I believe that the teaching of history should treat students as active learners while seeking creative ways to connect with the past. A professor is a guide for students, someone who challenges them, redirects them, and ultimately helps them to see why the study of history is important to their lives as citizens of the world, and central to a liberal arts education. My goal when teaching is to be honest, demanding, respectful, and interested in my students, while always emphasizing the complexity of the past and the rigor necessary for engaging with it.
Students should read for every class. It is, however, incumbent upon the teacher to give interesting and varying assignments. In my classes, I include as texts secondary and primary sources, poetry, prose, drama, music, film, and the visual arts. For students to best comprehend history, they must come at it from a variety of paths which illuminate the political, social, economic, and cultural processes that move the world forward in time. I also believe strongly that students learn through writing in multiple formats, ranging from computer-mediated low-stakes writing to polished, multiple draft essays. It is important for history classes to fulfill their roles within the overall writing program of a college, and students taking history should write to analyze, synthesize, and understand stories from the past.
I believe that technology has opened up paths to studying history that were previously difficult or impossible to employ. The Internet has been absolutely crucial to my own research about American adolescence in the years following World War II, as I’ve been able to easily access video, audio, and written texts whose study would otherwise have been difficult. I believe that it is the responsibility of a liberal arts education to create in students a critical sense of the quickly-changing ways in which we produce and digest information. Technology should be integrated into the classroom in ways that directly serve learning, and help transform information into knowledge. In the teaching of history, this means directed exploration of artifacts available via the web, individual and communal online writing assignments, the production and digestion of multi-media studies of the past, and learning to look at images and a variety of texts.
I believe the teaching of history should be without politics, but informed by the sense that the past and ownership of it is a political process. History is made up of a cacophony of voices, and our job as students of history is to sort through the din to understand how the past has shaped our collective present. Inevitably, questions of power and conflict will arise, and we must examine our own prejudices as we pursue an accurate picture of the past. The teacher should cultivate a classroom environment where civil disagreement propels learning forward, and where diversity of background and opinion is dearly valued. Ultimately, the student should emerge from the class having learned much, but with the desire to learn more.