Changing the Narrative: Queens History as World History

Presenters: Kathryn Shaughnessy, Elaine Carey

Link to the NHPRCQIH Resource Guide

A librarian and historian established community partnerships with scholars of Global History, Queens Libraries’ Queens Memory Project, National Archives, and NYCDOE to develop open curriculum for grade 10 NYC Global History that challenges traditional, Eurocentric immigration narratives in New York City. NARA/NHPRC grant monies and university/partner in-kind contributions were leveraged to offer professional development opportunities for NYC teachers to create open curricula that encourages students to apply historical thinking principles to researching family and neighborhood cultural histories, including exploring the motivating world history factors that have contributed to shifting demographics in recent US history. Using a combination of freely-available globally-and culturally-relevant digital collections, the open curricula was developed to be replicable in other regions and allows students to be discerning users of, and contributors to, digital archives.

Teachers were encouraged to adopt Open Pedagogy and Universal Design principles, allowing students demonstrate learning through projects ranging from GIS-maps, videos, shadow boxes, papers, podcasts, and video games. The project resources also encourage teachers to explore intellectual property, privacy, metadata and cultural knowledge issues around digital archives in order for students to determine if/how they wished to license their own archival-quality objects to local community archives, so that those archives might better reflect current immigrant and refugee communities and, in turn, become resources for future migration history researchers.

Learning Outcomes:

• Open assignments developed for Global History, US Government, Economics, and Social Justice courses that help students apply historical thinking (complexity, causality, change over time, contingency, context).
• Open Pedagogy assignments that encourage students to critically engage with digital archival materials, both as user and potential contributor.
• Collection of freely available, globally- and culturally-relevant resources, that expand a resource-gap in personal, historical research.

Attenuated Democracy: A New OER Textbook for U.S. Government Courses

Salt Lake Community College has published a new OER textbook for U.S. Government and Politics courses that consciously takes a new approach to the subject, resulting in a relevant and relatable textbook that appeals to students. This session describes the book itself as well as the collaborative process that connected the author, the editor, and OER support staff at the College. The book is available here: https://slcc.pressbooks.pub/attenuateddemocracy/

Learning Outcomes: Participants will be introduced to a new OER textbook published by Salt Lake Community College, including the need for this textbook, the process by which it was created, and the specific approach it takes.