I have attempted to do something similar in my YA time travel adventure book series, Edge of Yesterday. Although I am not a teacher, I am a student of history (and STEM and arts and storytelling) who works with teens frequently in my STEAM mentor programs. I have developed an online interactive "learning through story platform" that invites young people to time travel to periods of history where my stories take place: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Roaring 20s and the Harlem Renaissance, etc.) In the Time Travelers portal (https://edgeofyesterday.com/time-travelers), you can scroll down to "Discover New Worlds" and in that section you'll see where I've paired "great people" with their polymathic accomplishments. In the Renaissance, my teen protagonist Charley interviews Leonardo da Vinci, and Isabella d'Este, for example. In the Jazz Age, she interviews Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Zelda Fitzgerald, along with the forgotten-to-history but should be remembered Annie Nathan Meyer, a social activist and founder of Barnard College who was a many-times produced Broadway playwright (see the list of Charley's "heroes of history" here https://edgeofyesterday.com/time-travelers/discover/heroes.
There are some books yet to be written in the series, to cover The Atomic Age, for example. And I have just learned of a delicious acquaintance of TR who should be centered in what might become The End of the Frontier/The Progressive Age, Medora von Hoffman, a brilliant and colorful character and acquaintance of TR in his North Dakota days and whose name adorns the town that is gateway to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
I find that high school and college students I work with resonate when there's a relatable story that's attached to history.
They just need to remember that TR was a human being like anyone else, with his own share of triumphs, tragedies and disappointments. Even though he was one of the most influential men of the 19th and 20th centuries.
This is an effective way to teach relative to events or institutions or ideas or a sociological or macroeconomic data-y approach. Not all people have to be “Great Men” (or women). They can be movers and shakers but they can also be representative of their time in mundane ways. Or they can even be observers and sources more than participants. That last is particularly important for previous historical eras where we don’t have primary sources but mostly accounts written by historians. That also gets to problems of historiography. So yeah, I’d say to go for a people centric approach supplemented by events, institutions, ideas, and data. Plus lots of primary sources and example interpretive takes especially from contemporaries.
I have attempted to do something similar in my YA time travel adventure book series, Edge of Yesterday. Although I am not a teacher, I am a student of history (and STEM and arts and storytelling) who works with teens frequently in my STEAM mentor programs. I have developed an online interactive "learning through story platform" that invites young people to time travel to periods of history where my stories take place: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Roaring 20s and the Harlem Renaissance, etc.) In the Time Travelers portal (https://edgeofyesterday.com/time-travelers), you can scroll down to "Discover New Worlds" and in that section you'll see where I've paired "great people" with their polymathic accomplishments. In the Renaissance, my teen protagonist Charley interviews Leonardo da Vinci, and Isabella d'Este, for example. In the Jazz Age, she interviews Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Zelda Fitzgerald, along with the forgotten-to-history but should be remembered Annie Nathan Meyer, a social activist and founder of Barnard College who was a many-times produced Broadway playwright (see the list of Charley's "heroes of history" here https://edgeofyesterday.com/time-travelers/discover/heroes.
There are some books yet to be written in the series, to cover The Atomic Age, for example. And I have just learned of a delicious acquaintance of TR who should be centered in what might become The End of the Frontier/The Progressive Age, Medora von Hoffman, a brilliant and colorful character and acquaintance of TR in his North Dakota days and whose name adorns the town that is gateway to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
I find that high school and college students I work with resonate when there's a relatable story that's attached to history.
They just need to remember that TR was a human being like anyone else, with his own share of triumphs, tragedies and disappointments. Even though he was one of the most influential men of the 19th and 20th centuries.
This is an effective way to teach relative to events or institutions or ideas or a sociological or macroeconomic data-y approach. Not all people have to be “Great Men” (or women). They can be movers and shakers but they can also be representative of their time in mundane ways. Or they can even be observers and sources more than participants. That last is particularly important for previous historical eras where we don’t have primary sources but mostly accounts written by historians. That also gets to problems of historiography. So yeah, I’d say to go for a people centric approach supplemented by events, institutions, ideas, and data. Plus lots of primary sources and example interpretive takes especially from contemporaries.
History is so fun. 🤩