Teaching is a public and collaborative act. We learn best when we engage colleagues in discussion about what pedagogical practices work best. In that spirit, we organized this workshop to invite you to join an ongoing conversation about incorporating career diversity into the graduate curriculum. Each of us has spent several years working within our departments to rethink assignments, courses, and the broader curriculum to better reflect the goals of the career diversity initiative. Now we would like to share what we have learned, hear about similar changes in other departments, and help develop strategies for undertaking this work.

Each panelist will briefly discuss their experiences building career diversity into the curriculum and offer examples of their work. Each of us will elaborate on several themes, including how various departments decided to shape their courses and curricula, how students have experienced these new courses, and what elements of career diversity seem to meet the most acceptance and resistance. Laura Mitchell and Stephanie Narrow will discuss creating a History Pedagogy course at UC-Irvine. Amanda Seligman will describe how she transformed an existing graduate course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to embrace the AHA’s “five skills.” Tracy Neumann and Lillian Wilson Szlaga will detail how the Wayne State History Department developed their History Practicum course as part of a major curriculum overhaul that included input from faculty, graduate students, and alumni. And Tim Herbert will explain efforts to construct a pedagogy course at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Participants will learn about the rationales for making these changes, the reform process, and the expected outcomes at each institution. Panelists will also share syllabi, assignments, and students’ work with workshop attendees.

We fully intend this to be a working session. Participants will work together on their own curricular revisions. Our goal is for everyone to leave the session with 2-3 specific ideas about how they can embed career diversity within individual assignments, whole courses, or the graduate curriculum and experience. Though we will focus on graduate education, we welcome historians at all levels—K-12 teachers, undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty at undergraduate institutions—to inquire with us. We all have much to learn from each other. We also welcome historians who are unfamiliar with career diversity or even skeptical of its premise. In the true spirit of both career diversity and public, collaborative pedagogy, we look forward to working with everyone.