Kathryn Wall is a historian, online educator, instructional designer, curriculum developer, and consultant based in Durham, North Carolina.
Graduate School: Research, Teaching & Oral History
She received her Ph.D. in United States history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000, with special emphasis on the history of education, women’s history, and oral history. Her dissertation focused on the lives of southern women teachers in the aftermath of the Civil War. During her graduate career she worked closely with the Project for Historical Education, the Southern Oral History Program, the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Writing Center, and her department’s Committee on Teaching. She won her department’s outstanding teaching assistant award and her dissertation was supported by an internationally competitive fellowship from the Spencer Foundation. She coordinated curriculum development for a summer teacher’s institute sponsored by the Southern Oral History Program and the North Carolina Humanities Council, and worked extensively with K-12 teachers throughout the state. While a graduate student, she also created an exhibit for the University’s bicentennial oral history program and an interactive website for educators about the book Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World.
Post-Ph.D.: Academic Skills & K-12 Professional Development
After graduation, Kathryn served as an academic skills instructor at Duke University’s Academic Resource Center and then worked extensively for LEARN North Carolina, a program of the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education. There, she wrote articles about using primary sources in the classroom and best practices in education, contributed photographs to LEARN’s collection of educational resources, wrote for the Digital Textbook of North Carolina History, and created posts for the program’s Instructify blog on technology in education. She presented at numerous professional development conferences and workshops throughout her time at LEARN NC, regularly sharing online educational resources at the statewide social studies conference. In collaboration with the UNC American Indian Center and the North Carolina Humanities Council, she created a full curriculum on North Carolina’s eight state-recognized Native American tribes. She created online professional development courses for educators on historical topics including the Civil Rights Movement, American Indian history (at the state and national levels), and African American history. She also taught in the program’s Carolina Online Teacher (COLT) initiative, facilitating almost all of the classes in the curriculum, developing a new course on Differentiating Instruction, and serving as a mentor in the program’s final capstone class for K-12 educators transitioning from the physical classroom to the digital one. During her time at LEARN NC, she developed resources and taught in LearningSpace, Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai.
Recent Years: Curriculum, Teaching & Oral History
Kathryn has also written social studies and English literature curriculum materials for Moving Beyond the Page, a curriculum for gifted and creative homeschoolers. She has served as an online instructor at the North Carolina School of Science and Math, teaching courses on western political thought and international relations via Canvas and Webex. She has developed and taught independent online Canvas courses on academic skills for high school students and on early American history through the popular musical Hamilton. She regularly teaches history and essay writing classes for local homeschooled middle school and high school students and, during the Covid-19 pandemic, shifted those courses exclusively online, making use of both Canvas and Zoom. She also manages grant-funded oral history projects for the Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History in Chapel Hill, NC.
Personal
When she is not teaching or working in educational technology and oral history, Kathryn enjoys spending time with her fiancée, with her teenage daughter, and with their pets, cooking, coaching high school softball, performing with Paperhand Puppet Intervention, and axe-throwing.