a strangely fun activity designed to teach a critical part of editing: cutting unnecessary words and simplifying complex phrases.

I distributed a worksheet with a single 26-word sentence on it.

This sentence came from a highly regarded historical monograph. It was written by a distinguished historian and released by a major university press. I won’t identify the source here because I have no desire to shame this author in public. As I told my students, it’s a great book. It’s just unnecessarily hard to get through.

I chose the sentence partly because it has some obvious redundant language—unnecessary complexity that many readers can spot quickly when they think about it.

The worksheet I distributed looked sort of like this:

Continue reading “Revising for Clarity and Brevity: A Worksheet Activity” →

How We Talk about Heroes with Feet of Clay

Jonathan Wilson

Earlier this week, near the end of class in my modern U.S. survey, an undergraduate student posed a provocative and timely question: Why do we only want to talk about the good things people from history did, and not the bad things? I think the wording was pretty close to that, though I don’t recall exactly.

In the context of the lesson, the student’s question was about public monuments, and specifically the colossal presidential faces of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. (My student particularly mentioned George Washington’s slaveholding as an example of an inconvenient truth about a historical figure.) But the question also seemed to voice a complaint about the student’s experiences in K-12 education.

We were about to run out of class period, so we tabled this question for the next lesson.

I wanted to make sure we discussed this question properly because a lot of the students in this class are education majors. Whether or not they specialize in social studies, they’ll soon be dropped into a public maelstrom centered on this problem. And many of them will have to decide how they are going to teach children responsibly about flawed figures from America’s past.

Discussion backdrop with detail from a photograph by Sergio Olmos, via OPB

To set up the conversation at the beginning of the next class period, I looked up a story from two years ago.

In October 2020—on the weekend before the federal holiday that Oregon would later designate as Indigenous Peoples Day—some two hundred people in Portland participated in an “Indigenous Peoples Day of Rage.” By the end of that night, some of the protesters had pulled down statues of Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, defaced a mural of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and smashed windows at the Oregon Historical Society, accusing that organization of “honoring racist colonizer murderers.”

I focused on this story because—much more than the recent destruction of some other kinds of monuments—it presents us with legitimately challenging questions about public memory. (We’re toppling Lincoln now? Really?)

It also involves a specific atrocity I discussed in the last class period. Painted across the plinth of the Lincoln statue in Portland that night in 2020 were the words “Dakota 38”: a reference to Abraham Lincoln’s approval of the public mass execution of 38 prisoners after the U.S.-Dakota War in Minnesota in 1862. The statue’s hand was also painted red, presumably to signify Lincoln’s guilt as the Dakotas’ murderer. He had authorized, notoriously, the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

Basically, I didn’t want to make this conversation too easy. If we wanted to talk about hard truths, we should talk about hard truths, not easy ones. Thus, to begin our discussion in the following class period, I displayed a photograph taken that night in 2020 by the Portland journalist Sergio Olmos, and I briefly explained the story of the protest.

Then I posed two questions for the whole class. First, if you agree with the premise of your colleague’s question—that we usually want to talk about only the good, and not the bad—why do you think we’re like that? Second, how can we do better when we talk about our past?

The ensuing conversation lasted half an hour—a substantial portion of our total class time.

Out of an abundance of caution about protecting my students’ privacy, especially considering the political sensitivity of the discussion, I won’t go into the details of what they contributed. But I can tell you for sure that this issue has been on the minds of some of these students.

They are keenly aware that it’s a hot political topic. They understand that politics directly shapes what K-12 teachers can safely say about American history at work. And they already have strong opinions about this, opinions they have formulated with considerable care—in most cases, I’m quite sure, before arriving in my classroom.

Even though I’m being discreet about the contents of this class discussion, I’m writing about this because I think it’s important for American citizens who aren’t attending our colleges and universities to understand that these conversations are happening. It’s also important to understand that students are often coming to their own conclusions before they arrive in the college classroom.

And sometimes, correctly or not, they believe they’re reaching these conclusions in spite of the way they’ve been taught in primary and secondary schools, as much as because of it.

Class at a Historic Site: The Glassboro Summit of 1967

Jonathan Wilson
History, the Past, and Public Culture

Last year, the American Historical Association released the results of a detailed survey about how Americans interact with history. One finding caught my attention.

Nine in ten respondents indicated they trusted museums (90%) or historic sites (88%) either “some” or “a great deal” to convey “an accurate account of history”—compared with only three in four who said the same about college professors (76%) or high school teachers (70%). The intensity of their trust was striking, too: Respondents were three times as likely to trust museums or historic sites a great deal as to say the same about high school teachers.

Looking closer, I found something especially interesting. Historic sites, even more than museums, enjoy a distinctive level of trust among Americans who tend to be skeptical of other information sources.

For example, only 18% of Republican respondents said they placed a great deal of faith in college professors, whom they were just as likely not to trust at all. But 57% of Republicans said they trusted historic sites a great deal. Except for religious texts, in fact, historic sites were the only sources of historical information that Republicans were more likely to trust strongly than Democrats were.

