This is part of a roundtable on the COVID-19 pandemic and the work of history.
One of the more surprising revelations from this last school year was that it is not easy to teach a high-school Digital History class digitally.
One might think Digital History would be a natural class to transition to online learning. And I had the added benefit of experience, having taken online history courses as a graduate student. But public high schools are different from graduate school, not least because of the public school codes to which teachers must abide.
When I was originally approved to create the Digital History course, I excitedly designed the curriculum. I typed a fancy syllabus. The class was scheduled for the fourth quarter as an upperclassman elective and I was eager to end our school year with some hands-on, student-directed, collaborative learning. We received a brand-new Apple desktop computer with high-end podcasting equipment, which I envisioned the students would use for oral histories and podcasting projects. We were going to create a community-accessible digital archive of historical photos, newspapers, and documents. We would produce mini-documentaries and a historical walking-tour map for the town. I would facilitate my students in these projects while also teaching them how to utilize the vast digital archives already available online.
None of this happened.
About an hour after the school day ended on Friday, March 13, our governor shut down Pennsylvania’s schools. Though we had anticipated the shutdown, most of us were still unprepared. In a matter of days, we had to take curricula designed for physical classroom spaces and adjust them for online distance learning. For me, this included my seventh-and ninth-grade U.S. History courses.
Cue the challenges. I teach at a rural Rust Belt school, just south of Erie. It is a wonderfully tight-knit town, but one that has devastated in recent decades by fleeing industries. 78% of our students are categorized as “economically disadvantaged.” Many did not have reliable internet access. Fortunately, many school districts (including ours) received grants to purchase internet hot spots, but this took time to orchestrate.
All students must have equal access to any educational opportunities we offer. This is not only the law but a good thing. Still, it was a challenge for districts and teachers to figure out how to teach remotely while adhering to the law. Google Classroom simply cannot replace the classroom.
Also, I miss my students. I miss the collaboration, the conversations, the groans at my corny jokes, the improvisation, the thinking and pivoting on the fly, the sometimes wild process of embracing the tangential and seeing where it takes us, and the performative storytelling that comes with teaching history.
Somehow we did it. It wasn’t always pretty. I’m not sure that I did a good job. I’m not even sure how much learning actually happened, but I did the best that I could and I hope that my students took something away from the last few months. More than anything, I hope that they are doing okay.