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 and book lists 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 started by Dolly Jorgensen, Nancy Langston and colleagues led an effort to collate the numerous excellent suggestions offered by our fellow twitterstorians. Nancy created this website and a group Zotero library, and many environmental historians have added diverse citations to the 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).
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).
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, (co-authored by Sara B. Pritchard, Brinda Sarathy, Lisa M. Brady, Kathleen A. Brosnan, Nancy Langston, Ann Norton Greene, Emily Wakild, Julie Cohn, Laura Alice Watt, Nancy J. Jacobs, Sara M. Gregg, and Sarah Elkind) 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 includes and 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, (co-authored by Sara B. Pritchard, Brinda Sarathy, Lisa M. Brady, Kathleen A. Brosnan, Nancy Langston, Ann Norton Greene, Emily Wakild, Julie Cohn, Laura Alice Watt, Nancy J. Jacobs, Sara M. Gregg, and Sarah Elkind) 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 includes and 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
The Zotero Library and Website were created Nancy Langston. Dolly Jorgensen's comment on a twitter discussion led to a series of initial suggestions, which David Fousey was kind enough to collate.
