Who Is "The Nomadic Professor"?
We Want Students To Be Engaged, To Develop Perspective, And To Appreciate Nuance, Complexity, And Context
Who Is "The Nomadic Professor"?
We are a college professor and high school teacher who’ve teamed up to create engaging history curricula featuring on-location lessons filmed all over the world. Part of our motivation comes from a dire need to address two important gaps in student knowledge and ability:
- a nuanced understanding of the past, and
- a high-level ability to interpret and judge sources of all kinds.
History is the perfect class to address these gaps! From bias, to partisanship, to black-and-white thinking, to propaganda, to selective attention, to plain old ignorance, there is no subject more susceptible to pitfalls—nor more capable of teaching students how to avoid them. We want to arm your students with the knowledge and skills they need in today’s overloaded information environment.
Who is the NP for?
- High-school students, and perhaps some high-level middle-school students
- Teachers and co-ops who want a ready-made curriculum with an engaging and comprehensive text, on-location videos, an audio track, video modeling, answer keys, rubrics, auto-graded quizzes, a built-in gradebook, guided notes, document-based lessons, and other unparalleled scaffolds and grading tools
- Charter and ESA families who need rigorous, transcript-ready courses
- Students in non-traditional environments of all kinds, from virtual schools to homeschools, to co-ops, to microschools
What makes the NP different?
- On-location lectures: On-location video lectures are included in every course, unit and session. These videos are filmed around the world, giving visual context to the history being taught
- Scaffolding:
- An audio track: Every Session of every history course is professionally recorded in studio as an optional tool to support and engage students as they read along or study on the go, or to help instructors and parents keep up with what their students are learning
- Guided notes: These custom forms created to match each individual Session teach students how to track, organize, and condense key ideas across long periods of time, or large amounts of primary and secondary reading; in the American series students are gradually weaned off of the guided notes until they can take organized and useful notes on a blank page
- Structure terms: Students can study all key vocabulary with traditional flashcards and a traditional course glossary, but the NP's unique "structure method" for learning key vocabulary also enables students to go beyond memorizing flashcard definitions, and into organizing key vocabulary into a coherent network of related terms whose connections they can articulate
- Document lessons: These lessons teach students to read primary and secondary sources with the trained eye of a professional historian—how to get below the surface of the author's or institution's biases and other interests, the impact of the context, audience, and medium, the implications of the word choices and tone, and the significance of being contradicted or corroborated by other sources
- Emphasis on historical literacy: Throughout each history course students are persistently trained to think critically—to evaluate evidence, to judge arguments (even our own arguments!), to compare claims, to evaluate biases, to think and read contextually, and to resist simple answers, black and white thinking, and partisan takes
- Our goal is to train students to think critically, to judge carefully, to appreciate nuance, and to rely on the best information from the best sources, while actively pushing back against any inclination to merely affirm preconceived biases and partisan talking points
The result is a curriculum that treats students like historians in training, not just test takers out to meet bare minimum requirements!