IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

Our “History Lab” pedagogy invites students to be curious and imaginative about the past while co-producing knowledge through collaborative teamwork and critical awareness of AI’s limitations. Its central principle is that imagination is a creative and indispensable aspect of historical thinking. As scholars with expertise in Latin American & Caribbean, Native & Early American, and Imperial British, including South Asian histories, we together ask students to investigate the travel writings of Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Prester John, and others to develop a reflective, decolonial, and technologically adaptable pedagogy. Responding to changes in higher education brought by AI and by popular and fictionalized forms of history, this model preserves close reading, contextual interpretation, source analysis, and imagination as core skills of historical thinking. The History Lab is organized around three interrelated components. First, students use AI as a scaffold rather than a shortcut, completing an AI-generated reading on these historical travelers. Second, they engage with original primary sources, analyzing omissions, distortions, and assumptions in the AI text to underscore the irreplaceable role of human thinking. Then, in collaborative, station-based activities, students co-produce knowledge by working through questions, challenges, and puzzles to create written solutions as shared classroom resources. To promote mobility and interaction, students must move from station to station. Finally, through reflective individual pieces written at the conclusion of the session, they carefully evaluate the tension between historical significance and popular and fictionalized imagination, and consider whether and how the lab has shifted their perspective.