In July and August 2023, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of its involvement in the creation of the C3 Framework, the AHA convened a weeklong professional development institute for K–12 teachers of world history.
Since 2020, AHA has hosted a regular series of online webinars to support the work of history department chairs. These webinars are small group discussions facilitated by experienced department chairs on topics related to the faculty-facing, student-facing, and administrative-facing work of chairs. Department chairs are encouraged to attend as many webinars as are of interest.
Virtual AHA
Virtual AHA brought together communities of historians to build professional relationships, discuss scholarship, and engage in professional and career development. A service to our members, Virtual AHA provided a forum for discussing common issues, building research networks, and broadening and maintaining our professional community. It also provides resources for online teaching and professional and career development. Virtual AHA included the AHA Colloquium, which was a program of web-based content designed to bring together historians from all fields, institutions, and career paths who would ordinarily have gathered at the 2021 annual meeting.
Virtual Career Development
In 2020-21, the AHA hosted a Virtual Career Development series, with professional development webinars and workshops emphasizing career exploration and skill development for graduate students and early-career historians.
From June 2020 to January 2021, the AHA organized the Online Teaching Forum, a series of virtual events designed to help historians plan for teaching in online and hybrid environments. These webinars and workshops considered a wide range of teaching issues.
AHA Online has included Expanding Perspectives events, conversations with authors of articles in Perspectives on History about their work.
Assignment Charrettes
The AHA’s Assignment Charrettes, hosted from 2018-23, provided an opportunity to workshop individual course assignments with fellow history educators. In a facilitated and collegial small-group format, participants had the opportunity to discuss their goals and concerns for their own assignment, ask questions, and get input from peers. Presenters also received written feedback from other participants on how they might revise their assignment to address their teaching concerns and improve student learning.
Curriculum Mapping
The AHA hosted Fine Tuning Program Outcomes: A Curriculum Mapping Workshop in January 2021. Curriculum Mapping helps instructors identify how the assignments they create support the learning outcome they intend. The exercise of mapping helps instructors identify which learning outcomes are well addressed and which are absent or downplayed. It can also reveal the need for further discussion, collaboration, and revision of assignments and program learning outcomes so that both may better address what the instructor and the department want students to learn and do.
2022 History Graduate Student Association Workshop
What can we do to support graduate students? From professional development to mental health to community-building, the American Historical Association has found that History Graduate Student Associations are integral points of intervention for student support and success. At our first HGSA Workshop, we invited graduate students to collaborate on and exchange models for HGSAs that serve students' needs and empower students' agency.