AHA Topics
K–12 Education, Undergraduate Education
Episode Description
In this episode, we revisit AHA 2025 with a focus on history teachers. Daniel sits with Katharina Matro and Megan Porter—both high school history teachers—to talk about AHA sessions geared toward history teaching as well as the AHA 2025 K–16 Content Cohort, which this year focused on the theme of “Resilience in the History Classroom.”
Daniel Story
Welcome to History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. I’m Daniel Story. This past January, I was once again at the AHA annual meeting. This year it was in New York City. And by many accounts, it was one of the most successful in recent memory, with around 4,000 attendees and a record number of sessions at more than 550. I was involved in a number of AHR- and AHA-related activities, including serving as chair of the inaugural Sinclair Workshop on Historical Podcasting, which was made possible by the same donation that created the Sinclair Prize for Historical Podcasts, awarded for the first time this year to Andrew Falk for his podcast Past is Prologue. And if this is the first you’re hearing of the Sinclair Prize, I recommend that you go check out the details on the AHA’s website. And, certainly, if you are a history podcaster, consider submitting something for the prize. The current deadline is May 15th, 2025. Another track at this year’s meeting I was especially interested in was the AHA’s growing set of programming for history teachers and for subjects around history pedagogy. In fact, that was the focus of the other panel I took part in—”From Pixels to Pedagogy: Exploring Best Practices in Teaching Digital History, which was organized by historian and, as it happens, history podcaster Saniya Lee Ghanoui of the University of Texas at El Paso. And for 8:30 on a Sunday morning, it was surprisingly well attended, and the conversation was great. Now amid this growing set of offerings around the teaching of history, one of the more intriguing to me was the AHA 2025 K–16 Content Cohort that brought together 25 history teachers from a variety of backgrounds around a somewhat more structured approach to navigating the annual meeting. This year’s cohort was focused on the theme of “Resilience in the History Classroom,” and I had the opportunity to attend the opening session for the cohort.
Jennifer Baniewicz
Hi everybody. Thank you so much for coming as part of the cohort. My name is Jennifer Baniewicz. Calling me Jennifer fine. I am a high school teacher. I’m also on council. It is a three-year selected position. So this is my year two. And part of our conversation at council last year was, how do we incorporate more teachers, more high school teachers…
Daniel Story
That was Jennifer Baniewicz of Amos Alonzo Stagg High School, who is one of the members of the AHA’s Teaching Division. Jennifer got things started and then handed it over to a former Teaching Division member to moderate the main part of the session.
Katharina Matro
Welcome everybody. My name is Katharina Matro. I teach US history to ninth graders and AP world history to 11th graders in a large public high school outside of DC, and I’m your moderator for this panel…
Daniel Story
The following afternoon, I had the opportunity to sit down with Katharina to talk more about the K–16 cohort and about the high school history teacher experience of the AHA more broadly. I started by asking why a high school history teacher who might not normally attend a large academic history conference like the AHA might consider it.
Katharina Matro
So I think what the AHA has been trying to do since I have become more involved, like five years ago, and I think they were honestly already trying to do that beforehand, is to well one to take teachers seriously, to listen to teachers more closely and actually really figure out what they need, right? Like, what do you actually need? I think what the AHA can do better than any other organization that maybe a history teacher would go to is make the scholarship accessible. Because all the big names are members of the AHA and the AHA is very good at relationship building, especially has been under Jim Grossman. And so they can get the big scholars that we’re all reading and hoping for our students to read one day in front of us and talk to us. And I think that is what the AHA can do better than, let’s say, a conference that’s more focused on teaching, where you wouldn’t necessarily see the researchers and the scholars who are so steeped into the field and the latest research that you know, teachers don’t really have access to because we don’t have time to keep up with it. And I think that that’s why I will continue going, even if I no longer have any sort of official role to play at the AHA. Because the teaching stuff, I think teachers are always skeptical a little bit about, you know, some new educational method being rolled out. And what really we want and need is the content, and feel more comfortable with the content and get it right. Because there’s, it seems like nowadays there’s even higher stakes riding on us getting it correct. And so to have a dialog with the scholars here, but maybe also tell them, the scholars, what our worries are, or our limitations, or our obstacles or our difficulties. I think that’s, the AHA is just at a unique position to be able to provide that space of conversation. I don’t see that happening at a more teacher-focused or more education-focused conference. And I think what the AHA is recognizing is that teachers also want the content. We don’t have to talk about how to teach best all the time. Like, it’s fun to just, you know, learn something new. And I honestly also think that that’s what makes the discipline exciting for our students, right? Like they’re not interested in, like, whatever pedagogy we’re using. Hopefully we’re doing a good job…If we’re going to draw them in, we’re going to draw them in by having exciting content that’s relevant. So I think that’s how the conference is unique.
