Rules: 45 minutes, 750 words, edit later.

4:00 PM.

Why do I teach history the way I do? I have 180 days, maybe a few less, to cover all of American history. I can count on a range of student backgrounds — some will have ready made timelines to build upon and others will know very little — as well as the casual and reflexive dislike of history class.

So I could do it the way I was taught: start at the beginning and try and get as close to the present day as I can. If you do it this way, it’s hard to ensure that the themes of the beginning of the year carry all the way through, although it’s certainly not impossible. This way allows for the usage of a textbook, which is a kind of security blanket for any teacher, but I don’t have a textbook. Or I could do it thematically — come up with five or six themes and then use those as anchors for the year. You can skip around chronologically when you do it this way. I’ve seen some classrooms where this works very well.

Here’s what I’m going to do and why:

Quarter one: reading a survey text (Jill Lepore’s These Truths) and developing a podcast script that traces one theme in American history from 1492 up until the present. I want students to finish first quarter with a sense of the value of looking at all of American history. When pondering a policy problem, I want them to think about examples not just from the present day or the past fifty years, but from across three hundred years. Using a mix of discussion, primary source analysis, and mini-lectures, I hope there’s enough diversity each week to keep the kids interested.

Quarter two: making a short documentary for C-Span as part of their annual contest. The important work here is identifying a problem they want to address in the film; my job is ensuring that the documentary features real historical context. What are the structural elements and historical processes that shape the issue they’ve selected?

Quarter three: studying two eras in American foreign policy — the war in Vietnam and the Global War on Terror — with an eye towards assessing America’s role in the world. For the final assignment, each student creates two works of art based on primary source documents; the written component is a guide to those primary sources. These two works of art should allow for a comparison between the two eras and highlight the promise and peril of diplomatic, military, and economic foreign policy.

Quarter four: Here we look at Philadelphia’s place in American history, trying to assess how the larger trends we’ve discussed all year emerge in this city. We make a photo portfolio, a brochure on an understudied event in Philadelphia’s history, and we learn enough GIS to create storymaps on various topics.

The good news:

• There’s a range of different projects here where students can develop an understanding of the American past and then use that to create something new.
• There’s a balance between social, political, economic, and diplomatic history.
• There’s an emphasis on high-level secondary sources; there’s also time and space for research and grappling with primary sources.
• At the end of the year, they have a podcast, a documentary, an art exhibit, a photography portfolio, a brochure, and a storymap (mixture of their prose and maps they’ve made.).

The bad news or at least the questions I ask myself:

Am I moving too fast? I gave up on coverage long ago — it’s not possible in a compulsory setting — but I do wonder what could happen if I dropped C-Span (which I won’t do, ever) and read Lepore over two quarters. There’s never enough time for anything — why I gave up on multiple case studies during the museum unit and limited it to Vietnam and the GWOT — but is there enough depth here?

How do I make sure that the technical elements of the projects, whether recording audio, making videos, making the artwork, or learning GIS, do not take overwhelm the content? What process pieces do I build in to put kids in a position to allow the two to support each other? For example, when mapping census data, am I doing enough so that they’re studying the data they’ve mapped, not fuming at the software?

While this approach will help familiarize students with an upper-level collegiate course, it will do nothing to get them ready for a lecture-hall course with a mid-term and a final. I think the writing we do for the scripts underscores the necessity of being able to communicate about the past effectively, and while perhaps my feedback and their own reflection will allow them to evaluate their work, it’s definitely not the same as an in-class exam.