TEACHING PORTFOLIO: MEGAN THOMPSON
HIST 532 WORLD HISTORY SELECTED TOPICS: AZTEC, INCA, AND MAYA
Secondary Source Artifacts and Reflection
READING RESPONSE
In the first week of the course, graduate students read "Methodological Challenges of Ethnohistory" regarding the status of ethnohistory and the struggle that historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and other scholars have in collecting artifacts and drawing accurate conclusions about the people who may have created them. In applying western values like the importance of centrality or borders, for example, researchers might ascribe status inaccurately to the items they uncover. This work laid the foundation for critical interpretation of secondary sources, but also to consider my own inherent cultural biases when examining primary sources.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION
In order to examine the way in which different people interpret a similar set of events, students read a number of articles, some from secondary texts, others from newspapers, and others from history magazines regarding Christopher Columbus and his legacy. Students carry this information into a class discussion regarding Columbus' contributions, both positive and negative, to the lives of the indigenous people that he encountered and the legacy that he left. It helps students to understand the importance of skepticism and cultural bias, reinforcing understanding of historical complications and of life in MesoAmerica.
RESEARCH ESSAY
The culminating activity for a four-week unit studying the pre-Columbian Maya was to select a topic discussed in the primary text and research scholarly secondary sources to develop a thesis regarding an aspect of life among the Maya. My research considered the relationship between maize and political authority in Maya culture, bringing in sources from a variety of academic journals to create an argument regarding the centrality of maize to Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic Maya.
REFLECTION
I really appreciated the article on ethnohistory as a way to frame a course on the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas. It helped me to be skeptical of sources and appreciate when authors acknowledge the complicated nature of reporting what they "know" about the history of a people whose written documentation has largely been destroyed with time. This work helped me consider how I could bring in this important skepticism for my high school students in an approachable way. For world history, I thought that helping them to re-examine their misconceptions about Columbus would push their critical thinking. I hold a Socratic seminar on Christopher Columbus in both my AP World History and regular World History classes, and it is a strong reflection of this distinction: in regular world history, students vilified Columbus, the articles they read shocking them into a 180-degree turn from their previous beliefs; in AP World, however, students had more nuanced conversations regarding historical context, changing social mores, and the impact that, for example, Italian-American pride plays into Columbus’ role in American history. What I’m working on is how to help my lower-level students develop this same kind of thinking that moves away from the black and white toward the unanswerable but discussion-worthy questions of history’s gray areas.