John Green is the U.S. History teacher everyone wishes they had in high school. With an impressive command of the content, he guides his students through a sweeping narrative of America's past, all while layering in rich detail and interesting anecdotes that delight his throngs of adoring students. Each encounter includes new insights and questions, recurring themes in U.S. History, and, quite often, a very clever pop culture reference or two (or more!). But Mr. Green does not teach in a traditional classroom. In fact, he doesn't have a physical classroom at all. John Green, along with his brother Hank Green, are the creators of the wildly popular YouTube channel called “Crash Course.” These brothers are on the forefront of a growing movement to bring high-quality educational content to the Internet and, in doing so, perhaps dramatically alter the traditional classroom.
The Green brothers have posted hundreds of videos on a variety of topics, including biology, chemistry, world history, and US History. Since 2012, millions of people have visited “Crash Course” to review class content and to prepare for Advanced Placement tests. John Green's U.S. History series is made up of forty-seven, ten- to fifteen-minute, episodes. John works with a team of people to produce the show, including Raoul Meyer, his former high school history teacher. Each video begins with John rolling on screen in his desk chair and cheerfully introducing himself and the topic. What follows is a fast-paced lecture. The camera switches between his brightly lit classroom set, photographs of the period, and professionally produced animation sequences to complement each story as it unfolds. It is all a bit frenzied and informal, but irresistibly charming.
Green's personality and delivery are a major part of the appeal of “Crash Course.” He's genuinely funny, and, more importantly, he is well-informed and a natural teacher. While Green is the only person to appear on camera in the history videos, he does play a couple of roles, including his younger self as a high school student. High school student John Green will occasionally ask inane questions of teacher John Green, who seems to expect so much more of the younger version of himself—but always ends up being disappointed. This running joke helps tie episodes together and create a distinct style. At some point in each episode, Green will go to the “mystery document.” As if participating on a game show, he reads a primary source from the era in question and then tries to guess the author. If he guesses wrong, he presses the top of a gag shock pen, which he insists is real. Perhaps not surprisingly, he is right most of the time. It is playful moments like these that partly explain the success of “Crash Course.”
“Crash Course” is, however, much more than a series of clever, history-themed gags delivered by a charismatic host. Green's coverage of US History is thorough, intellectually sophisticated, and reflective of an awareness of recent scholarship. In the episodes that focus on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Green routinely makes transnational connections, including the development of nationalism and the rise of global capitalism. He delights in busting the myth of the western settlers as rugged individuals, disconnected from the old America, prepared to start anew in the untamed wilderness. Instead, he argues that these settlers enmeshed themselves in newly forming markets that were supported by the growing power of large corporations and a permissive federal government. Although he tends to focus more on political and economic themes, his videos always include references to cultural and social history. He has an entire video on the fight for women's suffrage in which he cautions his viewers to see the movement not as a monolith, but as a multifaceted collection of issues and individuals.
Green rightly instructs his viewers to appreciate that the study of the past is complex and that simple answers are insufficient. He introduces competing theories on the origins of the Spanish-American War as well as America's entrance into World War I. He discusses the origins of Progressivism and the competing goals of so-called Progressives, suggesting that there is still considerable debate on the topic. Though he rarely mentions specific historians by name, the implicit message of his approach is that engaging history is the ongoing act of interpreting the past. This is a crucial message well worth hearing, particularly for an audience presumably made up primarily of students in high school or college survey courses.
Many history teachers may be tempted to assign these videos as homework and “flip” their classrooms. The premise of a flipped history classroom is that lectures are to be viewed at home so that class time can be spent digesting primary and secondary sources or dealing with big ideas. In the flipped classroom, the teacher shifts from the “sage on the stage” to more of an academic coach. The promise of a flipped history classroom is that it becomes more interactive and discussion based, while high-quality lectures can be watched and re-watched as individual students need them.
“Crash Course: US History” can indeed be a valuable tool to enhance content delivery but should not be used as the only, or even initial, content delivery. The sheer mass of content and the speed at which it is delivered make Green's videos a daunting introduction to any of the topics he covers. “Crash Course” does not offer supplementary documents, bibliographies, term lists, discussion questions, or any of the support materials that would help a novice make sense of so much content. Part of the charm of these videos is the pace, and editing, along with the many inside jokes. Students with some background knowledge will appreciate the antics and clever references and likely benefit from seeing familiar stories told in a way that is both entertaining and from an angle different from what their teacher has presented. Many students, however, may well have to watch the videos more than once—or stop frequently to absorb the material.
In the spirit of “Crash Course” itself, though, teachers might well ask their students to watch a video and place it in the context of the historiography of the topic. Rather than rely exclusively on the content presented in each video, students could evaluate each episode in light of what they have learned from their textbooks, primary and secondary sources, and class lectures. Doing such active learning would reinforce the idea that no source is definitive—even those produced by someone with as many millions of YouTube viewers as John Green.
“Crash Course” videos do not come with a prescription for how they should be used. John and Hank Green simply tell viewers that they just hope they will be useful to teachers and students. In that regard the Greens have certainly achieved their goal. They offer entertaining and intellectually sound videos that can enrich any US History survey course. It remains, however, up to thoughtful classroom teachers to decide how to manage this resource to best meet the needs of their students.
