Time Traveler Directors Discuss Teaching with HGIS in a New Peer-Reviewed Article

Some people ask us how The Keweenaw Time Traveler (KeTT) can be used in the classroom or for teaching purposes. Answers have been provided in a recent volume of The History Teacher, an open-access academic peer-reviewed journal published by the Society for History Education. In the November 2019 issue, our own time travelers Sarah F. Scarlett, Don Lafreniere, and Daniel J. Trepal, collaborated with MTU Alumni John D. M. Arnold of the Keweenaw National Historical Park, and Yichun Xie of Eastern Michigan University to contribute an article that makes sense of the impact that Historical GIS (HGIS) is having on the way history is taught.

Read our article for free on The History Teacher website.

 History pedagogy, or the approach to teaching history, has been revolutionized by HGIS through instruction on spatial thinking skills, and enabling the concept of ‘community-engaged teaching’. Three case studies are described in the article, wherein faculty and graduate students engaged with local communities and heritage organizations by providing access to historical data in a GIS interface with community-led applications. Those involved in each example were not just able to review facts and statistics. They were able to view a landscape in history, while walking through it in the present, and they learned about the culture of their region while doing it.

     To learn more about the walk through Lake Linden using an HGIS map, which is discussed in the article, check out KeTT’s blog post from July 21, 2016. If you haven’t checked out the Keweenaw Time Traveler's Explore App yet, click here