Daniel Story
Then we got into the K–16 cohort itself.
Katharina Matro
I think the idea was because the conference is so huge. And scholars who come here will find their groups easily because they will know people in their field, for example, or like, from graduate school, whatever. So the conference facilitates meeting up in groups for an academic audience, I think, pretty easily. But teachers will not necessarily find each other unless they come and travel together with like teachers of the same school or whatever. And so I think the idea is, can we put a core together from the very beginning of the first day of the conference that experiences the conference together, but can also debrief after a particular session. And obviously a group of colleagues who have common concerns, I think also like, what does this mean for us for teaching so that the conference feels a little bit more manageable and more social.
Katharina Matro
When Jenny asked me to help moderate a panel on resilience in history education. I was a little confused by what it meant. I thought at first maybe she was talking about me. Maybe. I was probably in the middle of grading a stack of 91 DBQs and not sure that I was ever going to make it. Or maybe I was in the middle of wondering whether I needed a career change after all, and what would I do, and is teaching high school history worth it? Am I making a difference? Or maybe I was in the middle of revising the case study of the Pueblo Uprising that my AP World students have to engage with every year. Or maybe she was talking about a friend of mine, a teacher in Florida, who…
So I didn’t come up with the theme that was, I guess, this year’s teaching division. And I was at first a little like, what? What do they mean? Like, is this what they want us to teach now about resilience, or is it, you know, recognizing that teachers have been feeling very put upon. And I guess it was all of the above. But I think what it allowed yesterday was a very sort of wide ranging discussion of the challenges, both of what we’re teaching, like people were talking about, what if we’re always teaching these depressing things, for example, can we do that to students? But also just about the the experience of teaching nowadays in the classroom. Like it was nice that people got to commiserate a little bit about, you know, how hard it is, and in this particular political climate, for example. So I think that in some ways, oddly, this very broad theme allowed us to talk about teaching and the challenges from very different angles.
Daniel Story
A few weeks after the conference, I was actually able to catch up with one of the teachers who was part of this year’s cohort, Megan Porter.
