Enough About Me: Social Networks as Teaching Support

Table laden with laptops, phones, and stationery items. By Marvin Meyer on Unsplash.

There are a few really good gifts we can give ourselves in life, and one of them is learning how and when to seek out advice. Social media offers a lot of opportunities to do this with relatively low investment: we throw our question, minor or major, out into the world and see who might be willing to try answering it.

I was inspired to think on this when both I and a colleague of mine posted teaching related questions on Facebook within a few weeks of one another. I appreciated all the suggestions for video games that deal with American history that I had received in response to my query. When fellow Illinois PhD student in History Taryn Vaughn asked a question online about helping students build vocabulary, I noticed the variety and quality of answers she received and contacted her to chat about social media as a tool for teaching support. We decided to share our thoughts in a blog post (her words are italicized throughout). Along the way, I reached out (in a Facebook status, naturally) to see what others might be moved to say on the topic. So, join us in taking a break from scrolling to consider some benefits of the Internet Ask:

It gives you variety

Personal networks are extremely powerful, and it's likely that (despite constant fretting that we all live in monocultural echo chambers) you have connections to people with a broad variety of experiences. Asking for teaching help online has the potential to draw a wider variety of respondents than you would asking around your department/workplace/family mansion, especially if you're trying to find unexpected sources or ideas. I recently used Facebook to ask about video games that deal with historical subjects for the course I'm planning and was pleasantly surprised at the flood of useful responses I received-- some from other historians, some from people I hadn't talked to since high school. Taryn appreciated this aspect of the Internet Ask: "Any of my friends or followers or what have you can see my post so I can get advice from that friend who’s studying law, from that one high school teacher I haven’t thought of in years, from that poet friend I haven’t seen in a while, all without having to specifically search them out." This variety of respondents helped me feel as though I wouldn't miss anything that would seem too glaring to the students-- I'd hate to have my class say halfway through the semester "Why didn't you pick this game for our class, it would have been perfect!" and have to respond "Uh, because I live under a rock and have never heard of that one."

The variety of respondents to a query can result in a corresponding variety in the answers offered, which can be useful not only for getting a big pool of ideas in order to pull out a few, but also for situations in which you want to be able to show students a variety of options. Kateri Smith, a foster care specialist at the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, has used social media to accumulate a variety of responses to questions she later asked as part of trainings for teenagers in foster care: "A lot of what I do is about getting kids to think in an out of the box way about big, emotional subjects like family, success, & healing. When I first created the curriculum for one of the sessions, I asked people the same questions I would later ask the teens. This gave me a great variety of answers from different demographics so I could put some on a worksheet to demonstrate how not-black-and-white the topics could be. I think it was really important that the teens could see how people from across the country of different ages, races, and backgrounds had dealt with some of the things they were feeling." Students are wide-ranging, and can benefit from an instructor's attention to and appreciation of that truth.
 

…But not too much variety

Conversely, social media appeals for information can be limited in useful ways. I've occasionally participated in a Facebook group designed for instructors who use Reacting to the Past games in their classrooms to ask questions and to share tips, which not only keeps the secret twists and turns of each game from public eyes but also connects me to people guaranteed to have at least SOME idea of what I'm talking about. Using groups can also save you some time and effort by cutting down on extraneous advice. Sarah Morice Brubaker, Assistant Professor of Theology at Phillips Theological Seminary, uses a Facebook group to post her questions in order to maximize useful suggestions and minimize unhelpful comments. "Even though not all of the suggestions offered would work in my own classes -- because of theological perspective of the school, grad v. undergrad, and other norms specific to the institution -- I find it a lot more helpful putting an appeal there than putting out an appeal to Facebook or Twitter at large. Especially Facebook. There's a small but enthusiastic share of my Facebook friends who seem derive pleasure from giving advice the way a beagle dog derives pleasure from barking. And, er, it tends not to matter to them whether they have the requisite knowledge base or experience to offer useful advice." So, for specialized questions or if you just need a few good answers, groups can be a great way to limit responses. 

