The Teaching History Her Way Podcast · CherylAnne Amendola

Badass Women, Badass Stories: Strategies for Highlighting Local Women's History

November 17, 2024·35 min·2 clips

Women need representation so girls can see possibilities and boys can see women doing important historical work.

1. The Teaching History Her Way Podcast episode "Badass Women, Badass Stories: Strategies for Highlighting Local Women's History" centers on women's history, local archives, and classroom practice. 2. Sherrilyn Amendola hosts Carolee Wong-Nakatsuka, Annie Evans, Shannon Salter, and Angela Lee, all of whom teach social studies and history from different classroom and digital-history roles. 3. The episode asks what educators should do to make women's contributions visible in history, civics, geography, and world history. 4. Carolee Wong-Nakatsuka says students look for themselves in history and need representation to build confidence and see possibilities. 5. She points to watching the first female vice president being inaugurated with her daughter as a concrete example of why visibility matters. 6. Carolee also says boys need to see women in history so they understand women have always been part of the story. 7. Shannon Salter adds a civics frame, saying students cannot imagine themselves as agents of future history if they only study leaders who look like the usual power holders. 8. She argues that people with easier access to power need to recognize that history has never belonged to them alone. 9. Angela Lee brings in world history and Lexington, Massachusetts, where a wife in the Lexington narrative warned that "the regulars are coming" and said "something must be done." 10. Annie Evans shifts the conversation toward geography and digital humanities, describing counter-mapping and the need to interrogate maps as primary sources. 11. Carolee says local archives are the number one way to hook students because kids want to know what happened in their own town. 12. Shannon recommends genealogical research, personal journals, and family diaries as ways to find the intimate records women left behind. 13. She names FamilySearch, Ancestry classroom resources, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and local history societies as places teachers can start. 14. Carolee describes finding her grandmother's Westinghouse badge and employee number, then learning she put filaments in light bulbs during World War II. 15. Carolee also uses Wakelet, ThingLink, Puppet Pals, and virtual visits to Angel Island to make immigration history concrete for students. 16. Annie describes a GIS Day event where young women digitized Sanborn maps, which she reads as a sign that the gender balance in mapping is shifting. 17. She says ArcGIS is free for K-12 schools, that students can build story maps with images, text, video, and audio, and that the software is used by professionals. 18. The tone is collegial, practical, and teacher-to-teacher, with frequent examples from classrooms and conference planning. 19. Listeners who teach social studies, history, civics, or geography will get the most from it. 20. Listeners seeking a narrative arc or a single focused case study may skip it.

As heard by us

A practical discussion of finding women in the historical record through genealogy, family papers, and local archives.

The episode gives women’s history a practical shape. Sherrilyn Amendola leads a panel discussion ahead of the National Council of the Social Studies Conference in November 2024, and the focus stays on a clear classroom takeaway: when institutional records fall short, teachers…

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You want women's history ideas rooted in local and regional sources.

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