My teaching lives at the intersection of history, technology, and what we know about how students learn in the humanities. Over the past decade much of my undergraduate teaching has shifted to focus on giving my students the practical tools they need to translate their learning about the past into marketable job skills beyond the obvious choices available to the average history major. Courses I teach most regularly include: The Appalachian Trail (a digital public history course), Historical Methods (which I teach as a digital humanities methods course), Nationalism in Eastern Europe, The Digital Past (a university general education course), the capstone seminar for history majors, Digital Public History and Teaching History in the Digital Age, two courses in our online graduate certificate in Digital Public Humanities.
Among the awards I’ve received for my teaching innovation are:
I am proud to be the 2019 recipient of the Gutenberg Teaching Award from the University of Mainz. This award emphasizes, “the importance of academic instruction in the arts and sciences by honoring external national or international academics, artists, and others persons who have made significant contributions to the ongoing development of teaching and the improvement of teaching quality as a key factor in academic education.”
The State Council for Higher Education’s Outstanding Faculty Awards are the Commonwealth’s highest honor for faculty at Virginia’s public and private colleges and universities. These awards recognize superior accomplishments in teaching, research, and public service. I was the inaugural winner in the Teaching With Technology category in 2005.
In 1999, I was one of eight historians chosen by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to be a Pew National Fellow. This award launched me on the path of a career-long engagement with the scholarship of teaching and learning, an engagement that has transformed both my teaching and scholarship and resulted in a book and numerous articles on teaching and learning in history.
Outstanding teaching is an integral part of George Mason’s mission and the University’s Teaching Excellence Awards are both institutional recognition and a monetary acknowledgement of the significant work that faculty members devote to course planning and preparation; curriculum development; and innovative teaching, advising, and undergraduate and graduate mentoring. I won the Mason Teaching Excellence Award in 2005 for my work in improving general education at the university.