The objective of a history educator involves using film to guide students toward deeper engagement with historical construction and representation while avoiding simple date memorization. Film is a practical entry point for this work because it presents interpretations of historical events. Through classroom film screenings students learn to question narrative content and how different perspectives affect storytelling and what influences and evidence shape these narratives. These are all central to historical inquiry.

The historical drama Iron Jawed Angels represents an effective educational tool I would use to teach about women’s suffrage in the United States. The story of Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt serves as the main focus of this historical film. The story integrates contemporary storytelling methods, creating beneficial contrasts between historical elements and modern presentation techniques. The conflicting aspects between past and present content are what I want students to investigate. What motivated filmmakers to select their particular storytelling approach? Which elements does the film show and which parts does it omit? The film includes specific elements that direct our interpretation of the suffrage movement. The assignment pairs the film with authentic historical documents, including suffragist letters, newspaper articles, and political cartoons. The assignment allows students to assess visual representations against historical records to determine source reliability and intentional use.

I choose The Young Victoria and Suffragette to represent British history in my teaching. These films provide multiple chances to examine how the monarchy, political reforms, and women’s political empowerment appear in history. The film depicts Queen Victoria’s beginning years as monarch while exploring constitutional monarchy and royal court politics and the social dynamics of power based on gender. This film will trigger classroom discussions about the boundaries of royal power, image creation, and marriage as a political tool. This film shows how working-class women were central to the Edwardian suffrage movement. The movie demonstrates the conflicting forces between social status and political activism and gender identity. Students can analyze political power struggles through time and class by examining these films with parliamentary debates, protest literature, and contemporary newspaper accounts.

I see scholarly digital storytelling as a teaching method that empowers students to comprehend the interpretive elements of historical research. Through tools like StoryMapJS, TimelineJS, Omeka, and making videos like we viewed,  students develop skills to gather sources and create narratives while considering how the project format affects meaning production. Digital stories demand that students consider audience needs while building structure, accessibility features, and visual communication techniques. The process requires that students establish their key points and determine which information to remove while developing their material arrangement to demonstrate their historical argument.

Students studying Victorian Britain would develop digital exhibits or videos about pet ownership in their coursework. Students could analyze the representation of pets through newspaper articles and maps to explore their relationship with social class, gender norms, and imperial culture. Through this work, students would practice their abilities to conduct close readings and analyze sources while interpreting historical information. Through this experience, students would master digital competence, creative skills, and learning to present information effectively to public audiences. Such skills provide essential capabilities to anyone who aims to present historical content to broad public audiences.

Through their film and digital storytelling exploration, students gain awareness about the changing nature of historical records. Historical information is a dynamic system that depends on interpretive choices made during construction. The chosen methods enable students to investigate narrative development processes as they learn to develop their interpretive work. This is what I want to cultivate in the classroom. Knowledge acquisition about past events takes place alongside developing expertise regarding constructing that historical understanding.

After taking some time to consider deeply what I wanted to accomplish with my project in terms of the audience, I have thus begun to research and create some artifacts. Since I did my public history project for my last class on a similar subject, I am thinking of ways of creating a distinction between this project and the previous project. I can most likely use a few sources from that project, but ultimately, I want this project to be completely independent of the previous project.
In terms of research, I have been using various websites such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Collection Trust, the British Library, and the British Newspaper Archive to find various sources that allow me to narrow my focus a bit. I have primarily been examining primary sources such as images, paintings, etchings, and newspaper articles. This is not set in stone and can change often as the research leads me to another direction. The main question I have right now is what themes I want to pursue and categories that can and do relate to the viewers. This has been my challenge thus far, as I know pets and class is one category, but the others have not been fleshed out as much. In terms of challenges, it has just been how to make this project distinct from previous work and how I can create something different and unique. This should not be difficult; it just requires me to think more creatively since I want more interactive features. My next steps are to continue finding sources and exploring themes that fit into the larger narrative. The themes are the largest factor I need to figure out, and that will be my main goal moving forward. I also hope to create the framework for the exhibit in Omeka just so I have an idea of what everything will look like.

Below is one of the images I have collected thus far. I chose this image because it was not only drawn by the famous author Beatrix Potter, but it highlights the significance of pets as part of the family. This image depicts a rabbit lying on a rug, which highlights the place of the pet in the household and that pets can be more than just dogs and cats. As for the questions I want the students and viewers to answer, the first is: What is the significance of this drawing? What does this picture tell us about pet ownership during the Victorian era? What does the enclosure the rabbit is in tell us about care or affection for the animal? Similar questions about the origin of the drawing, who drew it, and how this affects the image should also be considered. In terms of how I will assist their analysis, I will provide them with the metadata and key relevant information that assists the viewers with context and significance. This drawing provides one piece in the larger picture that each exhibit teaches and shows the viewer the larger argument.

