Notes on pedagogy: Microhistory Through Character Creation

Jennifer Day
Jan 2
4 min read

Where students chose to place their characters for the first generation on Padlet

From 2018 to 2025, I taught a survey course on Modern China with a semester-long assignment with a fictive "family history" component. The assignment was designed to bring to life for students how history was experienced from a local and bottom-up perspective.

At the beginning of the semester, each student draws an identity card which assigns a social/ethnic class (peasantry, gentry, merchants, or ethnic minority/non-Chinese) to the first generation of their fictional family. Throughout the semester, students conduct research to explore how five consecutive generations of the family lived from the 1860s to the 1980s: how did they experience the history of modern China from their distinct local, social, and ethnic perspectives? How did each generation adjust their survival strategies to cope with political vicissitudes? How did the old social structure disintegrate, and how did new classes emerge? What were the actual effects of the social and political policies of each regime on these families?

None of these questions has single, definitive answers, and it would have been very challenging to explore them in depth without the students’ own research and creative imagination. The project invites students to exercise their historical understanding in an informed and empathetic way, and it encourages them to challenge the grand narrative of history (often told from the perspective of the dominant class, gender, and ethnicity) by assuming different roles: rural families from Northwestern China, Muslim merchants from Xinjiang, Manchu bannermen, American missionaries and their interracial descendants, and so on. The result is a remapping of Chinese history onto many localized identities with marvelous complexity.

I think this assignment can be adapted for just about any historical course. To get a sense of how it works, you can sketch the basic elements of this “family history” in five generations spanning about a century (two decades per generation). For each generation, create a new character with a name, age, gender, family location, social class, ethnicity, religious background, or anything else relevant to the history you are teaching. Use creative imagination and your own research to shape the identities, struggles, and choices of each generation. Flesh out as much information as you can. Between each generation, provide at least one significant historical event or process that impacted the lives of the individuals in the family.

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First Generation Character:

Historical event/process:

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Second Generation Character:

Historical event/process:

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Third Generation Character

Historical event/process:

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Four Generation Character

Historical event/process:

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Fifth Generation Character

Historical event/process:

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Here are some ideas for in-class activities based on students’ microhistory. Some of these will work well on Padlets with a variety of different boards (map of historical events, timeline, pros and con list, interactive storybook, etc.)

Give students research assignments throughout the semester on how their family members would have been affected (or not) by the larger historical processes you outlined in class, asking them how their family members strategized to survive, negotiated with power, and took advantage of the new opportunities.

Padlet essay prompt for week 2 using characters students created at the beginning of the semester

Ask students to create visual timelines for important events in their family history project, with particular attention paid to the intersections between macro-level events and the micro-level personal stories.

Sample timeline created by a student based on several generations of family history

Ask students to visualize migration or travel routes of their family members.
“A Day in Life” Tiktok videos
Historical Re-enactment - create specific scenarios, conflicts, trials where the characters were compelled to behave in certain ways.

Inspired by the game "Among Us" the class was divided up into groups in the Anti-Rightist Campaign.
Role-play debates (in person or on Padlet)
“Maker projects”: research and create material objects (sewing, hand-printing, 3D printing, designing a game, etc.)

Things to consider:

Class size: This assignment does not work for a big class! Even for a class of 25, the amount of work involved in grading, keeping track of student work, and logistical support was overwhelming. I would recommend keeping the class size at under 20.
This assignment is not designed to be AI proof, but students were less motivated to use AI for their characters than traditional assignments. Because so much of the in-class activities were interactive, students developed stronger bonds and supported each other along the way. All of these were strong incentives against using AI. Some students did use AI to generate images, which I permitted.