For the past nine months we have been talking to historians who work beyond the professoriate, and posting the videos on the AHA’s YouTube channel. Our most recent installment, a conversation with Rachel Reinhard, brings the number of videos to six.
Reinhard told us about her role as the director of the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project, which serves, she says, “as a bridge between the university and K-12 classrooms, and [supports] the professional development of K-12 instruction.”
Reinhard was an elementary school teacher before she went to the University of California, Berkeley to get her PhD in history. She explains that her experience as a graduate student working for the History-Social Science Project, under a Teaching American History grant, “really informed [my work] when I became a professor myself. I was working with students who wanted to be history teachers, and I used a lot of what I learned from the History-Social Science Project.”
Now back at Berkeley as the project’s director, Reinhard often finds herself in the role of a mentor to PhD students. She calls this an “unanticipated joy,” while noting that “when you’re getting a PhD, particularly at an R-1 institution, you don’t have a sense of what’s possible outside of what is being modeled for you.”
Watch Rachel Reinhard’s video at www.historians.org/perspectives/what-i-do, and visit our roundup of interviews in Perspectives on History, which this month features comments from our participants on being a historian outside the academy, and advice for graduate students.
This post first appeared on AHA Today.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Attribution must provide author name, article title, Perspectives on History, date of publication, and a link to this page. This license applies only to the article, not to text or images used here by permission.
