Ok, one more post related to National History Day projects. All my 9th and 10th graders are getting started with their research, so this has been at the center of my planning and resource creation for the past month.
At the end of last school year, I reached out to all the subject teachers on our 9th grade team to get a list of topic ideas that both connected to the NHD 2027 theme AND were being taught in their classes at some point this school year. I want my students to think more broadly about topic ideas and not find themselves getting stuck into the rut of more common history day topics. (I am considering banning projects on the history of vaccines this year…) Interdisciplinary connections make learning more fun and more contextual. Students need to see that content and skills are not isolated within our separate classrooms.
My colleagues sent me quite a few ideas, five of which made their way to my short list. I did some initial research, found primary sources, and wrote out a narrative for each topic. These narratives were woven with primary source quotes, the way any solid NHD project should be. I designed some simple posters to present these narratives and used them to get students brainstorming about the theme and how it can connect to different disciplines.
The topics were:
- Thomas Morgan and the Fly Room (Biology)
- Schrödinger and Scientific Inspiration (Biology)
- Kepler: Between Revelation and Proof (Math)
- The Poem that Solved the Cubic (Math)
- The Second Life of Henri Matisse (Art)
Each poster runs two pages. The discussion questions were intended to get students reflecting on connections to the theme, complexity in the narrative, and opportunities for argumentation. I think they turned out well for a first attempt at “seeding” project ideas in this way. Of course, each poster came with a short bibliography that illustrated my own research process. None of the students took the bait yet, but several 9th grade groups are still debating their final topic choice. There is still some hope!
There are a number of online databases, like Docs Teach from the National Archives, that curate primary source sets specifically for the annual NHD theme. These resources are genuinely useful. However, doing a bit of leg work on topics specific to my school’s 9th grade curriculum both opened up some connections with my colleagues that I really appreciated and modeled great collaboration to students.
I am taking any chance I can get to push History Day into other disciplines. I frequently hear how “Every teacher is a language teacher.” Maybe I can turn “Every teacher is a history teacher” into something that will catch on!
*No AI was used in the creation of these posters! It was Adobe InDesign. I’m sure there are typos in them as further evidence.