This roundtable will explore how college-level history instructors at student serving institutions are responding to a learning environment increasingly shaped by fragmented attention, digital distraction, and algorithmic information consumption. Across college campuses, faculty report a growing difficulty sustaining students’ engagement with in-depth reading, extended research projects, and historically grounded thinking. Conventional wisdom would suggest this is a result of decreasing student motivation or preparation. While acknowledging this may be part of the larger problem, this roundtable will approach distraction as the primary structural and environmental condition that plagues our classrooms.

Participants will discuss how historians can continue to achieve student learning outcomes in sourcing, research, writing, and critical thinking under these conditions without abandoning academic rigor. Questions to be considered include: How should history instructors respond to declining student engagement? Should traditional assessment models be reimagined? When should professors consider redesigning curriculum? How should digital tools be incorporated into our pedagogy and when should they be eschewed?

Themes to be explored include cognitive disruption vs. historical thinking, technology as an impediment and as an opportunity, evidence in an age of “fake news,” and the realities of obstacle-ridden student lives. The roundtable pays particular attention to student serving institutions where instructors teach regularly throughout the week, grappling with issues of engagement, retention, and student success.

Discussants will stress the importance of instructor agency in fashioning curriculum to best engage any classroom. Panelists will share classroom strategies, including the use of digital tools, redesigned assessments, and dynamic approaches to engage students. Attendees can expect to leave the session with a new shared vocabulary for discussing distraction and learning, new strategies for classroom assessments and lesson, and language to advocate to departments and administrators for the value of an agile approach to history education.