Teaching and Technology Statement
I find teaching history to be one of the most difficult things I have ever done. I was not sure all the stress was worth it after throwing up at least five times the first semester I taught. Then I noticed how excited I would be to return to the classroom the next week to better explain an important concept or challenge understandings of a received belief. For example, perhaps it will be the first time a student will be exposed to the social construction of race through reading how a Afro-Brazilian explaining why she does not consider herself black. Or perhaps they will read a state department memo detailing US knowledge of genocide. I love seeing expressions of concentrated perplexity slowly transform into expressions of awakening and understanding. Those “a-ha” moments are not what only makes teaching great, but also life.
Our society today does not encourage investigation or questioning. Rather, people in all walks of life are advised to accept what they are told and not to think very hard about why society and power structures are as they are. However, as a teacher I want students to sharpen their analytical skills and critical thinking in order to question social realities through the study of history. In my classroom I will encourage students to put together seemingly disparate pieces of information to form a cause and effect narrative not immediately apparent to them. I will encourage them to ask questions of each other and of me so they themselves can construct the complex web of the past. I still feel that excitement when I make connections from my sources and I begin to understand how involved the ties between gender, technology, and consumerism in Argentina are. I hope to share that thirst for a deeper, more complex understanding of the past (and the present) with my students.
I anticipate teaching both large lecture classes and small seminars in Modern Latin American History, Colonial Latin American History, Gender and Labor in Latin America, The History of Technology and Consumption in Latin America, and possibly Global History. For a lecture class I would assume I would be lecturing twice a week with a discussion section once a week. In organizing the syllabus I would make sure there were three primary questions that the course would constantly be trying to analyze (for example, how does power function in the workplace? What is the relationship between sexuality and romantic love? Or, how does race construct gender and vice versa?). Each lecture would in some way be tackling the large questions posed for the class. I would also make sure that I had three “take home” points to organize each lecture. I would reiterate the points at the end of each class and ask that the discussion leaders review them each week as a way to begin discussion.
There are two ways in particular to utilize technology in a large history lecture class. First, I would use PowerPoint sparingly, illustrating key historical moments upon which the lecture is based with 3-5 images per lecture. I would start the class by posing questions, offering hypotheses, or putting the names of key figures/places in the PowerPoint show. I would also utilize the PRS system to ask students whether they saw change across time (were Canadian women more liberated in the 1960s then the 1920s?), whether they believed something (Do you think the hygiene campaigns of Rio de Janeiro were successful, misguided, incomplete, impossible to know), or gauge how they understood something at the beginning and end of a unit (Is race conceptualized in the same way in Brazil and the United States?). This would break up the monotony of the class and also let me know what the students understood.
For each discussion section I would want to make sure that my students are grasping key concepts and working through analytical problems presented that week. In order to gauge that I would alternately ask them to turn in at the end of class free writes (on concepts or events they don’t understand), answers to questions I pose them, questions they have for me, a worksheet they had filled out in class, etc. I would grade these assignments with a check, check minus, and check plus. The grade would be based on comprehension and willingness to engage with the questions at hand. More importantly, it will let me know how I should alter my lectures. I would also encourage group work especially to periodically analyze any of the three thematic questions of the class or when working with primary sources, which connect students to the people they are studying. For example, students need to learn how to excavate good examples from primary texts (novels, census records, diaries, advertising, business records, etc.) and when they are first learning this group work is usually the best way of pinning down the best examples. I would tell students it is their responsibility to review lecture notes before discussion so that the material is fresh in their minds and they are ready to engage at a deeper level with the material. Obviously, discussion section is where the grappling of key issues is worked out through discussion, questioning, and deeper engagements with the text.
In addition, my students will learn through a writing intensive experience. I think for those of us raised on email and text messages, adequately expressing difficult and nuanced ideas in writing is challenging because it is not a skill we use outside of a humanities classroom. Writing clearly is also grueling when our ideas are still muddled. I understand the writing process as a key space for working out our insight into ideas and events. I also find that many times the written word is the best way to communicate as it gives the reader time to ponder and review what has been said and it is, of course, more permanent than the spoken word. For these reasons, I will teach writing intensive surveys and seminars that will give students space to reinforce their knowledge base as well as work out tough theoretical problems. Therefore, I would assign 3 short papers of 3-5 pages each and one long essay of 12-15 pages with two graded rewrites. The short papers would be based on a conceptual question given by me and I would ask they utilize the assigned readings and lecture as evidence to prove their theses.
The process of writing the longer paper would count for around 40% of their grade. Elements in that process would include the following: as the semester progressed I would ask the students to meet with me once or twice to discuss their final paper topic. I would also require them to turn in the paper topic with justification, a bibliography, an exposition of problems, and two rough drafts. I would ask them to give feedback to two of their classmates in a workshop session on the first rough draft. I would give feedback on the second rough draft and the final paper. The multiple drafts gives students the room to work out a variety of problems such as organization, use of evidence, conceptual misunderstandings, the need for additional readings and the like. Two rounds of commentary will also improve their writing clarity. As such, writing will be central to how my students learn in my courses.
