Charlotte, N.C. / April 14, 2021 - Dr. Marsha Rhee, associate professor of English, is a HistoryMakers 2020 Innovations in Pedagogy Teaching Fellowship Award recipient. She is the only educator from an HBCU represented in this fellowship.
“It was super exciting to receive this recognition because I have been serving on the teaching advisory board for the HistoryMakers database,” Rhee said. “The fellowship is designed to motivate professors, at universities that have subscribed to the HistoryMakers Digital Archive to actually use it in their classroom on a consistent basis. JCSU was tapped for this fellowship because of our high usage of the archives.”
The HistoryMakers Digital Archive provides a deep research and teaching resource for college curricula in a variety of disciplines, particularly in its applicability to the study of Black intellectual history, including ongoing research on the current state of Black Studies through case studies and the interdisciplinary study of the African American Experience.
“The fellowship is designed to motivate professors across the nation at universities that have subscribed to the HistoryMakers Digital Archive, to actually use the archive in their classroom on a consistent basis,” Rhee said.
The cohort of educators in this fellowship are working to develop lesson plans andcourse syllabi that heavily use the database as a central focus and shift how professors teach.
“As professors, we could do a whole lot more with the database,” Rhee added.
Rhee has been using the database in her classes since spring 2020 semester, but during the fall 2020 fellowship, she became more intentional of how she incorporated the database into her syllabus. Sixty-five student participants were tasked with creating mixtapes using interview clips from the database for a more hands on experience.
“Hands on learning is the way that I learned when I was in college. I feel like it's just a great way for people to get real world experience,” Rhee explained.