Michael Fuhrman
Michael Fuhrman is a World History and Humanities teacher whose work is rooted in relational, discussion-based learning and global inquiry. He has taught across a range of secondary history and humanities courses, designing classroom experiences that help students understand the world through narrative, culture, and lived experience. His teaching draws on training from Harvard Divinity School, where he focused on religion, migration, and ethical engagement across difference. Fuhrman emphasizes student voice, community partnership, and creative approaches to historical thinking, and he develops learning environments where storytelling, curiosity, and care guide students’ understanding of the global past.
The Wooster School, Harvard Divinity School
Session
This innovative session explores how oral history and digital storytelling can reshape the way students understand global history. When students listen closely to the stories of immigrants and refugees, they begin to see that the global is not a distant structure but something carried in memory, ritual, and the daily work of making a life in a new place. This session builds on practices modeled by the University of Arkansas TEXT Program and expands them into a digital humanities framework that supports high school students as they learn to work with narrative evidence and to represent it with care.
Participants will explore a pedagogy that treats oral testimony as a central source for understanding the movement of people and culture across borders. The session highlights classroom projects where students create digital exhibits, interactive maps, and annotated transcripts that allow them to see how global histories become visible through the details of a single voice. Examples from the Pho Minh Buddhist Temple oral history project will show how digital tools can help students notice the smaller forms of global connection found in family stories, religious spaces, and community practice.
The session invites participants to experiment with digital platforms and to consider questions of ethics, representation, and listening. The goal is to offer a model for world history teaching that honors human experience and expands what counts as global knowledge. Through this work, oral history and digital humanities become a way to teach students that the global past is something that lives in people and continues to be shaped in the present.