The National Humanities Center collaborates with partners, scholars, and subject matter experts to provide virtual courses that allow educators to explore a relevant topic over five to six weeks. Participants actively engage with course materials and colleagues, expanding their own knowledge, skills, and dispositions, and developing customized educational resources.
About Our Instructors
Each course is developed with an established scholar in the field, who helps develop activities and provides resources for group discussions and individual research. Our goal is to facilitate a learning experience that will result in classroom-ready instructional materials. Our instructor pool is comprised of experienced, talented educators and scholars in humanities education.
Current and Upcoming Courses
Digital Literacy in the Classroom
In this five-week online course, educators explore digital literacy through a humanities lens. Participants will investigate how media has evolved, how its messages shape our citizenry, and how it can be brought to life in a classroom setting. By using investigation, analysis, discussion, and reflection, participants will develop a classroom resource or lesson customized to their individual educational environments. This course is co-sponsored by the North Carolina Humanities Council.
Lead Scholar: Jevin West, Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington and co-director of the DataLab.
Participation Hours: 20
Suckers and Swindlers in American History, Part 1
Financial scams, fraudulent activities, and Ponzi schemes have been a part of American culture since the 19th century. Using archival materials and source documents, participants will learn how economic, political, and cultural systems have evolved in response to these trends. This six-week course is framed around the recent publication Fraud: An American History From Barnum to Madoff (2017) by Edward Balleisen. Participants will develop a classroom resource to use in their individual educational environments.
Lead Scholar: Edward Balleisen is an NHC Fellow (2008–09) and currently the Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and professor of history and public policy at Duke University.
Participation Hours: 30
The Oyster and the City: Environmental History in Turn of the Century America
Launch Date: Spring 2019
Food is a powerful way to enter environmental history. Food is always about stories: stories of family recipes and traditions; stories of hardship and survival; stories about blending traditions and creating new ones. And because food is produced in nature, it connects our most cultural stories to our dependence on the larger, nonhuman world. That is the essence of environmental history: locating humanity in the natural world. This course will use Library of Congress images as evidence, not merely as illustrations. Specifically, we will identify sources from the photo and written record created by the National Child Labor Committee Collection. Through Lewis Hine’s photographs of child laborers at work in canneries and oyster packinghouses, and in his written notes compiled in 30 reports held by the Library of Congress, we will emphasize links between city and country, between child labor and the nation’s cheapest and most abundant protein: oysters.
Lead Scholar: Matthew Booker, who currently serves as director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program and is an associate professor in the Department of History at North Carolina State University. Professor Booker was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2016–17.
Becoming Visually Literate in the Humanities Classroom
Launch Date: August 2019
We live in a visually saturated world in which citizens are asked to read photographs, maps, as well as other visual material in order to understand the world around them. This visual literacy has significant impact on students’ content area learning. Reading comprehension demands comprehension of the written text, but also depends heavily on the comprehension and integration of the graphical content that is almost invariably included in those texts. This course address a variety of U.S. history topics commonly taught in elementary, middle, and high school (e.g., The American Revolution, The Civil War, The Great Depression, Civil Rights) as models/examples to begin each session. This will include an introduction to and the use of the Library of Congress’ “Observe, Reflect, Question” analytic tools. Participants will explore Library of Congress collections, with particular attention to the Primary Source Sets, Themed Resources, and the Connected Collections for exemplary visual materials for their particular teaching context (e.g., grade level, state standards). Module titles will include: A Case For Visuals, Photographs, Political Cartoons, Paintings/Murals, and Maps and Other Data Visualizations.
Lead Scholar: Kristy Brugar is an associate professor of social studies education at Oklahoma University.
Water Rights and Land Access: Native American History Today
Launch Date: August 2019
This course will address clear curricular gaps in Native American history with a focus on foodways and the loss of access to traditional fishing, hunting and gathering, and family lands, historical loss of land through treaties and conflicts, and water rights for Native populations. Digital materials from the Library of Congress online collection will be featured prominently in each module with an emphasis on material culture, visual materials, and images.
Lead Scholar: Joshua Reid is a professor of history at University of Washington.
Registration
For more information, contact Libby Taylor, Coordinator of Education Programs.
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