Megan Porter
My name’s Megan Porter, and I teach in Lenox, Massachusetts, which is in the Berkshires of Western Mass. I teach 11th and 12th grade American Studies and Sociology and Holocaust History, the Holocaust and genocide. I was lucky enough to go to AHA, I think, eight years ago, when it was in Denver, and then again this year. When I went eight years ago, I was, you know, only a couple years into teaching, and was really kind of rueing that I might have taken the wrong path and, like, should have been in academia, and I was feeling really inadequate, kind of at AHA amongst all these PhDs and and things like that. The the one place that was not true was I went to the grad student reception, because I was also a graduate student, and I felt like a celebrity there, because they were all trying to figure out how to get jobs. And I had a job, just not in higher ed. So I had a really good experience eight years ago, but it was really kind of felt like a continuation of my own kind of undergraduate, graduate studies and not of my professional, you know, self. And then this time in New York, it was really nice to have a very different experience, which is, I think, made possible, really, by the K–16 cohort, which was like, felt respected for my professional experience, felt like I had lots to offer in conversations with people in the cohort. And it was a nice confirmation where I got to, like, kind of geek out and follow those academic pursuits that I, you know, always have interest in but also really appreciate that the work that I do in the classroom. You know, some of the history that was presented in panels is so fascinating and so important, but also so different than my work with students. It was really affirming for me to be like, Oh, I’m glad I’m not in academia. No slight to people who are. But that it was like, nice to feel like the work I’m doing today is, like, has meaning for me day to day. So I sort of stumbled into it because of an email blast that was like, oh, deadline for applying to this content cohort. I applied, and, you know, really didn’t have too much context for it, but then got in and was able to learn that it would basically be this cohort of educators and professors and academics talking about resilience in history education, which feels completely relevant to my day-to-day experience in the classroom. And yeah, it was a really good experience in that it gave me a kind of touchstone for the conference, both in terms of a cohort of people that I got to see again and again throughout the conference, but also, like a set of ideas. So on the I took the train down from Albany to the city, and on the train I got to read, you know, there were three articles that were recommended that we read that kind of framed our conversations around resilience. You know, one talking about the etymology of resilience and how it’s been used in academia, the word itself. But then also Lendol Calder’s article about the importance of telling meta narratives and stories in history. So it was a really nice way to start the conference, actually, kind of thinking doing some of my own kind of academic work about what resilience is. And then on Friday, we met the cohort. We heard from some of the authors of the articles that we had read and some other teachers. But yeah, I think that it really gave me a way to network and talk with other professionals in a really meaningful way that wouldn’t have been there without the cohort. You know, when you go to AHA, some people are there interviewing for jobs, but other people are, they know, they’re all academics. They work with each other in college campuses, they peer reviewed, like articles, and so for a K through 12 teacher, we don’t have that. So it was really nice to have a way to kind of break into that and meet other K through 12 teachers, and then also other, you know, professors and academics were interested in hearing about the K through 12 experience. So that was huge, because it just meant that whether it was like an actual cohort session or like a recommended session, there was always someone that you recognized. And then, of course, that bread like conversations across sessions like, oh, how does this? How are you integrating all of this and things like that? So the cohort was great, but there was also just a lot more offerings for K through 12. There was that, you know, welcome reception on Friday, which was a godsend because I missed breakfast trying to catch my train, but I got to talk to other room 12k through 12 teachers, which was kind of a nice way to kick off the conference. And then, kind of my two highlights were a presentation by the Library of Congress. I’ve worked with them a lot in my classroom, and I’ve gone to PDs, I think, with them before. And so I was like, Oh, I think this is not going to be helpful. But it was the opposite. It was very helpful, not just the presentation on the LOC, but like, there were so many different types of professionals in the room that the conversation about finding primary sources, and where, like, there was a, you know, a fellow from Angel Island who was able to, like, talk about what they offered. So that was a really great workshop. And then on Monday, I did a workshop for, like, writing, teaching writing. And that was a mix of college and high school. And that conversation, I thought was, like, really fascinating and helpful. Just because I don’t, like, usually we don’t have, I don’t have access to college professors and what they’re thinking. And a lot of it was around AI and how we’re using or not AI in classroom. And so hearing kind of the everyone’s different experiences was, was helpful. Um, all of those things were affiliated with the cohort, but not directly, and were definitely offerings that weren’t there eight years ago when I was there. So it was really directly relevant to my professional development, whereas before, like, I could find there’s so many amazing panels at AHA, but it would be mostly like, Oh, this is sort of helpful, and maybe I’ll tell my students one of these tidbits that I learned, but not like, okay, now I can go and implement this in my my practice. And I think definitely from, like, the public school perspective of having them pay for my attendance at the conference, I was like, Oh yeah, they’re getting more bang for their buck this time around than than eight years ago, For sure. So.
