Studying the 2000 U.S. General Election, students read the word, "hanging chad." A dictionary definition reveals "fragments from holes made in paper cards," but leaves students dangling with uncertainty, which shortchanges the importance of this word in history. Is knowing the definition of "hanging chad" enough? When…

By using the "Game of Thrones" pop-culture television series, the author has structured courses in a way that seeks to solve problems that plague many history courses serving university requirements. In this article, the author will discuss how gaming the classroom can serve as a solution to the issue of engaging majors and non-majors…

History education rests at the junction between historical content, disciplinary literacy, and educational psychology. To understand the sources and strategies that facilitate historical thinking, more inquiries are needed. How do students respond to different historical topics, texts, and tasks? Which sources and strategies best facilitate…

History departments in universities across the country are facing acute pressure to increase enrollments. In this article, the author describes an effort to boost history enrollments that they have spearheaded over the past couple of years: teaching the history of engineering online. In particular, the author would strongly encourage history…

This article reports on the findings of a learning and teaching project exploring the application of flipped classroom models, funded by Macquarie's Faculty of Arts. Scholarship on the impact of flipping in tertiary institutions has been focussed mainly on the sciences rather than the arts. This article reports on the author's early experiments…

The author discusses their experiences teaching an upper-division seminar course in a traditional face-to-face setting, and re-designing a "long eighteenth century" survey course for delivery online. The article thus explores spatial strategies in both face-to-face and online courses, and suggests ways in which they can be particularly…

What could two dozen middle school students, two teachers, land surveyors, journalists, divers, college professors, lawyers, archaeologists, an author, and an 85-year old retiree possibly have in common? The answer is their insatiable quest to redefine colonial American history. From geodesy to glaciology, from geology to hydrology, from…

During spring semester 2010, a long-standing upper-division lecture course, Medieval Cities of Europe, 500-1500 CE, underwent a course transformation. The goal was to address specific challenges with student engagement that the authors had experienced in the course in the past; their overarching strategy was to introduce technology into the course…

An examination of prescriptive classroom films, particularly films made between 1945 and 1961, reveal a great deal about postwar society in general and youth culture in particular. Using these films in an undergraduate history course presents some very real problems, but the author argues that using them also offers instructors at least three…

To address the disparity in the skills of entering students and the goals of the first-year learning community (LC) program, the authors created a series of scaffolded, or tiered, writing assignments around the concept of kingship to move students from summary to analysis to synthesis. For each assignment, the authors incorporate informal…

For the past twelve years, the author has been teaching a lower division introductory historical methods course that uses active learning to introduce students to the issues and practices of historical methods, the "how to" of historical inquiry, research and writing. In her methods course, she is working to take into account the perspectives and…

In this article, the author describes the first lesson for his Chicago History Workshop, a course designed to take students beyond the Gradgrind memorization of facts approach and to introduce them, through a series of critical reading exercises, to the ways that historians actually work. In this lesson, the students begin to see that history is…

Chartered in 1994 and opened in 1996, the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School (CCLCS) was among the first charter schools in Massachusetts. CCLCS strives to foster "intellectual development, academic achievement, project based learning, interdisciplinary studies, community partnerships, environmental studies, global awareness, and an ethical…

Each fall semester, on the first day of class of his upper-level American Military History course, the author informs his students that a major part of the class consists of a wargame in which they will participate. In this article, the author describes briefly how the class will be divided into two teams, and that on a specific evening during the…

For educators, the anti-globalization movement has created a literature of opposition which offers enhanced opportunities for teaching critical analysis of neo-liberal political economy. The movement also aids those who wish to teach how First World wealth and privilege is functionally related to Third World poverty and underdevelopment. The…