HIST 429F: History of the University of Maryland The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Presentation from the MARAC conference in Boston, MA on March 18-21, 2015. S12 - History in Action: Collaboration in Academia

Straddling The Gap: A MIddle School Teacher's Journey Towards Good Geography

Research points to a gap between academic or disciplinary based geography and what is taught in secondary classes across the nation. This study documents a teacher’s journey and efforts to bring a more disciplinary approach to two suburban heterogeneous sixth grade geography classrooms. The researcher traces student perspectives on geography and facility with geographic reasoning as well as his own perspectives and pedagogy with respect to student data. The study attempts to map the space where school geography meets and interacts with disciplinary oriented geography based upon the Geography for Life National Geography Standards. Participants completed two sets of baseline assessments and two sets of end of year assessments as well as an initial intake survey. The seven primary participants were interviewed five times each throughout the academic school year and data were openly coded. The data suggest that students can learn geography and geographic reasoning from a disciplinary perspective. Students sharpened their geographic skills through deeper subject matter knowledge and developing spatial and ecological perspectives. The data also indicate that the teacher researcher faced considerable challenges in implementing a disciplinary approach to teaching geography. The coverage demands of a crowded history-centric curriculum together with ill-fitting resources required a labor-intensive effort to put together and execute this study. Study findings indicate that the path to good geography pedagogy can be impeded by a host of external and internal challenges. However, to forward thinking practitioners, the effort to straddle the gap between school geography and disciplinary-based geography may be well worth it.

“In The Good Old Days of Long Ago": Echoes of Vaudeville and Minstrelsy in the Music of Uncle Dave Macon

Uncle Dave Macon provided an essential link between nineteenth-century, urban popular stage music (especially the minstrel show and vaudeville) and commercialized country music of the 1920s. He preserved through his recordings a large body of songs and banjo techniques that had their origins in urban-based, nineteenth-century vaudeville and minstrelsy. Like the minstrel and vaudeville performers of the nineteenth century, Macon told jokes and stories, employed attention-grabbing stage gimmicks, marketed himself with boastful or outrageous slogans, and dressed with individual flair. At the same time, Macon incorporated many features from the rural-based folk music of Middle Tennessee. Overall, Macon’s repertoire, musical style, and stage persona (which included elements of the rube, country gentleman, and old man) demonstrated his deep absorption, and subsequent reinterpretation, of nineteenth-century musical traditions. Macon’s career offers a case study in how nineteenth-century performance styles, repertoire, and stage practices became a part of country music in the 1920s. As an artist steeped in two separate, but overlapping, types of nineteenth-century music—stage and folk—Macon was well-positioned to influence the development of the new commercial genre. He brought together several strains of nineteenth-century music to form a modern, twentieth-century musical product ideally suited to the new mass media of records, radio, and film. By tracing Macon’s career and studying his music, we can observe how the cross-currents of rural and popular entertainment during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries interacted to form the commercial genre we now know as country music.