Daniel Story
Back to my conversation with Katharina. I asked if there were any other sessions in particular that she had found helpful, or that other history teacher attendees might have.
Katharina Matro
So the ones that I love, and this is they, they started when I was in council, so it’s a little bit self-promoting with they started when Laura McEnaney was vice president of the Teaching Division, but have then continued, and now there’s tons of them. We used to have just one per conference. It’s called “State of the Field for Busy Teachers.” And this year they have three. We used to have one, and they the one. I have been to two so far, one on Africa and one on—maybe they have four, actually, if they have four, because they have one on LGBTQ, and then comics still. And they have had one on Africa that I attended, and one on Native American History.
Daniel Story
There were actually five state of the field sessions. And as of this recording, I’ve been able to sit down with four of them.
Ned Blackhawk
My name is Ned Blackhawk.
Don Romesburg
I’m Don Romesburg.
Jennifer Hart
I’m Jennifer Hart
Walter Greason
Good afternoon. My name is Walter Greason, and this is the state of the field…
Ned Blackhawk
For the study of Native America.
Don Romesburg
For LGBTQ+ History.
Jennifer Hart
For African History.
Walter Greason
For Graphic History.
Daniel Story
The idea is to produce a series of brief state of the field episodes that can be shared far and wide, and hopefully be useful to many more busy history teachers than could make it to this year’s meeting. And I do hope to grab time with someone from that fifth session on the state of the field of the American Revolution.
Katharina Matro
Those I feel like I exactly what I was saying at the beginning, what we should be doing at the AHA, which is bringing scholars together with teachers and having a conversation that’s not scholars talking down to teachers, but teachers telling the scholars what they need to know and what they don’t have enough of, and what they don’t understand, and what what the challenges are of implementing scholarship in the high school classroom. But then also just having easy access to the scholars, right? Like I just don’t have time to do comp exams on everything that I now teach, and I feel like as an ethical historian that’s technically what I should be doing so that I can teach it well. Just don’t have time. So essentially, it’s like a shortcut to getting as much knowledge and sort of feeling more comfortable with the different subjects that we teach. And this direct access, like following up with a question if you don’t understand something. And that I think can only happen at a conference, not even on a Zoom call or webinar or something. So those I love. Then any sort of workshop format where teachers get to talk, but also where it’s not just teachers in the room, but scholars and teachers and then exchanging, you know, strategies like, how do you deal with this? How do you deal with this? And I often see that it’s the teachers who are teaching at the college level who are actually really interested in hearing from about all the techniques that the teachers have to share.
Daniel Story
High school teachers?
Katharina Matro
Yeah, high school teachers, yes. So, so there’s like, actually exchange in both directions. And you see that at workshops, I think, more so than you would at like a classic panel, where, yes, the teachers come to listen to understand a particular topic better, and then hopefully bring it back to their classrooms. But when there’s an interaction about like, oh, have you tried this strategy or something that maybe a college level teacher has never tried because they haven’t been exposed to it, then there’s actually a two-way conversation happening. I love those too.
Daniel Story
So maybe next year you might consider attending the AHA annual meeting and navigating its many sessions, at least in part, with the idea of teaching history in mind. In the meantime, you can find many great teaching focused articles and resources on the AHA’s website, historians.org, as well as in the journal’s ongoing #AHRSyllabus series. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by me, Daniel Story. You can find out more about this and other episodes at historians.org/ahr. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
Show Notes
In this Episode
Jennifer Baniewicz (Amos Alonzo Stagg High School; Counselor on Teaching Division for the American Historical Association)
Katharina Matro (Social Studies Teacher at Walter Johnson High School)
Megan Porter (American Studies and Sociology Teacher; History Department Chair at Lenox Memorial Middle and High School)
Daniel Story (Host and Producer, UC Santa Cruz)
Music
By Blue Dot Sessions
Production
- Produced by Daniel Story