Heather Gumbert

Heather Gumbert is an Associate Professor of History, specializing in Modern Europe (especially Germany), Visual Culture, Television History, and the Cold War. She is an outstanding student advisor and mentor and serves as Faculty Principal in the Honors Residential College, and Managing Editor of the Virginia Tech Undergraduate History Review. She received the CLAHS Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Student Advising, in 2013, and an XCaliber Certificate of Excellence - Honorable Mention in 2012. Her project, "Building Knowledge Across Space and Time: The World War II Timeline Project" offers an innovative experiment in collaborative, inquiry-based, student-centered learning, one that successfully leverages opportunities afforded by networked learning. This course asks students to make contributions to an online, jointly constructed timeline that explores the causes, events, and consequences of the Second World War. Heather teaches by modeling for them how historians approach both secondary sources and primary documents (such as treaties, political speeches, excerpts of literary works, film, political cartoons, and so on) and then let them explore the possibilities of interpretation and argumentation. Using open-source software, Timeline JS, students will incorporate a rich variety of sources - text, images, statistics, videos, maps, tweets, and others - into the timeline. Her inspiration for embracing teaching-centered strategies was inspired by Donald Finkel's book, Teaching with our Mouths Shut, from which she developed strategies to ask students to engage and think critically about the twentieth century.