Teaching History Conference 2019

We Are The West, Too! Documenting Community and Identity in the 21st Century. (Dawn A. Dennis, PhD. History, CSULA)
This presentation seeks to highlight the use of project-based learning, in the form of a student-curated history exhibition, as an active learning tool, while disrupting the “traditional teaching methods of history,” in which freshman assume that the survey history course is simply a regurgitation of facts. What I mean by “traditional teaching methods of history,” is what freshman believe a history survey course is comprised of: rote learning, a dull lecture, and numerous tests. Students in an undergraduate history survey course at Cal State University Los Angeles created a public history exhibition, “We Are The West, Too!” at the Autry Museum in Fall 2018. Teaching history is empowering our students to be changemakers. Over the course of sixteen weeks, three learning outcomes emerged; historical thinking, the ownership of their community/neighborhood narrative, and collaborative problem-solving skills that focused on the central question of “how does our personal story fit into the narrative of the West?”   This presentation highlights a partnership between museum educators at the Autry Museum and my students to create a student-curated history exhibition. The impetus for this exhibition draws upon the participation in the Autry Teaching Academy in the summer of 2018, to implement innovative teaching methods for an undergraduate U.S. history survey course.