Trying to Make History

¶ … history affects and is affected by the individual." This article addresses some of the latest techniques to assist college students and professors in the teaching of history. For the former, there is frequently a perception in which history is tedious and not fully relevant for the student today (Johansen, 2014, p. 245). For the latter, it is always beneficial to understand what techniques are influential within one's particular sphere of interest, and the author offers a variety of assignments to help engage students in the understanding of history.

The article begins with the author providing a terse overview of her own challenge of teaching history to college students. She swiftly comes to the primary thesis of this paper, and one which is worthy of consideration for both pedagogues and students alike -- history becomes alive again, and takes on full meaning, when it is conceived of and elucidated at the individual letter.

Johansen (2014) notes that when considering the perspective of the individual in history, the discipline as a whole "provides an endless supply of the riveting stories of men and women struggling to cope with a changing world" (p. 245). She then devotes the entirety of the rest of the article to denoting various assignments that she reuses which emphasize the perspective of the individual and have repeatedly proven engaging to her student base.

In analyzing the merit of this article, it is noteworthy to mention that there is no original research involved in it. It is written in the first-person, and provides little empirical evidence as to the conclusions or findings that the author draws. Instead, she is merely recollecting her personal experience teaching history while emphasizing the individual's perspective.

Still, she is able to use objective student evaluations disseminated at the end of her classes to provide some form of feedback or data regarding the efficacy of her approach of tailoring history to the individual. Moreover, she bases her findings on practical experience, which should not be wholly discredited because there is a dearth of empirical evidence in her article.

In its own way, the practical application of the strategy denoted by the author and the many assignments she has done with a plethora of different students is a form of original research, and is perhaps even more valuable because it is based on classroom experience. One of the points of interest regarding this article, then, is the information the author provides about the type of assignments she disseminates which forces students to consider history from a first-person vantage point.

She provides examples of three different types of assignments that accomplish these objectives. The first is about the diversity of the lives of women during 20th century, the second is in regards to social activism, and the third pertains to U.S. Foreign policy. This part of the article is of extreme interest to other instructors, largely because the author includes a surfeit of detail about.