Salutations readers! This week was relatively uneventful compared to previous weeks. The students are in the middle of the research cycle and their research paper due date is still a few weeks away. I'm also still working on instructional content that isn't quite finished yet, so there's not too much to discuss. Nonetheless, let's get into the blog!
Currently the students of my assigned History and Historiography section are (hopefully) hard at work gathering sources, researching, and constructing a working bibliography. I'm available for assistance, but I haven't been approached by students in this time. I'm going to assume they are handling the research process well! They should be capable of taking on the research process without much direct assistance - the History Lab provides plenty of resources, instructions and links to databases full of relevant sources. Perhaps when they enter the writing phase and start producing drafts they will ask for help. Until then there's not much I can do to help beyond the occasional email or instructive media content like infographics and presentation guides. Unfortunately I don't have any content ready to share yet, so that will have to wait until next week.
The students are not the only ones with a final project approaching! A major part of the public history summer internship involves a twenty minute presentation (over Zoom) at the end of the semester. This is a dual internship (although we cover different class sections) so my internship partner and I will present together. We're planning to meet over Zoom next week to figure out our presentation and hash out the details. The presentation mostly involves discussing our internship experience, and maybe showing off some of the instructional content we created along the way. The presentation will also involve a question and answer section at the end as well. I'm slightly nervous - I haven't done any public speaking since high school! I was a fairly proficient public speaker in high school after taking two years of speech and debate, but I'm worried my public speaking skills may have deteriorated since then. After my internship partner and I organize our presentation I'll need to practice presenting my pieces of the presentation.
That's all for this week! This was a really slow week with not much going on. That's not always a bad thing, it's nice to have some free time to read, reflect and prepare for the last few weeks. The weeks will definitely get faster as the end of the semester approaches - exciting times are coming up!