Exhibits as Storytelling

Exhibits as Storytelling is a series of three scaffolded group assignments that provide students with opportunities to engage in exploration of history as storytelling.

The goal is to explore the way story-telling can bridge the gap between academic and public/popular history, to use primary sources – documents, images, perhaps even sound – to illuminate some of the key topics and issues in American history and to help to link the past to the present. The tools for the series of assignments, including and most especially the textbook, are all open source. The stories crafting in these assignments may be made available to the public. Students will also reflect on what goes into collecting/collections, including permissions, copyright and open source licensing.

The completed exhibits for each class become models of storytelling for successive classes. Successive students will be encouraged to retell the stories of previous students from different perspectives. This is a core objective related to critical thinking across the curriculum.

This project was supported by a grant from the Designing with OER (DOER) Fellows grant program