The Syllabus Project: Diversifying the Environmental History Syllabus
Bringing more women and people of color into our courses
Has anyone else noticed how often environmental history syllabi largely omit women and scholars of color? Let's all work to diversify our syllabi--it will strengthen our teaching, our scholarship, and our field. After a lively twitter discussion, several participants collated the numerous excellent suggestions offered by our fellow twitterstorians and created a group Zotero library.
Please feel free to use the excellent suggestions in this group library to enrich your syllabus and scholarship.
And help us gather more citations--you can add them directly to the Zotero library if you're a member of Zotero (click on the + icon). If you don't want to join Zotero, use the form here and we'll add it for you. Thanks!
We'll propose a roundtable at the ASEH 2019 conference in Ohio to help spread the word.
Please feel free to use the excellent suggestions in this group library to enrich your syllabus and scholarship.
And help us gather more citations--you can add them directly to the Zotero library if you're a member of Zotero (click on the + icon). If you don't want to join Zotero, use the form here and we'll add it for you. Thanks!
We'll propose a roundtable at the ASEH 2019 conference in Ohio to help spread the word.
Group Zotero Library: open for collaboration
What's Zotero? It's a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research. You can view the group library without joining Zotero--but to collaborate and really use the library, you will need to join Zotero. It's an amazing open source tool, created by digital humanists, that serves as an excellent PDF manager and bibliographic software. I can't imagine doing research without it. To register for a free account, click here. To learn more about Zotero, visit their home page. Harvard has a good library guide to using Zotero here. If you do join Zotero, I'd strongly suggest installing it in your browser or downloading the standalone app. Both are free, and both work very well to manage citation databases. For example, adding each citation to the Zotero group with the standalone app took me about 10 seconds per citation.
Suggestions for additional entries?
You can add them directly if you're a Zotero user (much faster!), or you can go to this form on the suggestions page and we'll add them each week.
Syllabi Examples
Call for Diversified Syllabi and Reading Lists
As highlighted in the recent op-ed in Inside Higher Ed, written by a group of WEHN’s founding members, work by women and BIPOC remains undercited, undercredited, and underrecognized in our field. To help change that, the Women’s Environmental History Network is joining with The Syllabus Project to call for diversified syllabi and reading lists that incorporate traditionally marginalized perspectives and authors. We understand that creating syllabi involves substantial intellectual labor, so some folks might want to share reading lists rather than full syllabi. If you have a reading list or syllabus for a course in environmental history – any level or specialization – that you’re willing to share, we want to see it!
Send your list or syllabus to srhamilton@auburn.edu. If you’d like, include a note about how and why you broadened the voices it includesand what some of your outcomes have been. All submitted syllabi will be posted on the WEHN and Syllabus Project websites, where other scholars will access them for inspiration in course design, research, graduate exams, and more.
Help us to change the focus of teaching, learning, and scholarship in new generations of historians; to elevate a greater diversity of voices, scholarship, and experiences; and to establish a new definition for “canonical” environmental history.
As highlighted in the recent op-ed in Inside Higher Ed, written by a group of WEHN’s founding members, work by women and BIPOC remains undercited, undercredited, and underrecognized in our field. To help change that, the Women’s Environmental History Network is joining with The Syllabus Project to call for diversified syllabi and reading lists that incorporate traditionally marginalized perspectives and authors. We understand that creating syllabi involves substantial intellectual labor, so some folks might want to share reading lists rather than full syllabi. If you have a reading list or syllabus for a course in environmental history – any level or specialization – that you’re willing to share, we want to see it!
Send your list or syllabus to srhamilton@auburn.edu. If you’d like, include a note about how and why you broadened the voices it includesand what some of your outcomes have been. All submitted syllabi will be posted on the WEHN and Syllabus Project websites, where other scholars will access them for inspiration in course design, research, graduate exams, and more.
Help us to change the focus of teaching, learning, and scholarship in new generations of historians; to elevate a greater diversity of voices, scholarship, and experiences; and to establish a new definition for “canonical” environmental history.
About Us
This project was sparked by Dolly Jorgensen's comment on a twitter discussion about EH syllabi. Nancy Langston created the website and the Zotero group, and Davey Fousey collated the many suggestions in the twitter link. On the suggestions page, you can find Nancy and Davey's emails if you wish to email us.
