How to Get the "Golden Get-Together":
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One of the challenges of teaching historical research, even in the era of digital humanities, is helping students understand how to put sources together to read them more closely and draw more complex conclusions through a detailed, analytical process. Indeed, research is seen by many students as a mysterious enterprise, one where the steps between source material and published article remain hazy and elusive. I believe the only way to clear the fog is to encourage scholars to share more of their own work in different stages of completion and to do so in open source forums accessible to their students. Here was my first attempt to do just that; my contribution will focus on an assignment from a high school history seminar course on tourism, travel, and leisure in twentieth century America that used a combination of digitized historical source material as well as new media tools. My goal was to help students see historical work as collaborative and dynamic while showing students how historians assemble their research and draw conclusions when sources are put into dialogue with one another.
To do this, I decided to share some of my own research in a very raw form, focusing on an event in the history of Glendora, California during the 1930s. This event, Glendora's "Golden Get-Together," took place in May, 1937 and was designed by town business leaders to be a tourist activity in order to attract attention to the struggling town. Instead of just handing out the sources I used or sharing my own writing, I created a Google site with an array of embedded texts, docs, images, and video (like the one above) along with a series of detailed instructions that asked them read sources like the one above and collaborate by crowdsourcing notes and interpretations through a shared Googledoc. The class then reviewed its findings and in small groups, worked to create their own original arguments. Over the next few months, this site will feature not only the steps and materials from the assignment, but also my reflections on the outcome, including the impact of sharing the conclusions from my own writing with my students and the politics of opening up historical research beyond traditional published mediums to share in the classroom. |
Assignment Learning Objectives:
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