SOURCES: “Digging in the Digital Archives: Engaging Students in an Online American History Survey” By Carla Vecchiola & “Guest Post: ‘Can’t We Just Write a Paper?’ Digital Galleries and Archival Research for Undergraduates.” By Thomas Edge

“…the promise of digital materials to amplify the learning outcomes of primary source student work in history survey courses for issues of student motivation, coverage, and the integration of skill development with content delivery…”

Carla Vecchiola, “Digging in the Digital Archives: Engaging Students in an Online American History Survey,” The History Teacher 53, no. 1 (November 2019): 108.
  • Throughout both readings, we begin to understand the importance of technology in the classroom. Most importantly, we start to look at how the creation of mini-primary source gallery blogs, and how student creation of these can help students better understand the periods and grow a tool of how to go about directing history and its remains. In “Digging in the Digital Archives: Engaging Students in an Online American History Survey“ By Carla Vecchiola, Vecchiola starts to preview her past student’s work with digital history and describes that when students use primary sources, they better understand the material and can use their thinking skills to help shape historical information longterm. The quote above helps displays themes of the week including Communication – verbal and nonverbal and Self-preservation. These themes can also be reflected in Thomas Edge’s work as both stories describe the importance of relocating historical thinking on an online platform.

“…While they were often able to look at a racist image and intelligently discuss what made it racist, at times they needed to be pushed further in analyzing positive imagery, including images that groups created themselves to challenge dominant discourses about perceptions of their identities…”

Thomas Edge, “Guest Post: ‘Can’t We Just Write a Paper?’ Digital Galleries and Archival Research for Undergraduates.” Omeka.org-News, August 16, 2016.
  • In Thomas Edge’s “Guest Post: ‘Can’t We Just Write a Paper?’ Digital Galleries and Archival Research for Undergraduates”, Edge describes his classroom experience with OMEKA and how that fundamentally changed his student’s perspectives on dissecting history. The quote above is in context with Edge’s Introduction to African American Studies class, where students were challenged with creating mini-digital displays of primary sources, looking at each meaning and how they overall tie together to create a bigger narrative. Edge, in this example, challenged his students to find “not normal” narratives of racist imagery and try to search for opposing narratives. This concept made me create the question “Overall, Is finding opposing narratives in ‘controversial’ topics like this truly beneficial when discussing such?” I think because I am personally used to having a certain narrative on topics for different reasons, I wonder if (when talking about the holocaust for example) it is worth it to focus on opposing beliefs when the overall message should be able what NOT to do.

“…Utilizing primary source databases as the main reading material for my American history survey resulted in my students actually “doing history” and also resulted in high student engagement with the class…”

Carla Vecchiola, “Digging in the Digital Archives: Engaging Students in an Online American History Survey,” The History Teacher 53, no. 1 (November 2019): 117.
  • In Carla Vecchiola’s discussion of “Engaging Students with Each Other and with Difficult Course Topics”, Vecchiola described how such research into primary sources and the establishment of databases helps students “do history”. I am not entirely sure if it was my poor grammar skills that caused me to reread this phrase and sentence over and over again, but the idea that the students can “do history” popped a star in my brain. This quote raised a point in my head that the past is the past but the overall reasoning and full development in the past is in-fact history itself. Vecchiola’s purse in using this wording I think was designed to communicate to the audience that “doing history” is a shortened term for many historical tools that students and many others can and have developed. The creation of such databases gives a more engaging way of providing and creating such skills in students’ minds.

After reading both sources, they both establish and make certain that the relationship between students, the classroom, and technology should be heavily intertwined. The creation of projects focusing on creating mini-gallery and databases, help student gain the tools to help dissect history and provide reasoning for it long-term. It’s important, as a future history educator myself, that I use such resources to help better equip my students and even better equip myself in my own personal studies.