For almost two decades, Zappia has taught a wide range of survey and seminar courses covering the Americas, the environment, and world history.  While a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Zappia participated with more than a dozen UCSC graduate students of world history to develop a two quarter model globalized U.S. history survey course. It is available to support and inspire the development of a new globalized U.S. survey for the 21st century. This curriculum also appeared in Carl Guarneri's Teaching American History in a Global Context (M.E. Sharpe, 2008). More recently, Zappia was asked to participate on a forum focused on teaching about "Indigenous Peoples During the Age of Global Revolutions" for World History Connected. 

 

At Whittier, Zappia has taught co-curricluar interdisciplinary paired courses utilizing service learning pedagogy as well as Whittier's Sustainable Urban Farm Lab (SUrF). Zappia has spoken on pedagogy panels related to food history, empires, and Indigenous world history at the American Historical Association, Association for the Study of Food and Society, the Autry National Center, and LA County Natural History Museum. Zappia is also particularly interested in integrating history into non-humanities courses, an effort he championed in 2019 when he taught Whittier College's Organizational Leadership course for business majors. At CSUN, Zappia will continue to practice interdisciplinary pedagogy in his environmental history courses.

 

His courses include:

 

Introductiont to World History                 link to syllabus

Freshman Nature Writing Seminar        link to syllabus 

U.S. History to 1865                                 link to syllabus

Early American History                            link to syllabus

Native American History                          link to syllabus

Colonial Environmental History              link to syllabus

Food Systems History                              link to syllabus

Historical Methodology                            link to syllabus

 

(Graduate Teaching Instructor)

World History, 1500 – Present

US. History, Civil War – Present

Ancient Japanese History

Colonial Latin American History

​