Masters level teaching is a thrilling experience when compared to undergrad classes. For a start you are working with much smaller groups, so you can get to know every student and his or her interests and needs personally: exactly the way it should be. Also, masters students are almost always the brightest of the bunch and the most enthusiastic. When you ask them to read something in preparation for a class, they actually do so!

Of course it is also challenging for a teacher used to working with undergraduates. You have to prepare for class in much more depth. Your MA students will expect you to be knowledgeable about the latest research in the field, about key historiographical debates and so on, whereas most undergrads seem to simply want to be told what they need to do to pass. Postgraduate students have the confidence to question and challenge you, so you had better know your stuff!

If you haven’t yet had the opportunity to teach at postgraduate level, I would recommend putting yourself forward as early as possible in your career. It will remind you why you wanted to become an academic in the first place and may jolt you out of the complacency and cynicism that undergraduate teaching sometimes engenders.

Part of the problem with working in academia is that you often end up with lots of small projects on your plate: perhaps given to you by your line manager at the university, but more often deriving from your collaborations with other scholars or with involvement in learned sociaties.  New Year is a good time to take a look at your portfolio of jobs and think ‘am I working smart, or just working hard?’ If there are roles that no longer fulfil you, or that you have outgrown, then find a way to give them to someone else, perhaps a scholar at the start of his or her career.

This process of consolidation can leave you with room for developing new projects, and that’s the really exciting part of your New Year planning. What can you achieve this year? Perhaps a new job or a promotion? Publication of your research?  Or getting that funding award?  It’s important to have this period of spring cleaning because otherwise your job can stagnate and become monotonous. It encouragesd you not to take the job for granted: despite all the problems, being an academic is fantastic after all!

Now seems to be a good time to look back and think about what we’ve acheived over the term, and maybe update our CVs accordingly . You don’t have to be actively looking for work to improve on your CV.

One exciting development for me is getting the BA in American History at my institution off the ground, and according to our admissions team, applications are already coming in!

Another bonus is that I am organising a HEA funded workshop for North American History teachers next year in Manchester to try to bring our community here in the UK closer together. More details on that to follow in 2012!

Apart from that, I have been making progress with my research, developing new courses and generally keeping very busy! So in order to maintain that work-life balance I am going to take some time off – proper leave- over the Christmas break. It’s important not to get too exhausted so give yourself a breather over the holiday season. There’s always more to be done, but I am sure it can wait for the sake of your health and your friends’ and family’s happiness! Have a lovely Christmas!

While organising conferences or seminar series can take a lot of administrative time and need funding, a reading group is a siple way to get researchers together for an informal discussion without having a huge outlay of cash.

In Manchester, I have recently founded the Manchester-MMU American History reading group and we had our first meeting last week. We discussed Walter Russell Mead’s book ‘God and Gold’, a lively book that produced a correspondingly lively discussion!

As well as sharing our thoughts on this book over a civilised glass of wine, we also discussed our own research and teaching experiences. The meeting also allowed scholars who knew of each other’s work to put names to faces. So, almost the perfect academic encounter really, and all for very little outlay of time or money.

At our next meeting we’re reading Natalie Zacek’s ‘Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands’: looking forward to it already! Why don’t you try setting up your own reading group?

One website that I find very useful in my teaching is the Virtual Jamestown collection of maps. To see what they have available click here.

Old maps can be used in subtle ways to teach students about the relationship between natives and whites in the first contact period and the motivations of early white settlers and their governments. Maps don’t show a physical reality but instead give an impression of what their creators hoped would be.

Early European maps of North America, such as John Smith’s map of Virginia of 1608 tells a complex story about his reliance on native knowledge and the vulnerability felt by the English in the New World. But it also shows England’s nascent imperialism by making grand claims about the possession of the region.

Asking students to assess visual sources such as maps can open up the key themes in American history, such as colonialism and white-native relations, to broader discussion and can also appeal to some students who are aliendated by textual sources. Why not give maps a go next time you’re not sure how to teach your topic?

However, it is important to recognise that our fellow historians in continental Europe also have an interest in the US and working with them provides a fruitful and unique perspective on the topics we study.