Others can see it

When you put a question out into the big wide world (or the small limited group), others can also benefit from seeing the post. I think this is especially useful for making what we do as teachers reach wider audiences. It draws broader attention to the topic being discussed-- you never know who on your friends list might decide to pick up a book or check out a website because of someone's suggestion. It demystifies the teaching prep process: no, the curriculum doesn't all come out of a textbook-- we're working to make it here, together, right now! It also helps other teachers, as Taryn notes firsthand: "I’ve posted on Facebook asking for advice on a specific teaching issue in the hopes of getting a wide variety of different perspectives on the problem. Before actually posting myself, though, I also saw my other teaching friends post their own questions on Facebook. I found it really useful to read the responses that people gave them. Sometimes the questions and answers spoke to questions I already had, but had not yet asked, sometimes they spoke to issues I hadn’t even considered before, but either way, seeing what other teachers are asking and the solutions their Facebook friends provide is just as useful to me as posting a question myself."

It gives you confidence

Taryn noted something that I hadn't appreciated: perhaps paradoxically, asking others for advice in this way can help you to trust your own instincts. As she put it, "I think the most valuable thing that I’ve gotten from social media in this regard is the advice that actually confirmed ideas that I had already had. When someone recommends something that I had already considered doing, it helps me trust my own instincts as an instructor. I’ve only just started teaching and before I reached out on social media, I felt paralyzed by my own lack of experience. I had no idea what I was doing. I had ideas, sure, but how was I supposed to know if they were any good? I convinced myself that they probably weren’t. Then I asked my Facebook friends and while some pointed me to resources that I had never heard of or considered, many of my friends suggested the very ideas that had been floating around in my head. 
Furthermore, just the simple act of asking for advice helped me to start thinking of solutions to my own question. It was as if putting the question out there helped me to separate myself from the problem and view it more objectively, whereas before, my fear of personal failure had stopped me from even wanting to think about it."
 

You can ask about almost anything without figuring out who to ask

There are some times when you want specific answers to a question. What games relate to US history between 1600 and 1920? That's a pretty rigid boundary. But other times, you're thinking broadly, or you're not sure what kind of responses you want. Maybe you want to get a sense of what other people think about a topic or a genre of thing. Maybe you have a question for which you know there is no solid, single answer, or maybe it's on a topic that you know so little of that you don't even know who might know of good answers.

None of that matters in the Internet Ask! It's your rodeo. Ask away. Any of these kinds of questions have the potential to be answered. Taryn notes that she thinks she'll continue to use social media for teaching questions and may in the future expand from more specific queries to murkier, harder-to-approach questions: "The last time I was looking for resources (like apps or websites) and/or class activities to help students improve their vocabulary. What I didn’t ask in my last post, but what I think I’ll ask about in my next one if I can figure out how to word the question, is how to structure a class that I myself will be comfortable leading. Newbie that I am, I’m not really sure what my teaching style will or should be when I attempt for the first time to teach history. It’s not simply that I’m not sure how to help my future students understand the material (though that is certainly one of my concerns). My question is: how can a pretty introverted and shy person like me engage students without exhausting my limited social endurance? How do I structure a class that draws on my strengths instead of preying on my weaknesses? I want to teach in a way that’s sustainable for me, and in a way that allows both outgoing and shy students to learn and participate."
 

It can lead you in directions you didn't expect

I'll conclude with a brief recounting of both my and Taryn's experiences at seeking teaching advice from social media, which should illustrate the broad pathways for action that this can open and reinforce some of the other benefits mentioned above.

