The Annual Meeting Is for Teachers, Chicago Edition

Teaching has gotten harder. Students struggle with focus, motivation, and their mental health; they are reluctant or unable to read and write (skills that are the foundation of most history courses); and the outside world is monitoring what we teach. Since late 2022, teachers have had to grapple with the possibilities and risks presented by large language models in the humanities classroom. (Why learn critical reading skills, when there is ihatereading.com?) And every year, teachers are expected to do more with less.

The longer I teach, the more I wake up to how impossible it is to do this job well. At the same time, I feel strongly that what I do has never been more urgent: I want students to think deeply about the world and figure out how we have gotten ourselves here; I want them to be open to listening to those they disagree with. Typically, once winter rolls around, all of that seems increasingly impossible, and my faith in my ability as a teacher tends to flag. That’s when I head to the AHA annual meeting.

This year, I had the privilege of helping shape the experience for teachers at the meeting. While it’s unlikely that the program’s offerings will help us solve the “teaching history problem” once and for all, I am confident that the panels offer teachers at all levels practical solutions for classroom challenges, new scholarly insights to help improve the content of their lessons, and, most of all, community: the chance to exchange ideas, forge connections, commiserate, and support one another across disciplines and institutions at a time when teaching history is hard.

Here are some of the AHA26 sessions I am most excited about.

Easily one of the most frequent topics of conversations about teaching I have is students’ refusal or inability to read. How can we possibly get all of this content in their heads, let alone expect them to examine texts critically, when reading skills are declining? I have organized and attended “teaching writing” workshops at past meetings, but writing starts with reading. This year’s program features a two-hour workshop on the “reading problem,” which will introduce the Reading Apprenticeship framework and showcase educators’ approaches to teaching reading across educational levels.

Another session tackles the use and relevance of history textbooks: Should we still be using them? Given the reading problem, educators increasingly use other media in the classroom, but are we training students’ historical thinking skills when playing a podcast or a film clip? Two teaching sessions deal with these alternative forms of “content delivery”: “They Don’t Read—Can They Listen?” explores how teachers may push students to examine podcast narratives just as critically as they would ask them to read texts. Teaching History with Film features a film scholar, a historian, two documentary filmmakers, and a producer of the popular Crash Course series. The session will guide educators in using film material in the classroom more effectively. (If you are planning to attend this session, I recommend that you attend the screening of Fred Kuwornu’s film We Were Here the day before.)

There are, of course, other challenges that history teachers must confront. One of my recurring struggles is keeping students engaged and convincing them that what we study matters. I have learned that the key to getting them to care is to have them work with materials that connect to their own lives, but that is easier said than done. A session on teaching local history will discuss how teachers might include the history of students’ schools, neighborhoods, and cities into standard survey courses. I will also be sure to attend Lee Ann Potter’s always engaging and eminently useful two-part workshop on the Library of Congress’s primary source collections (Part I and Part II), which this year focuses on revolutionary history. Some of my “best” teaching sources made it into my curriculum after I attended one of her workshops.

I also attend the annual meeting because I appreciate the community it offers: No other gathering brings together historians from so many different institutions who, in spite of their varied jobs, share the conviction that historical thinking plays “a critical role in public life.” I have appreciated that the annual meeting always makes space for history educators at all levels to offer each other support. To that end, the AHA has sought to encourage university educators and K–12 teachers to meet and exchange ideas as partners. That idea is reflected in the session Building K–16 Partnerships, a version of which has been on the program at least twice before, and which I know has made teachers feel seen and heard.

For the second time, this year’s conference will also convene a content cohort, which a participant described as “a built-in community to travel with through the weekend.” Educators will visit various sessions as a group to explore the theme of revolutions across periods and regions together. Megan Porter, a fellow public school teacher and member of last year’s cohort, shared in Perspectives earlier this year that the frequent opportunities for common reflection and exchange this group provided made “a professional development opportunity far and away more effective than those typically offered to educators in the K–12 sector and unique to professors who spend their time on college campuses.” Everyone should consider joining the group this year!

I’ll also be sure to attend the Saturday plenary, Making History Indispensable at Your Institution: Historians and General Education, which will be relevant to both university faculty and those preparing students for their first year at college–another chance to hear from colleagues across institutional divides. Finally, I am curious to learn about how colleagues deal with outside pressures, polarization, and censorship elsewhere in the world, topics that will be discussed at a Friday session featuring educators from the Netherlands, Peru, South Africa, and the UK.

Lastly, I have to say this: I am a historian. I go to the annual meeting because I want to learn more history. This year, I will attend some of the State of the Field for Busy Teachers sessions (on Africa, Latin America, and post-1970 United States)—always useful exchanges between practitioners and scholars. Because I want to be a more confident AP World History teacher, I am also looking forward to sessions on the Canary Islands, the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and modern China. Last year, my colleague Jenny Baniewicz, currently an AHA Council member on the Teaching Division, reminded attendees at the K–12 reception that we were all there because we loved history: “Come and nerd out with us!” she told everyone. I’d like to reiterate her invitation. You can say hi to both of us at this year’s K–12 Welcome Reception.