The Dark Ages ;)

history, method, and teaching

I've always been a firm believer in following a leaderless pack.  Which is why I want to join with my current undergraduate students and embrace research on the internets machine.  My students read plays and articles and take lecture notes on their phones.  When I say "get the book," they think "read it on google" or borrow the file from another classmate. Why would I make them read from any other media?  I may enjoy flipping pages made of reconstituted wood pulp, and I especially enjoy handing sheepskin.  Despite post-structural critiques of the archive, I believe there is value in engaging sensorially with old stuff.

But why would I make my undergraduates do the same?  I possess certainly luxuries for considering histories and texts through multiple frames and by way of multiple media that they do not... mostly, time.  Many have jobs, a number have families, and a handful lost their homes to hurricane Sandy. But there's another problem (and here comes the universal academic groan). Their current knowledge-base of world history is either feeble, imperceptible, or flawed.  How can our students interpret, build, deconstruct, reconstruct, synthesize, abhor, or embrace history and texts when a middle school understanding of world events (circa 1980) simply does not exist at the undergraduate level?

Enter the internets!  I like these modules by the nerd blogger and young adult author John Green.  He's selling the stuff in a middle-America white loser vernacular, which is not exactly what my CUNY students are used to, but he is able to quickly provide a basic structure for undergrads to hang their hats on before they begin reading Petrarch or analyzing colonial Mexica codices.  His lessons are fast and funny, and even in this condensed format he is able to suggest multiple and counter narratives.

Here's one Americans of every age would benefit from: