What have you done this semester?

Jean Stuntz Discussion

Friends and colleagues,

As we wind down this semester, please take a few minutes to let us know what you have been doing. Have you had a class project go especially well? Have you uncovered something interesting in your research? Are you thinking about how to revise your courses for next semester?

Share with us so we can all raise each other.

Thanks!

Jean
Co-Editor, H-SAWH

4 Replies

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I am retiring next month after 22 years of teaching early American history, the history of childhood, and southern women's history at Rhodes College in Memphis.  I look forward to more time to read, write, walk, travel, laugh and enjoy the many cultural events in Memphis.  Still plan to see you all at SHA and SAWH events!

Each semester I teach one section of the US history survey as US Women's History. This is the first time I have had a majority of men in the class. It has been especially rewarding to see them get so involved in the fight for equality. I do a lot of activities during class time and to see these guys - many of them athletes - being so passionate about health care, suffrage, education, and so on has been wonderful.

 

Jean Stuntz
West Texas A&M University

Second LifeMy class for first-year students "Between Shadow and Light: Cosmopolitanism in Virtual and Physical Worlds" worked out great this semester - a better balance between using the virtual world of Second Life to practice interviewing "the stranger" from another land and their in-person interviews with our University's English-language learners. Even when I think I've got the hands-on components just right, the students teach me some other wonderful thing as we work together on building out an open course in learning to think like a global citizen.  Way-finding is hard enough for any of us, not just first-year students at a (relatively) big research university like the University of Kentucky!

WikiSOO Burba badgeEven more fun for me this semester was taking a Little Open Online Course (LOOC) with some terrific folks from the Wikipedia Foundation: WIKISOO which is hosted by the School of Open in P2PU. I got to work on a project that I've been thinking about for a while - benchmarking and defining open access policies for higher ed institutions. You can see some of my work for the course that I published in a new section "Policies Adopted by Research Universities" in the article "Open educational resources policy." We're hosting a second annual THATCamp Kentucky here at UK next month, and I hope this time to get some traction among the faculty to start going with conversations about what David Wiley calls "openness" - wish me luck!

Randolph Hollingsworth, Ph.D.
University of Kentucky

Editor for H-Kentucky

 

I'm retired, but I still measure time in semesters. This one has been busy with book signings and a local Houston radio interview for my book, THE HOGGS OF TEXAS: LETTERS AND MEMOIRS OF AN EXTRAORDINARY FAMILY, 1887-1906 (TSHA Press, November 2013). I've also been writng a blog, "Jamestown Mysteries," (www.jamestowntheblog.blogspot.com) to promote my historical novel about early Virginia.  Great fun, and this novel (paperback and ebook) would be a good addition to colonial history courses, etc.! 

JAMESTOWN: THE NOVEL: The Story of America’s Beginning

(New York: Argo Navis, 2014; originally published as A Durable Fire, New York: William Morrow, 1990; Avon, 1991)

 “A complex tale of courage, treachery, cultural conflict, administrative bungling and desperate choices.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

​ “A captivating first novel that combines Bernhard’s expertise as an American history professor with a vivid, sure prose style to produce a rich tale of suffering and triumph in 1600s America.”—KIRKUS REVIEWS

Fiction, with a supplement of eyewitness accounts.

Now an Amazon paperback and e-book.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Jamestown%3A+The+Novel