The main topic of my final project is Reevaluating the Progressive Era. The main goal is to teach students how to think historically, taking Progressive Era as an example and learn the methodology to examine a piece of primary source when they have one. The target audience is college students.
I plan to build a website using Omeka. Due to the limited time and the wide range of Progressive Era reforms, I will select a few reforms and focus on the primary sources of these reforms. I will make a decision on what reforms I would like students to work on after doing a search of primary sources. My original idea is girls’ education, women’s suffrage, racial relation and social welfare.
I will set up a few modules for my project.
- The first one is the methodology of thinking historically. Students will read articles.
- The second one is the brief history of Progressive Era, this includes texts, videos, pictures, government reports, newspapers etc.
- The third one is primary source reading which gives students the opportunity to practice historical thinking. I will select the primary sources for students to read, compare and contrast, and provide their own thought such as why they reach a certain conclusion. Students can also provide other primary sources the same topic to support their argument. This module will also include group work. Students will make presentations on their work and the class will provide peer review and discussion.
- The fourth module is teaching resources. In this module, there will be various things on the Progressive Era such as primary sources, the questions to explore, Internet links etc for future teaching of the Progressive Era or historical thinking. It is a complement to the project the students do in the first three modules. Ideally, there should be a part where students can do crowdsourcing but it needs a professional web engineer I guess.