A chart showing that 57 percent of Republicans, 47 percent of Democrats, 48 percent of independents, and 42 percent of people with no preference said they had "a great deal" of trust in historic sites.
Trust in historic sites as sources for “an accurate account of history,” by political party.
Fig. 45 in “History, the Past, and Public Culture,” 2021

These results suggest to me that historic sites may be uniquely important tools for engaging skeptical audiences—including, perhaps, earning the trust of students in high school and college.

Mulling this over, it occurred to me that skeptical Americans probably think of historic sites as primary sources. They may place greater faith in them because they sense that historic sites give them more immediate access to the past. (Of course, there are several other important factors in play, too, but let’s not overcomplicate the blogpost.)

This immediately focused my attention on a teaching idea I’d already had. And it brought together different aspects of my idea, which I now saw with new clarity. I suddenly got more serious about making a plan.

This autumn, I’m scheduled to teach a modern U.S. history survey course at Rowan University in southern New Jersey. As it happens, Rowan’s campus was the site of a high-level Cold War diplomatic meeting in 1967.

Press conference in front of Hollybush, from Rowan’s Glassboro Summit Collection

That summer, President Lyndon Johnson invited the Soviet premier, Alexei Kosygin, to speak with him at Hollybush, also known as the Whitney Mansion. That was the home of the president of what was then called Glassboro State College.

As you may already have guessed, this building still exists on campus.

A newspaper front page in Rowan’s Glassboro Summit Collection

Usefully for my teaching purposes, the Glassboro Summit was not only local. It also involved several distinct topics of interest in this course, including nuclear disarmament, the Vietnam War, and the Six-Day War. Although Rowan’s summit was less immediately consequential than some others, therefore, it’s actually a pretty good window into the Cold War.

Today, the restored Hollybush mansion is maintained by Rowan University as a space for special events. So I’ve requested permission to hold class there one day this semester. And it now looks like I’ll be allowed to do it.

If my plan works, we’ll have an on-site discussion of primary sources related to the event. I’ll ask my students to read, view, or listen to those sources beforehand; furthermore, I’ll allow the students themselves to select some of the sources they’ll examine.

These primary sources may include:

Many of these sources are available through the Glassboro Summit Collection, a project hosted by the Rowan University Libraries Digital Scholarship Center. Before my class heads to Hollybush, therefore, I’m asking a DSC representative to come speak with us in our regular classroom about that collection.

If everything works, we’ll devote most of one class period to getting to know our digitized primary source collections, with help from a curator; then I’ll give students a few days to explore those collections on their own; and then we’ll convene in Hollybush to discuss what students have discovered—speaking together in the actual rooms where the summit took place.

I am pretty excited about this plan.

How Footnotes Work: A Scavenger Hunt

Jonathan Wilson
The first page of Steven Watts's article "Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century."

Following up the small group activity I described last week (“Reverse-Engineering a Scholarly Article”), I developed a similar classroom exercise this week. The new activity was a “scavenger hunt” designed to help the same students become more comfortable using footnotes.

(I’m asking this class to use footnotes to cite the sources in their final projects, and I was aware that some students had very limited exposure to this form of scholarly architecture.)

I based the activity on Steven Watts’s article “Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century,” which was published in 1995 in the Journal of American History.

I printed enough copies of Watts’s article for each student to have one—but with a catch. Each student would have only part of the article. They would have to pair up to compare their versions. Some students got “Version A,” which included the first half of the main body of the article. Others got “Version B,” which included the second half. Both versions included the introduction and conclusion.

This was my way to make sure the activity would involve plenty of interaction.

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Reverse-Engineering an Article: A Small Group Activity

Jonathan Wilson2 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I tried a simple new activity. The students in this course, all first-year undergraduates, are working on original research projects. One student had asked me for practical advice about how to outline their history paper—an essay that will be longer than anything they’ve ever written before. I came up with this activity for a subsequent class meeting. As I expected, the activity took an entire 75-minute period.

The first page of the article "Forgotten Habits, Lost Vocations: Black Nuns, Contested Memories, and the 19th Century Struggle to Desegregate U.S. Catholic Religious Life"

First, I located a scholarly article that seemed appropriate in various ways. I was looking for something with a reasonably accessible subject matter and writing style, clear organization, and some identifiable relevance to our course. I also wanted the article to be of moderate length: not overwhelmingly long, but not too short, either.

I settled on Shannen Dee Williams’s “Forgotten Habits, Lost Vocations,” an important article published in 2016 in the Journal of African American History. Among its many other virtues, this text would be relevant to our university’s ongoing mission-and-heritage-month celebration. (This college isn’t affiliated with the IHM sisters, who are the focus of Williams’s article, but it is affiliated with a different Catholic teaching order.) I was also pretty sure some of my students would find it very interesting on its own terms. And it would let me talk a little about how scholarship develops over time; Williams has a book coming out soon, and that book will incorporate material from this article into a larger story and argument.

I printed and stapled a copy of this article (double-sided, two pages per side) for each student. Then I prepared a set of directions.

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