mendozanatalie
History

Many historians continue to rely upon traditional teaching practices in which the classroom remains a teacher-centered, rather than student-centered, learning environment. Lecturing may deliver historical narrative, but it fails to engage students in the “doing” of history: carefully analyzing documents from the past, piecing together a story about what happened with a historical record that is often incomplete, and making meaning out of that story for both the past and the present. As the project lead for the History Teaching & Learning Project in the History Department at CU-Boulder, I used the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History (SoTL in History) to research and develop teaching practices that re-orient the history classroom as a student-centered learning environment. At the 2018 World History Association conference, I will co-facilitate a workshop that briefly introduces participants to the SoTL in History, with the central goal of encouraging historians to use this evidence-based body of literature to inform their teaching practices, rather than rely upon traditional teaching practices. The workshop then offers examples of SoTL-informed activities that promote student-centered, active learning. To debrief, the workshop invites participants to evaluate the activities and think about how to adapt them to their own classroom.