6.17.22 Projects, History and Sports

This week has been relatively eventful! Online issues with Canva and UCF enrollment were solved, I completed my second online media creation, and the NBA Finals and NHL Stanley Cup are in full swing! Well, were in the case of the NBA Finals. History is my favorite academic subject because it is universal - everything has a history. Historians can dive into any subject, object, style or activity - such as sports - to create meaningful discoveries and interpretations. Sport and society are closely linked to the point that the former often reflects the latter. A great example of this, and currently relevant (Juneteenth is a couple days away as of the writing of this blog post), is the role of sports in the Civil Rights movement. NBA stars like Elgin Baylor and Bill Russell contributed to breaking down the barriers of segregation on and off the court. The role of sports is an important factor to remember when discussing cultural history.

Onto the focus of this week! There have been some technical difficulties with the enrollment of our class, but those have (mostly) been solved. There are a lot of moving parts in academic administration, so understandably there will usually be a couple issues. Nonetheless, that hasn't stopped us from working on content for the History Lab. My effort this week has been focused on creating a guide to facilitating historical discussion. It's specifically intended to help students with facilitation assignments that involve searching for a relevant primary source, analyzing it, and then sharing it with peers to create a discussion. These can be quite difficult to first-timers, I definitely remember struggling with my facilitation, but they encourage the use of key skills necessary for any historian. I discussed this last week and showed some progress I made. This week I finished the guide, here it is in PDF form:

Facilitating Historical Discussion Guide.pdf

Download PDF • 29.70MB

And here it is as a direct link. I would have liked to create something more intuitive, but I think the powerpoint presentation style works best for an extended guide. I wanted to create a quick, informative guide that students can keep open and reference while working on their assignments. I didn't want to flood the reader's eyes with text so I tried to make it somewhat simple and straightforward, but still informative. The panels guide students to archives to search for sources, give basic analysis tips, and offer a practice and example source for students to use. I hope this little project fills a need for the History Lab and assists students with a difficult form of historical practice. That's all for this week!

Moore, Louis. "Black Athletes and the Civil Rights Movement." Uploaded January 9, 2019. African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). url: https://www.aaihs.org/black-athletes-and-the-civil-rights-movement/.