TEACHING
I began my teaching career as a high school social studies teacher in the Denver area, where in two short years I taught a wide variety of courses, including US and World History, Government, Economics, and Sociology. This experience, along with my expertise in the history of American education, helped me get hired at Illinois State University in 2006 to join the History Education program team. In my role as part of one of the largest and best History Education programs in the nation, I regularly teach the Methods of Teaching History course, in which my students learn a variety of methods, such as how to develop a classroom that emphasizes historical thinking, inquiry, and discussion. In the methods course, we also dive deep into the politics and philosophy of teaching history.
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In addition to methods, I also teach a large number of US history courses, ranining from the introductory surveys (US since 1865; US since 1945) and more specialized courses (such as graduate seminars on the history of capitalism, and more). I also regularly teach the senior seminar, the capstone course for the history major, where students research and write original papers rooted in historiography and primary sources. I have also been one of the faculty who teaches the course that introduces our graduate students to the discipline, Historiography and the Philosophy of History, where students read and think alongside Marx, Fanon, Freud, Butler, and more.
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Since our MA program is often populated with high school history teachers, I often gear those courses to their needs and interests. In the summer of 2021, I turned my graduate seminar over to the general topic of the American history narrative (something they all have to teach). One of the most powerful forms of constructing the American history narrative can be found in surveys of U.S. history, books assigned in high school and college classrooms that sometimes even attract readers beyond the classroom. In short, the course objective was to think deeply about the construction of the narrative of American history by reading, analyzing, and critiquing five of the most popular and intriguing U.S. history surveys, written from a diverse range of perspectives and with distinct objectives. We read, in the following order: Wilfred McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States; Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States; Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom; and Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. We also read the 1619 Project and the 1776 Report.
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For their final papers, I asked students to write on any topic related to the course theme, with the goal of publishing some of the best papers as part of a forum for Teaching History. Five students rose to the occasion. The published essays represent a diverse range of approaches to answering the question: how should we organize the American history curriculum? Andrew Erford, a teacher at Bloomington High School in Bloomington, Illinois, uses the 1619 Project as an example to make the case that we should teach history through historical argument. Chad Kuehnl, who teaches at Fieldcrest High School in Minonk, shows the value of the 1619 Project approach by demonstrating that the narrative of American history can be told through the lens of other landmark years, specifically, as he shows, 1968. Kelly Schrems, who also teaches at Bloomington High School, argues that organizing the American history curriculum around the theme of protest is an effective strategy for making the content relevant and engaging for her students. Hunter Watts, a teacher at Normal Community High School in Normal, Illinois, offers a knowledgeable critique of the anti-historical 1776 Report. And finally, Cameron Zindars, who teaches at Mahomet-Seymour High School in Mahomet, Illinois, gives an overview of the history wars, past and present, before offering friendly advice to teachers as to how they might teach history in a meaningful way while also avoiding the pitfalls of the culture wars.
To see the whole forum, click here.
If you would like to look at any of my syllabi, feel free to send me an email. Thanks.