When I asked for video games, I got suggestions from a wide variety of comers. I looked up several of these and decided to add one or two to my syllabus (it's still in flux, as it will be until the moment of truth on day 1, probably-- there's always something that could be BETTER, right?). However, another of the suggestions I hadn't yet played. Assassin's Creed III had been on my Steam wishlist for some time, but it had not been on sale. I had already been in touch with a librarian about the gaming initiative for the final game of the course, Valiant Hearts. So I was aware of the existence of the gaming center, but hadn't yet been down there. My curiosity led me to find the disc (on a separate floor of the library); bring it back to the gaming center; check out the key to the gaming center, the Xbox controller, and the headphones; put it all together-- and sit and wait for the Xbox to download some necessary piece of the game. I never did get to play Assassin's Creed III that day. But I did learn how to use the gaming center, and prepare students for any issues that might arise when they try to use it to play Valiant Hearts or any other games I might assign in future. (And Assassin's Creed III went on sale on Steam just a few weeks later-- kismet!) Even though I likely won't assign that particular game due to time constraints, the suggestion led me in a helpful direction that I couldn't have predicted.
 
Says Taryn: "The last time I asked for advice on social media, I was able to cobble together a workable teaching style from the varied advice I got. I had asked about vocabulary building and most of my friends stressed the importance of context. Students need to see words in context, they need to use words in context. One of my Facebook friends, who also stressed the need for context, is a Spanish teacher at my former high school. When he commented on my post it reminded me of the Spanish class I took in my junior year of high school. Every day our teacher would come to class with a list of vocabulary words or structures (phrases that highlighted different grammatical rules) and we would use them to make up stories. Each student would get a turn to speak and sentence by sentence, we would create a story, usually ridiculous, using the vocabulary for the day.
 
I decided to take that strategy and modify it for my own purposes. Instead of a spoken exercise, like it had been in my Spanish class, I turned it into a written one. I made note of the words that my students had difficulty with, and the next day I came with a list of words, announcing that we would write stories, no matter how ridiculous, using that day’s vocabulary. I wrote too, [which] allowed me to warm up each day to the prospect of speaking in front of a crowd because writing and reading my own silly stories for them was somehow less terrifying than just talking. It allowed me to show them my personality and allowed them to show me theirs. It gave the outgoing ones a chance to share and the shy ones a chance to participate without exposing themselves to scrutiny. And it was everyone’s favorite class activity.
 
I never would have thought to do it if my high school teacher hadn’t commented on my post, and I never would have thought to ask him for advice otherwise… the fact that social media allows you to address many different people from many different backgrounds all at once is its biggest strength. If I had limited myself to what I could pick up in the TA office, I wouldn’t have hit on a strategy that suited both me and my students."

Have you used social media to help your teaching, or have you learned anything from others' queries?

Current Project: Fictionalizing West of the Revolution

Book cover of Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution.

For many, the most immediate contact one has with history is in fiction. I'm currently solidifying the syllabus for what will be my fall course, Fiction and the Historical Imagination: Fictionalizing US History, 1620-1920. The course will focus on some of the lingering mythologies of American history and the ways these are explored in fiction. I've mentioned before my intention to use Hamilton as material for this class, even as I've shifted the course theme a couple of times. Hamilton emphasizes the centrality of the American Revolution to myths of American history and identity while rearranging some of our ideas about what that big moment looked like and who the players were. But for every history that's been made into part of a founding myth, there are many that have rarely been considered at all, let alone given a fictional treatment. In this post, I'll explore the companion piece to the discussion of the American Revolution in my course: an assignment which will ask students to create contrasting historical fictions of 1776.

I didn't always realize this assignment would involve a creative element. As a teaching assistant at the Center for Talented Youth this summer, I watched my students take on a variety of creative projects related to the theme of the course, Politics and Film, all orchestrated by experienced instructor Jess Wilton. I was pleasantly surprised at what they were able to accomplish in a limited period of time, and on my return home I came to an epiphany--  In a course about the ways in which history is fictionalized, where we will gather to talk about the responsibilities and possibilities inherent in using fiction to make arguments about these larger-than-life mythological pasts, why would we not take a moment to create historical fictions of our own?

