History

Dean Vesperman, History, presented "From Kerner to the Classroom: Using AI to Illuminate the Past and Shape the Future of Social Sciences " at the Social Science Education Consortium on Wednesday, June 18 in Detroit, MI. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to expand, the possibilities of its application to education grow exponentially and, if leveraged appropriately, has the potential to provide educators with a tool for renewing social science education. While AI can lead to a flood of new curriculum due to the timesaving affordances of generative AI, Clark and van Kessel (2024) have argued there has been little attention to the quality of the curriculum produced. We discovered that these lessons provided ample opportunities to discuss issues of power and oppression and did so through interesting activities. These activities provided various methods for students to explore issues of inequality and injustice in the past and present. The lessons encouraged teachers to use various strategies, including case studies, jigsaws, and various research projects. Next, we discovered that when the lessons did hint at Black futurism, it was often tied to activities that required students to take informed action. Lastly, as Clark and van Kessel predicted, we found problematic narratives.

Submitted on: June 18

Weixu Lu, Communication Studies, and Ariel Beaujot, History, presented "Serendipity and sustainability: The extended life of an urban location-based storytelling project" at 75th International Communication Association Annual Conference on June 12 in Denver, CO. This presentation featured Dr. Beaujot’s long-running Hear, Here La Crosse oral history project and its vital role in fostering a strong sense of place among local community members. Through the lens of urban communication, Dr. Lu and Dr. Beaujot examined the factors that contributed to both the successes and challenges of integrating this narrative initiative into K-12 education, community events, and even its unexpected adoption by local Pokémon Go players.

Submitted on: June 16

Dean Vesperman, History, co-authored the article "Keeping it Real: Confronting Controversy in the Classroom" in The Great Lakes Social Studies Journal published on Friday, May 9 by Michigan Council for the Social Studies. The ultimate goal of teacher education is to prepare students to be informed participant citizens in our democracy. A driving question that motivates our work is how to best prepare future secondary social studies teachers to teach about controversial or contentious issues in authentic ways. Keeping it real in the classroom necessarily includes the freedom to teach about the critical contemporary issues confronting our world and affecting our students’ lives. However, schools have become a barrier in the battleground for freedom of speech. This article focuses on how we used a simulation of a school board book ban and a structured academic controversy to help our teacher candidates explore teaching about controversial issues.

Submitted on: May 9

Dean Vesperman, History, presented "Conquering Machine Learning: How do We Improve AI-Generated Curriculum?" at UWL Research and Creativity Symposium on Friday, May 9 in La Crosse,. Presented with undergraduate researchers Terra Clark, Zach Powley, McKiley Green, and Audrey Langworthy, preliminary data on how to improve AI-generated curriculum. This poster presentation focused on analyzing AI-gen lessons about the Kerner Commission Report (1968) through the lens of Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind. Our research demonstrated that the lessons focus on a limited number of Frames: Linguistic, Interpersonal, and existential.

Submitted on: May 9

Gita Pai, History, authored the chapter "Activist Authors, Duty-Bound Arjuna, and Selfless Action in Early Indian Nationalism" in Mythologizing in South Asian Traditions: Myth, Gender, Power, and Politics published on May 1 by Palgrave Macmillan.

Submitted on: May 5