Remixing the Classroom: Community Archives, Wikis, and Revisionist History
Howard Zinn, author of the best selling People’s History of the United States, stood before 800 teachers at the National Council for Social Studies Conference in the winter of 2008. In his keynote address, Zinn talked about the intersection between teaching and activism in K-12 education. In “Remixing the Classroom: Community Archives, Wikis, and Revisionist History,” Carpio examines what an undergraduate classroom built on these principle might look like. Drawing from her recent collaborative article in the Journal of American History, Carpio details the Building People’s Histories project, its efforts to reaffirm history as a process in which the past must be narrativized, and its lessons for engaging students in this process. Semester long-engagement with off-campus organizations, complemented by digital media, offers a model for what a classroom based on a broadly conceived people’s history might mean for visions of liberatory praxis both within and beyond the classroom.
Genevieve Carpio, USC
Genevieve Carpio is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. Her work examines place and mobility as generative forces in the construction of racial categories in the Inland Empire from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. She is interested in the ways culture drives technology, methods for collaboration in a networked world, and the implications of emergent technologies for historians.