"The Stories We Tell Ourselves Shape Our Identities": Journals in a Plague Year

The author--in the role of one teacher observing another--documented a spring 2021 remote introductory art history course during the COVID-19 pandemic when graduate student teaching assistants called a campus-wide strike. Forced to improvise, the professor replaced formal analysis papers and exams with an ungraded journal. Drawing from the content of these journals, notes from the Zoom classes, and email correspondence with the professor, the author explicates how students took this journal assignment as an invitation to respond personally to the course content, and as an opportunity to grapple with their own identities. These journals allowed students to use art to explore similarities and differences freely across culture, space, and time. With the traditional requirement for an academic argument temporarily on pause, the author raises questions that characterize our present day: how to encourage a world that accepts different identities without hostility.

It Can Be Done: Engaging and Powerful Social Studies Education Using Technology

My biggest fear about teaching a social studies methods class with COVID restrictions was talking "at" my teacher candidates and not modeling interactive and engaging social studies education. Social studies education should be engaging and student-centered. In this article, I offer technological adaptations to lessons that center around three main ideas of history/social studies teaching: Promoting Historical Inquiry, Facilitating Discussions, and Supporting Civic Engagement. With advances in technology and digital learning tools, challenging and active social studies instruction can be achieved in a virtual or hybrid learning environment.

Local History Practice in the System of Bachelors-Historians Training: Experience and Prospects

The article describes and summarizes the experience of conducting local history educational and productive practice for students of the first (bachelor's) level of education, majoring in "History and Archeology" at the School of History, V.N.Karazin Kharkiv National University (Ukraine). The authors show that the set of principles and research methods, being the basis of this investigation, ensures reliability of the analysis and representativeness of the results. A review of the latest publications on the topic confirms its relevance and lack of development in the specialized literature. The article substantiates the important role and significance of the local history educational and productive practice for further professional activity of the future graduates. The authors explain the main approaches to the organization of this form of educational activity in traditional conditions (among such approaches--the implementation of creative projects in small groups, excursions and expeditions). The article reveals the changes that took place in the process of organizing and conducting local history educational and productive practice after the outbreak of the coronary crisis. The approaches and methods, developed for the distance passing of local history educational and productive practice, may be useful after returning to the traditional system of education. The authors, using a correlation-regression analysis of the ratio of the number of students who underwent local history educational and productive practice and the number of students--speakers at the International Local History Conference of Young Scientists, found a moderate correlation between these indicators. The article concludes that the local history educational and productive practice encourages students to further research activity in the field of local history.

"Not Your Model Minority": An Inquiry on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

The realities of COVID-19 have clearly revealed the myth of the model minority, a stereotype in which Asian Americans are seen as successful and high achieving in contrast to other Communities of Color. An ever-present, but sometimes seemingly dormant, anti-Asian racism in the United States is reflective of patterns in U.S. immigration history. Yet, neither is often taught in PK-12 education. In this article, the authors briefly outline the history of two major policies in Asian American immigration history and share an inquiry designed to help students explore the institutionalized racism that has defined who is a "good" immigrant.

Creating Culturally Relevant, Place-Based Lessons for First Graders in Minnesota - And in Every Community

On a blustery day in March 2021, a line of bundled-up, masked first graders walked from school to a house on the National Register of Historic Places in their south Minneapolis neighborhood. For these 23 young learners, it wasn't just a walk. This COVID-era field trip was a culminating activity in a series of lessons, "Unearthing Histories," that empowered the students to be historians, dig into their complex local history, and then take action to help create a more just future. "Unearthing Histories" was a long time in the making, especially for first-grade teacher Megan Peterson. But Megan's journey from late summer of 2019 to the end of the 2020-2021 school year emphasizes the possibilities of local history in helping to frame and support anti-racist elementary social studies.