Science fiction literature and film are an underappreciated source for the teaching of history. Finding material that can excite a student's curiosity can be a key towards greater student engagement, especially among students who are taking history as a requirement, rather than from interest. The discovery that they can read or watch science…

Teaching about slavery entails teaching about the archive. Punctuated with silences, scattered with compelling details, and laden with descriptions that oscillate between racist, harrowing, and heartbreaking, runaway ads provide a glimpse into the lives of enslaved people. The details embedded within them--or omitted from them--can also provide…

Increasingly, educators seek to teach and assess historical thinking. In the post-secondary environment, historical thinking skills are typically taught alongside historical fact, however there is a paucity of research on the relationship between historical thinking skills and knowledge of historical fact. The purpose of this study was to…

In the early modern era, Spanish missionaries, cosmographers, chroniclers, and physicians wrote major studies on botany, ethnography, navigation, Indigenous languages, war, and history, aided by capable, though often reluctant, Indigenous informants. They penned this rich body of scholarship using iron gall ink -- a mixture of tannins, sulfates,…

Research on flexible assessment suggests that providing students with choice in assignments can increase motivation and deepen investment in learning. Although instructors are often advised to adopt flexible assessment, they are also warned about potential detriments such as perceived lack of rigour among colleagues, the stress that…

During the past decade, interest in chocolate and its history has increased significantly. Following on this trend, a vast number of books dealing with chocolate have appeared in different publishing venues, both academic and nonacademic. Similarly, some instructors have included units that study the commodity or, in some rare instances, have…

Historians often present their interpretation of the past in written accounts. In order to gain deeper knowledge of the discipline of history, students must learn how to read and write historical accounts. In this experimental pretest--posttest study, we investigated the impact of a domain-specific reading instruction followed by domain-specific…

If high school history courses are meant to introduce students to the paradoxes and debates of American history, then they should study the 1619 Project, the authors argue in this article. College history students regularly debate the extent to which slavery was formative to the development of American systems of law, business, medicine, religion…

In February 2020, the author was offered a position as a postdoctoral teaching fellow at a large land-grant college in the American West. A couple weeks later, COVID-19 hit in full force. As the newly hired postdoctoral teaching fellow, the author's department chair tasked the author with a challenging assignment -- to develop an asynchronous…

History done well is culturally relevant. In part due to the shifting demographics on college campuses, and in part due to the modern cultural and political climate, history professors have enhanced their approaches to make their once-lecture-heavy survey courses more culturally relevant to their students. In this article, Summer Cherland…

The centennial of the First World War has offered instructors across the humanities an exciting opportunity to enhance students' disciplinary expertise while reflecting on the significance of an event that continues to shape the world today. Drawing on established courses on the history and literature of the war, respectively, the authors designed…

The author--in the role of one teacher observing another--documented a spring 2021 remote introductory art history course during the COVID-19 pandemic when graduate student teaching assistants called a campus-wide strike. Forced to improvise, the professor replaced formal analysis papers and exams with an ungraded journal. Drawing from the content…

This article discusses the authors' experience implementing the use of the online platform Story Maps, which allows students to create digital geographic information systems (GIS) maps of past people, places, and events and combine them with text, images, and other multimedia, in three different undergraduate history courses. The authors found…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is sharing out basic guidelines and examples from an extended collaboration to move educators move online while avoiding synchronous meetings. "gPortfolios" are public (to the class) pages where students write responses to carefully constructed engagement routines. Students then discuss their work with…

Starting with early research on multiple source comprehension that primarily emerged from work in history, researchers have explored several types of instructional manipulations including altering the features of the inquiry task that is given (such as being asked to write a narrative or an argument); changing features of the task environment…