One important example of this relationship is the EEASA (European Early American Studies Association), an AHRC funded network project designed to link scholars of early America in a pan-European context. For more information, click here.  They are holding their third biennial conference in Bayreuth, Germany next year. on Empire and Imagination in Early America and the Atlantic World.

Bayreuth University was also the venue in 2010 of the first Summer Academy of Atlantic History, designed to bring together junior scholars in the field from across Europe. For more on this click here. The second such event was held in Galway, Ireland this summer.

All of this activity shows that early American history is as lively a subject in Europe as it is in the US and UK and scholars should look on this as fact as an opportunity to expand their horizons!

Using TV documentaries has long been the fall back of both innovative and lazy teachers! Lazy teachers who put on a documentary simply to keep the students entertained for an hour without properly engaging them are doing the documentary a disservice.

Properly used, they can be an excellent classroom tool to get discussions going and to encourage students to think about ‘public history and heritage’, i.e. how the general public choose to remember a past. So a documentary can be both a secondary and a primary source.

A good example of a useful documentary on PBS this week has been the fiver part Prohibition series by Ken Burns. Burns’ previous efforts on the Civil War, the West, the Jazz Era have been big hits with the public and with teachers and lecturers and Prohibition should be no exception. For more on this programme, please click on this link.

Showing one of these programmes in class needs to be accompanied by active participation from students too. And that’s where you can get really innovative!

One of the disadvantages of working in American academia at the moment are the extremely competitive nature of the job market, and especially the difficulty in transitionin from adjunct to tenured post.  Another issue to think about for American historians is that the subject is ubiquitous there. Many more scholars work on each topic and this again increases the competitiveness of the job market.

On the plus side though, working in the US and studying the history of the country has got to be inspiring intellectually. You will be in the heart of every debate and will be able to see in the country today the political and cultural ramifications of the historical trends you study. And on a practical level gaining access to important archives will be easier from within America.

However, the easy availability of digitial resources and the occasional availability funding to do research abroad means that scholars outside the US face no disadvantage. And as a teacher, getting university students to learn about a topic unfamiliar to them in the UK is exciting in different ways to teaching American students who have had their own history drilled into them from kindergarten onwards.

So, the preconceptions that they bring to class come from a variety of sources, usually rooted in popular culture, especially the movies.

One of the ways that I like to challenge my students is to get them thinking about myths and myth-making in history. Why is that there are so many half-truths in the stories that Americans tell about their past? Are they different from other countries in that regard?

Here are just a few interesting ones that I like to use to challenge my students’ assumptions:

1. Columbus realised he had discovered America: wrong! He went to his grave believing that he had reached ‘the Indies’, i.e. Asia.

2. The Puritans wanted to establish religious freedom: wrong! They were intolerant of others’ religious ideas.

3. Everyone in the South wanted to leave the Union during the Civil War. Wrong!  There were many unionists in the South, especially in the upper south.

4. Franklin Roosevelt pulled the US out of depression with his New Deal initiatives whereas his predecessor Herbert Hoover had complacently done nothing. Wrong! There are many similarities between the approach of the two men, and depression was ended by World War Two anyway!

5. Older people in the US were for the Vietnam war, whereas younger ones were against it. Wrong! Younger people were more likely to be pro-war, probably because they didn’t have personal experience in World War Two or Korea.

These myths and others like them are a good place to start when debating different interpretations of history.

(Thanks to Erik Sass for these examples! See more of them here )

Photographs, cartoons, paintings and other artisitc media and film all convey messages about what life was like in the past. There are also problems to be faced when interpreting the messages of each.

An example is the study of the histroy of Native Americans. Visual imagery is an excellent way of expanding our understanding of the prejudice faced by Native Americans in the last 400 years.

Photographs such as this one of the Wounded Knee massacre can enhance students understanding of the horrors of this event because they tell its story like a thousand words never could.

However, there are problems in interpreting old photos that students need to be ware of. Too often they believe that photos are presented to them as fact with no need for analysis.

They need to think who’made’ the photo: the photographer or the person who published it. They also need to ask about the values implicit in the photo. Why was that particular shot thaken?  Why not another one? Is this a white American spin on native life, or a genuine impression of native life?

If we are to encourage students to movebeyond understanding photos as illustration and towards understanding them as sources in their own right, we must get them to ask these difficult questions about meaning and significance.