Riverside Brookfield High School history teacher Erin Cunningham worked hard to introduce the OER World History Project this year to RB with help from the curriculum board and other history teachers. This course is now the freshman level history course, and the goal is to better prepare students for their future history classes.
The OER Project, or Open Educational Resources, was founded by Bill Gates and David Christian. It is a non-profit open educational resources provider, and an online course to help students learn to use the tools they were given in the class to become “mini historians”. It has been tested by many different specialists around the world in order to make it official.
“The goal is to teach students to be essentially amateur historians and to use historical thinking skills like comparison, continuity, and change over time,” Cunningham said. “It’s been developed by experts in history, archeology, [and] education, who have come together to create resources and activities and readings for students around the world.”
RB history teacher Ryan Grieve explains what the students do on a daily basis.
“It’s a reading and writing extensive class for freshmen. We want it to be a class where everyone feels prepared to move on in our other social studies classes. We work on paraphrasing evidence and reasoning skills with analyzing what students are writing,” Grieve said.
Before the OER Project was widely used by schools all over the world, RB was one of the first schools to test it. About five years ago, the history department began to slowly replace the previous Western Civilization class with the OER World History Project. RB was able to give feedback regarding the improvement of the curriculum and what modifications should be made.
“We were looking at various options, and we were at the national council for the social studies conference in 2018. That’s where we heard about this curriculum first. We were able to speak to the organization, and they were able to add us to their pilot program. We were one of the first schools to trial the curriculum before it went public for all. It felt like a good fit because we were part of the development of the curriculum,” Cunningham said.
Kylie Lindquist, Assistant Principal of Curriculum and Instruction, agrees that it was a benefit to be able to pilot the OER Project. RB is trying to incorporate the skills that the curriculum teaches into history lessons.
“Our social studies department has worked really hard to infuse literacy skills into their curriculum over the last 10+ years, so it was a natural fit to try this when the pilot program was offered because it was in line with our priorities as a school or department to best support students,” Lindquist said.
The goal of the class, according to Grieve, is for each student to feel like they belong and have an understanding regarding the material being taught. During the time the curriculum has been used, there has been a noticeable difference.
“Ultimately, we want everyone’s identity to be felt in that class and for them to be connected to what we’re learning. I think it’s something we’ve seen over the last four or five years,” Grieve said.
