St. Cloud Technical and Community College faculty member Hudda Ibrahim, author of “From Somalia to Snow” joins Dr. Rob Galler’s Teaching History Summer Sessions class on the last day as students discuss her book.
Student researchers have had their projects upended or put on hold as COVID-19 shuts down access to physical archives and materials, but it’s also led to new ways of thinking and access to new students who’ve joined the online classroom, Galler said.
This juxtaposition of circumstances was seen in Galler’s Summer Sessions graduate seminar offering of Teaching American History. The course was offered online and opened to upper-level undergraduate students for the first time.
The online option brought in several new alumni to the graduate offering for the first time, he said.
The class attracted alumna 1st Lt. Shaela Rabbitt Pion, First Lieutenant, active duty division historian for the 94th Training Division at Fort Lee, Virginia; Kasey Solomon, a public history graduate student who is working at the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri where she is engaged in a project digitizing letters and documents for public use; and public history graduate student Andrew Romitti, who works at the Minnesota Historical Society, with current focus on a newspaper digitization project.
The class also connected diligent undergraduate history/social studies students such as Austin Eastwood and Sonya Smetana, who are preparing to enter the teaching profession with others like alumna Renee (Vetsch) Goerdt, who entered the class with experiences teaching social studies in Central Minnesota and in the Peace Corps in 2008-10 in Chongqing City in China.
Having undergraduates who are preparing to enter the classroom and working professionals who are doing public history work together in one space virtually led to some really engaging conversations throughout the course of the class.
In addition to whole class Zoom sessions, Galler offered breakout sessions for small group discussions and a running discussion board on D2L throughout the course.
The conversations were expanded by the classes’ focus on teaching the histories that are often left out of the story.
Those preparing to teach American history in the classroom or in a public exhibit, need to be prepared to think about the histories that aren’t included in textbooks and how to find and incorporate those stories, Galler said.
“As teachers our job is to pull up untold stories, absent narratives,” he said. “The class examined numerous books, presentations, and primary sources on new topics as well as new dimensions of common topics that typically do not fit into traditional textbooks portrayals. Such readings were designed to strengthen their critical thinking skills and examine new stories to include into their classes or public history portrayals.”
As textbooks rarely mentioned Native Americans in the early 20th century, the class read a primary source collection of native leaders in the pre-World War I era.
Rather than focus on the common telling of immigration in the late 19th century, the class explored the Somali experience in St. Cloud with guest speaker St. Cloud Technical and Community College faculty member Hudda Ibrahim, author of “From Somalia to Snow.”
That mixture of exploring absent histories and mixing people of different backgrounds led to a unique experience, Galler said.
“I’m really glad I had such a smart and diligent group of students to develop my online teaching methodologies,” he said.
