Rwany Sibaja

Welcome! I’m excited to work with you this semester. This is my eleventh year in the history department at Appalachian State University, where I also serve as the director of the History Education Program and as the Executive Director for Teacher Education in the College of Arts & Sciences.

My work in history education focuses on the impact of new media on the teaching, learning, and scholarship of history. As a cultural historian of modern Latin American history, focusing on sports (Argentine soccer) and leisure, this translates to an interest on the educational approaches for teaching cultural history informed by critical media studies, digital storytelling, creating digital archives and collections, and data-geographic visualizations.

Because digital history intersects with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), these two fields have become an important part of my pedagogical approach. Before coming to App State, I helped develop educational projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, where I worked on Teachinghistory.org and led workshops and training for professional K-12 social studies teachers. I also worked for eleven years in NC public schools as a teacher and K-12 social studies director. In Boone, I have been part of faculty groups for SoTL, Digital Humanities, Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs), and Course (Re)Design.

As a Costa Rican-American, coffee is a mild obsession, which I enjoy anywhere but especially at home relaxing with my wife of twenty-three years, our dog, Django, and our two college-aged children when they’re back home in Deep Gap.