Teaching Digital History: 10 Design Principles

AHA Session 60
Friday, January 6, 2023: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Grand Ballroom Salon K (Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, 5th Floor)
Chair:
Antoinette M. Burton, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Panel:
Suze Gibson, Roxana High School
Jennifer Guiliano, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis
Michelle Moravec, Rosemont College
Roopika Risam, Dartmouth College
Joel Zapata, Oregon State University

Session Abstract

In this hands-on roundtable session, contributors use Jennifer Guiliano’s 2022 book, A Primer Teaching Digital History: Ten Design Principles, as the jumping off point for exploring how they approach digital methods in a variety of history classrooms. Michelle Moravec will draw on examples from the book as they apply to building syllabi for students in a small undergraduate college setting. Joel Zapata, working out of Oregon State in a newly designed Master’s degree program, will address how The Primer helps imagine student-and community-centered digital research. Roopika Risam, who has worked with K-12 teachers, will show how the book’s design principles work in pre-service training settings. And Suze Gibson, herself a high school teacher, will describe how she implemented a lesson plan from Guiliano’s book (“Documenting Local History from the Cold War”) and how that worked in practice. Giuliano will respond, kicking off a broader discussion with the audience focused on practical applications of the 10 design principles. The goal is to generate discussion on how to break down what can be both abstract and over-technical approaches to the digital into usable models that directly address aspects of the historian’s craft. The discussion, guided by Antoinette Burton, will prioritize digital methods that make the fundamentals of history – archives, storytelling, documentation – accessible to traditional and non-traditional students alike.
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