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Why Workshops Matter
Welcome to July! This month’s theme is Teaching Innovation (Workshops, Creativity, Pedagogy). I’ll cover why you should do workshops, how to design them, teaching while you are still learning, and creative teaching techniques. As you can tell, I’m a planner. When I first started this blog post, I called it ‘Why Do Workshops.’ Then I… →
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Read to Create Your Voice
When you write, you have decisions to make. First, find your voice. Developing a strong narrative voice takes time and practice. As you read, notice how writers influence you and help shape your scholarly identity. If you are reading to find gaps in the literature, you are already doing this, introducing an additional layer you… →
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The Anatomy of a Historical Narrative
History isn’t just what happened. It’s understanding how we make sense of what happened. Every historical narrative is constructed, layered, intentional, and shaped by the questions we ask. We love learning about the past, but we want to learn in a way we can connect with. We want a crafted story with a beginning and… →
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How to Read Your Semester Like a Story
The end of a semester always feels a little blurry. Finals are over, grades are posted, and suddenly everything that made you stress slips away. Before you shake it all off, pause. Look back and read the semester as if it were a story. See what the highlights were and what the lowlights were, so… →
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How Historians Turn Facts into Stories
Narrative Craft Historians are storytellers; they tell the past. They take facts and turn them into meaning. Historians interpret evidence in order to explain ideas, power, and people. Investigating the past is not easy, as you know, because it was written by the victors, but Historians keep digging. That’s not enough. We start with evidence,… →
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All Writing is Writing
It may not look the same, but it’s words to paper! Most of my weekly writing never ends up in essays, conference papers, or chapters. Half the time, it isn’t even academic; it consists of journal entries, long texts to friends, emails, teaching notes, and postcards or letters sent each Sunday as part of the… →
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Writing with AI
Without Losing Your Voice AI is a hot topic at universities and colleges everywhere. In the past six months, I’ve heard a history professor say, “AI is evil,” while a sociology professor said she loved that her students could use it. Both are right. AI can take over your voice, and it’s very obvious when… →
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How to Organize Your Essay Writing
An Undergraduate Guide. Writing is challenging. It does not matter who you are or what you do. Skilled writers can feel overwhelmed! As an undergraduate, you can’t always be perfect, but you can set yourself up for success. Writing can be hard. Frustration can stem from multiple classes, unclear instructions, procrastination, or perfectionism. And that’s… →
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Build a Sustainable Writing Routine
Routines are hard to establish, so creating a writing routine isn’t something you can decide to do one day and expect it to work instantly. Academic life is demanding and pulls you in different directions every day. Your writing routine needs to fit within that push-and-pull. For example, if today is Wednesday and you decide… →
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Conference Reflections
A Personal Update from SECOLAS In Fall 2018, I took a course called World War II: Germans/Lat Amer in Texas. In that small seminar, we built a series of interconnected papers and eventually submitted them to SECOLAS, where we presented them the following March in Oaxaca, Mexico. I’ve attended SECOLAS every year since—except for… →
Wendi Kavanaugh 