Now that I have had more time to reflect on my initial project ideas and think more carefully about how to teach others, particularly upper-level undergraduate students and members of the general public, about the past, I am seeing the digital possibilities of this project more clearly. My focus remains on pet ownership in Victorian Britain, a topic deeply tied to my dissertation research. However, my understanding of how digital tools can shape historical learning and interpretation has evolved.

Originally, I was torn between creating a digital exhibit using Omeka or designing a role-playing game that would allow users to inhabit the perspective of a historical actor trying to purchase and care for a pet. What I have since realized is that the most effective digital tools are those that help users actively engage with historical thinking. This means prioritizing interactivity, source interpretation, and ease of access. Even if I do not move forward with a fully developed game, I now see that incorporating game-like components into the structure of an exhibit will allow me to meet my goals while keeping the project manageable and user-friendly.

Regarding my target audiences, the best way to help them engage with digital media is through the integration of visual primary sources such as paintings, advertisements, and historical photographs. When the general public can see what they are reading about, it not only brings the past to life but also supports deeper comprehension. In a project about pet ownership, seeing historical animals and their human companions helps establish emotional and contextual connections. For students, these images can become points of entry for more analytical activities, like asking why certain breeds were popular or how pets were used to reflect class identity.

I also plan to use a timeline to orient users chronologically, which is especially helpful for those unfamiliar with the period. In addition, I am now thinking more intentionally about including question-based interactive elements. These might involve source comparison activities, classification challenges based on class or species, or reflective questions tied to specific items in the exhibit. The goal is to help students and public users alike move beyond simply consuming content to actively engaging with historical evidence and interpretation.

The biggest influence on my design choices moving forward will be usability. If I want the general public to explore this work meaningfully, the project must be intuitive and easy to navigate. This realization has shifted my project away from a complex digital game and toward a structured exhibit that incorporates the openness and critical thinking of a game within a more accessible format. In other words, I am not abandoning the idea of interaction but adapting it to work within a platform that will be more widely usable.

This shift has helped clarify my final project goals. I now envision an Omeka-based digital exhibit built around thematic sections such as“Pets and Class”  and various other themes. Ultimately, I want users to leave the site having not only learned about Victorian pets, but also having practiced historical thinking in a way that is visual, interactive, and inclusive.

One of the many challenges in teaching history is helping students recognize that what they often perceive as static and factual is, in reality, dynamic and interpretive. This week’s readings prompted me to reflect more deeply on how external expectations, whether from school boards, lawmakers, or the public, can limit the potential of historical education. These expectations often frame history as a settled narrative rather than an interpretive process. Yet these constraints also open a space for innovation. As T. Mills Kelly and others suggest, the digital turn may offer us a way to challenge those boundaries and reimagine how we teach and learn history.

As Sam Wineburg argues, historical thinking is an “unnatural act” that requires us to “hold simultaneously the familiar and the strange” (Wineburg, 1402). This balancing act is difficult for students, who often enter the classroom believing that the historian’s job is simply to retrieve facts and that their own experiences equip them to understand the past. I see this struggle firsthand. Students perform well on “find out” questions—those based on memorization—but often falter when asked to “figure out” something complex or ambiguous. Wineburg’s research highlights that this tension is not new. As early as 1917, Bell and McCollum noted that many students “take all statements with equal emphasis” and become overwhelmed by details instead of seeing meaningful patterns (Wineburg, 1401).

Lendol Calder and Tracy Steffes describe how history education has often been shaped by the demand to produce “authorized, unchanging” stories about the past. For many policymakers and members of the public, history should “foster American national identity” through a celebratory and fact-based curriculum (Calder and Steffes, 38). This view is codified in legislation like Florida’s, which requires history to be taught as “factual, not constructed” (Calder and Steffes, 39). These pressures narrow what history education can achieve, reducing it to patriotic memorization rather than critical inquiry.

Yet the digital turn offers new ways to disrupt this model. T. Mills Kelly explains that history is not merely about the past itself but is “a way of knowing” that depends on constructing meaning from incomplete and often contradictory evidence (Kelly, ch. 1). Digital tools such as online archives, collaborative platforms, and interactive source analysis exercises allow students to engage directly with evidence and to question dominant narratives. This process helps them see that historical interpretation is not about imposing a story but about exploring multiple perspectives.

Carl Becker’s concept of Mr. Everyman reminds us that historical reasoning is not limited to professionals. People are constantly constructing their own sense of the past from fragments of memory, family stories, and public narratives (Ayers, 506). Our job as educators is to help students refine that instinct into disciplined thinking.

These readings have pushed me to reconsider how I guide students through that messy and often uncomfortable process. How do I better teach students that uncertainty is not a weakness in historical thinking, but its foundation? And how can I use digital tools to help them see themselves not as passive recipients of history, but as its active interpreters?