SCHC 422 H01 26058

HistoryCiv, GHS

Notes:

** GHS, U.S. History**History Outside is course about finding America by getting lost in it. It is an “experiential” class with three parts. One part is a “traditional” history course in which students will study people who have tried to find America—and themselves—by dropping out, hitting the road, taking to the trail, setting up on the frontier, and/or becoming part of the wilderness. A second part involves students studying the history of a specific place or route – in this semester, the incredibly diverse, 400-mile Palmetto Trail. The third part involves students themselves taking to the road (or path) on foot and by bicycle. Using hands-on approaches, students will document their experience there through writing, audio recording, and/or filming, immersing themselves in the cultural landscape and built environment to tell their own story about the history of that place and their time in it. Students will develop an archive of their research and use it to produce their own historically focused written travel narrative or historically focused podcast. Students will learn about aspects of public history, oral/documentary history, environmental history, architectural history, historic preservation, cultural landscapes, histories of race and ethnicity, and the specific histories of the places explored.  The course is inclusive. It does not require any experience in the outdoors, and it is open to students regardless of their physical abilities, mobility challenges, or other limitations.] Course assignments: Students will be writing non-fiction (mostly) stories, and the big idea is for them to produce travel narratives/documentary stories for a book/book idea called Finding America Along the Palmetto Trail.  This class is a storytelling class that requires students not just to get out of their comfort zone, but to reconceptualize what that zone actually is. It is for students who like/want to be writers or documentary storytellers, whether visual, audio, written, or all of them as multimedia. Part of the course will have students experiment with multimedia documentary history, and at least one assignment will have students develop a documentary podcast. SCHC first year history majors or humanities students would likely thrive in the class.