AHA Session 309
Monday, January 6, 2025: 9:00 AM-10:30 AM
Empire Ballroom West (Sheraton New York, Second Floor)
Chair:
Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge, University of West Georgia
Panel:
Kerry Boeye, Loyola University Maryland
Ruma Niyogi Salhi, Northern Virginia Community College
Samantha Sagui, Fordham University
Rachel Talbert, Teachers College, Columbia University
Ruma Niyogi Salhi, Northern Virginia Community College
Samantha Sagui, Fordham University
Rachel Talbert, Teachers College, Columbia University
Session Abstract
This roundtable of history educators emerges from the recent collection Teaching the Once and Future Middle Ages: A Global History for a Global World (Rowan and Littlefield, 2024). The session aims to address medieval misconceptions and myths by doing precisely what world history educators need more than anything: practical lesson plans that align with common state standards. While people who work within this chronological time period recognize its complexity, most students are not exposed to the history of the middle ages until they take upper level or graduate classes at universities, if they ever get that far. Given recent national and international events, it is clear that leaving this complicated and nuanced history for so late in a student’s educational journey is doing a social as well as educational disservice. There are many factors contributing to the prevalent misconceptions about the middle ages, especially a lack of readily accessible materials for overworked teachers. This roundtable will highlight the successes of and challenges faced by educators of the global Middle Ages and Medievalisms in both K-12 and higher education contexts for teachers of World and United States history for grades six through twelve, with a particular emphasis on meeting and exceeding state standards. In this roundtable, Ruma Salhi will discuss her efforts to create practical lesson plans on cultural encounters, especially in medieval Baghdad, with the Byzantine Empire. Rachel Talbert will globalize the middle ages by discussing lesson plans that center Indigenous cultures especially in United States History curricula. Samantha Sagui will focus on popular misconceptions and myths surrounding crime and policing in late medieval European societies, taking a myth-busting approach to the satisfaction of state standards. Emerging from his contribution to the volume on conceptions of chivalry in Confederate newspaper culture, Kerry Boeye will focus on lesson plans designed to train students to interrogate museum presentations of the past. Finally, Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge’s commentary as chair will draw these contributions together as practical, concrete ways to teach a dynamic global medieval period with state standards that often serve to limit the period’s vitality and nuance.
See more of: AHA Sessions