Spicing Up U.S. History

Bring show-and-tell to the college classroom? Incorporate field trips into the syllabus? The mere mention would give many professors a good chuckle. But Sallie Shanahan, a history major who expects to graduate from the University of Maryland University College next spring, says these methods – tailored to a college audience – would work.

A former pre-school and kindergarten teacher, Shanahan regularly brought in artifacts when teaching history to her tots. As a student who previously attended the College of William and Mary, she fondly remembers a professor who took a class to Jamestown for an archeological dig. In most cases, though, Shanahan said her professors have been short on classroom innovation when teaching survey history courses.

Stopping short of criticizing the conventional lecture format, Shanahan, speaking during a session at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, said that history classes — even introductory courses — need an infusion of creative lesson plans that deviate from the chronological information dump. While her touch-taste-smell approach is perhaps extreme for the college setting, her concept of diversifying the curriculum drew a uniformly positive response from panelists.