Averill is an advocate of kinetic, impactful, and project-based pedagogies. She uses a range of digital technologies in my classrooms, from Slack to the Google Suite, to audio and video editing software. She uses Reacting to the Past immersive gameplay, and designs her own role playing activities for use in courses. She regularly Tweets about her pedagogical classroom experiments. She's led workshops and professional development seminars on these topics and more.
Courses Taught
Intros
History Detectives (Historical Methods)
World History to 1500
World History from 1500 to the present
Mid-Levels
Middle Eastern History
Decolonization
20th Century Europe through Film
Victorian Britain
History of Ireland
Global Masculinities
Sex in Modern History
Reacting To The Past: French Revolution
Upper-Levels
Russian Film
History & Memory of the Holocaust
War, Sex & Violence in 20th Century Europe
Digital History
DH: 101 to 3.0
DH: Storytelling
DH: Documentary Filmmaking
Faculty-Led Study Abroad
Crime & Punishment in Modern Ireland
Impactful Learning Experiences
In May 2018, Averill's History & Memory of the Holocaust course included a field trip to Washington DC for an intensive study weekend at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her 2018 class piloted this new experience facilitated by the USHMM, which included a special guided tour, meeting with two Holocaust survivors to hear their stories, listening to a lecture from W. Jake Newsome, PhD, and time processing and discussing the history, memory, and memorialization of the Holocaust. On the left the class is pictured with Dr. Gideon Frieder, who graciously shared his story with the class; on the right is a picture of some of the students who took advantage of their free time in the city to visit other DC museums.
In January 2019 Averill led a group of 18 students with colleague EmmaLeigh Kirchner to Ireland, for a 9-day exploration of Dublin, Galway, and Belfast, in conjunction with their Fall 2018 courses on the history and the contemporary conditions of crime, policing, and imprisonment in Ireland.
Digital Public History
As a digital public historian, Averill both models good practices of the field through her podcast and collaborative history blog work, and instructs students in methods and modes of digital public history engagement. She developed a three-course Digital History series - Digital History: Storytelling, DH: 101 to 3.0, and DH: Documentaries - where she focuses exclusively on digital history methodologies. Students have produced podcasts, built digital museums, written essays for publication consideration at popular history blogs, edited and created Wikipedia pages, blogged about course material, produced short documentaries (like the two below), and created collaborative Google maps using archives like the Old Bailey online.
Her digital history courses are project-based, but she also employs these assignments - non-traditional assignments where students have to produce quality research in clear, effectively written and precise oral communication - in most of her courses. The digital skills students learn are essential to their success beyond my classroom, and they are generally more engaged and invested in these projects than in traditional research papers. Framing a traditional research paper as one they must write accessibly, for a public audience, to submit to a blog like Nursing Clio, changes the way they approach the task. These methods are effective pedagogically, but also satisfying for the students.
Students in Spring 2017 Digital History: Storytelling class researched, wrote, recorded, and produced podcasts for our class show "Hurstories."
Spring 2019 was the first run of Digital History: Documentaries course, where students watched, evaluated, and contemplated examples of other filmmakers' work, and then made films of their own, learning (by doing) Adobe Premiere Pro, and exploring the historical roots of current issues/problems. Here are two of the final products.