Providing a Path for Lifelong Learning
Did you know that the phrase "founding fathers" wasn't coined until 1916? It was then that Warren Harding used that wording in a speech to the Republican National Convention. Somehow, I always find this a surprising fact. Have Americans only thought about the revolutionary generations as father figures for a century? Americans before 1916 certainly… Continue reading “Founding Fathers”
Tara and John get together to discuss their upper division classes in the spring of 2018. Tara is teaching classes on the American Revolution and the history of American slavery, while John is teaching a class on popular sport in a modern, global context. The conversation moves on to some pedagogy pretty quickly: how do… Continue reading Centre Trail Podcast Episode 11: Sport and Slavery
Hello there. I write from the depths of Centre Term. It is a fraught place. Everyone is tired. All we do is learn, at breakneck pace. The end is nigh. Actually I have been having a great time, though I will admit to being tired. Posts on our experiences this term are long overdue, but… Continue reading Video Game Demo Day!
Tara and John get together to talk about the intensive term coming to an end. Warning: we are very tired in this episode! John talks about his recent op-ed in the “Made by History” blog in the Washington Post about American policy in East Asia, and Tara talks about the steampunk genre and its relationship… Continue reading Centre Trail Podcast Episode 10: Steampunk and Talking to the Public
Tara and John return for our first podcast in 2018 to talk about how they utilize the intensive “CentreTerm” class as a platform for experimenting with topics and pedagogy. Tara discusses her brand new class on alternative histories and John discusses his class on history and video games, which he is teaching for the third… Continue reading Centre Trail Podcast 9: Experimenting in Intensive Winter Terms
We are back here at Centre Trail, just as we are back at Centre College. Tomorrow kicks off CentreTerm, a three week intensive period during which all Centre students on campus will take only one class and Centre faculty will each teach only one class. Students meet with their instructors for at least three hours… Continue reading We are back! CentreTerm begins…
We hand things over pretty quickly to some alumni from our program! We recently had homecoming at Centre and at a History program coffee get-together we had some lovely conversations with people roaming the earth with Centre College degrees in History. We wish we could have recorded everyone, but we do have great chats here… Continue reading Centre Trail Podcast 8: Homecoming!
We’re all sports all the time on Centre Trail this week! The Houston Astros won a dramatic game two of the World Series last night, and it looks like we have a real series here to determine the baseball champions of the world. Wait, why do we have two American teams play every year for… Continue reading American Baseball and the World Series
This semester I’m teaching an upper division class in Modern Chinese History, “Chairman Mao’s China.” The title is of course somewhat reductive, but it gives me a chance on the first day to talk about what I hope the class will do. We are not going through Mao Zedong’s biography nor do we ascribe all… Continue reading What’s in a word? Minzu and the Chinese Nation
In the most recent Centre Trail podcast episode, I talk a little about my decision to use 80 Days, a video game based on Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, as a reading (or “reading”, if you prefer) for my world history survey course. Specifically, I talked about how I used the game… Continue reading 80 Days and Breathing Room in the Classroom
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