Our inquiry will use Claudio Saunt's text West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776. This great resource for expands the story of the American Revolution, providing an engaging, complicated view of the year 1776 in disparate parts of what would one day become the US. The book has many features of interest to discussions of history and memory-- I particularly enjoyed the brief reflections on historical memory at the beginning, in which the author notes that a giant cake he remembered as part of the national bicentennial celebration turned out to be, upon further research, actually related to a far more local event, the bicentennial of the city of San Francisco (12-13). I look forward to discussing with students this fall the ways our memories of history are so eager to fit themselves into the most dominant narrative touchstones.

One of the key appeals of this text for this project is the way that Saunt uses stories of an individual or group as a framing device for each chapter in order to personalize his geographically far-flung story. The book links Russian projects in Alaska, Spanish missions in California, and expeditions across the Great Basin as inciters of and responses to one another; pieces in a variety of efforts to control as much of the vast territory as possible. These broad themes are made manageable by each chapter's focus on an individual or group affected-- a group of seven Aleuts journeying on a Russian ship from Alaska to Yakutsk; Diego, a in indigenous man imprisoned at a Spanish mission in southern California-- who appear in the historical records but many details about whom we-- and he-- can only guess.

This emphasis on small stories of individuals makes it particularly well suited to students' dabbling in making their own historically-informed fictions. Immediately, we've got a few characters to play with when we begin thinking about how to transform this history into a different kind of narrative. Perhaps more importantly, Saunt proves himself willing to guess at possibilities and draw information out of seemingly minor players in Eurocentric records and make them central to the analytical and emotional crux of the argument. His transparency in doing so gives students a blueprint for how they and other writers of historical fiction can do the same.

Here's my lesson plan for this project, based around our fifty minute class period three times per week:

Day 0:

Divide class into 4 groups. Each reads the introduction to Saunt's book and one chapter from the first half of the book.

Day 1:

First 10 minutes of class: Group discussion on the introduction. What is Saunt's mission in this book?

Last 40 min: Groups get together and discuss their chapter with one another.

1st half: What happened in this chapter? Why is it important?

2nd half: Begin brainstorming an outline or draft of a fictional take on the history you've read.

Questions to consider:

What form should it take (Novel? Musical? Video game?)

What is the genre? (Comedy? Drama? Horror?)

Who are the characters?

What is the plot?

Homework: Create a draft or an outline of this fiction in consultation with your group. 

Day 2:

1st 10 min: Groups meet and tie up loose ends in the first version of their piece (draft/outline).

2nd 20 min: Split groups and create new groups with mix of people from each group.

Compare notes:

What is your fiction about?

What choices have you made about what to put in and what to exclude? How did you determine this?

3rd 20 min: Regroup. What did you learn, and how can you use it in your fiction?

Homework: Revise the draft/outline based on what you've learned. Distribute pieces to class.

Day 3: Share with one another.

1st 10 min: Quick 2 minute introductions to works from each group.

2nd 20 min: Exploring the drafts. Students will read, play, or otherwise examine what other groups have created.

3rd 20 min: Sharing analysis of the works as a class.

Discussion questions:

What did you learn?

What is the historical narrative?

What is emphasized and what is downplayed from the chapter?

Some of the challenges I anticipate with this plan relate to the relatively limited amount of knowledge students will have about the chapters outside of the one they have read, potentially making it difficult for them to evaluate other groups' fictions. However, I also think that this serves as an opportunity to motivate students to consider the fact that this is frequently the case in historical fictions-- rarely are historians the intended audience for a historical film. When developing their fictions, then, each group should be thinking about the fact that they will be introducing a topic to an audience that doesn't have the benefit of the exact knowledge they possess about it. I look forward to trying out  this lesson plan in less than two months!

Do you have any favorite resources on 1776 or historical fiction? 

Related Links:

An episode of the podcast Ben Franklin's World, in which Saunt discusses the events depicted in his book. 

A Chicago Tribune review of West of the Revolution.