Introductions
We are a diverse group of people who do not all know one another yet and who come from all over the world (Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Japan, Sweden, Uganda, UK, and US are represented so far). Feel free to post a comment here to introduce yourself to the group. Or, write a post describing your work and others can provide feedback.
February 8th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Hi, I’m brand new to SoTL. As a way of introducing myself, may I re-post something here from elsewhere? I posted the following essay on Another History Blog a few weeks ago, and it’s gotten some favorable comments. I think it gets at some big issues, including, implicitly, “why I teach.”
I titled it “Saving Tammy’s Soul.”
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I went to Woodlief Elementary School when I was in sixth grade. Woodlief was a little farming community in piedmont North Carolina. My father was the Methodist preacher there. The people of Woodlief were conservative folks, in their politics, in their social outlook, and in their religion.
We had Bible study once a week at school. The teacher was Miss Brazil, a retired missionary. Miss Brazil conducted the class like she would Sunday School. It wasn’t “The Bible as Literature” or “Christianity in a Comparative Perspective”; the class was unapologetically evangelical, proselytizing, beginning and ending with prayer, full of the Lord’s sacrifice on the cross and the promise of God’s grace.
The son of a minister who had always preached in rural North Carolina churches, I saw nothing wrong with the class. And I liked Miss Brazil, a sweet and gentle soul.
Bible study was not required. Students could (with their parents’ permission, I suppose) leave the classroom and spend the hour in the library. In my class, all the students stayed, except one. Tammy was a pretty girl, smart and pleasant. I could never figure out why she left the classroom when Miss Brazil came in.
Tammy always wore nice clothes. I didn’t know her parents. Perhaps they were professionals, maybe doctors or lawyers. I assumed they weren’t church-goers.
I wasn’t sweet on Tammy or anything like that, but I sure did hate knowing that she was going to Hell.
That was 1968. We moved away that summer, when my father was appointed to a church up in the mountains of North Carolina. I haven’t seen Tammy since, but I think of her from time to time.
I thought of her this morning, during my Georgia History class at Kennesaw State. The students and I were discussing Cherokee creation myths–how the earth was formed, the origins of suffering and disease, where the corn came from, that sort of thing.
According to Cherokee myth, the earth is an island floating in a huge sea. Hills and valleys were formed when the Great Buzzard, flying low over the earth when the ground was still soft, became tired and let his wings strike the ground. The first people were a sister and brother, who were alone until he struck her with a fish and told her to multiply. Animals developed diseases, which they aimed especially at hunters who failed to ask for pardon from the spirits of the deer they killed. Plants, more sympathetic to man, provided remedies for the diseases. And so on.
“What’s the purpose of myths?” I asked.
One student said, “To explain the inexplicable.” (She really said that. I have some sharp students.) We talked about Greek and Roman myths and how they helped people understand their place in the universe and how the world functioned–explaining the inexplicable.
Someone brought up the creation story from Genesis–Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the serpent and the apple, why women now suffer in childbirth–and pointed out the similarities and differences between that and the Cherokee version of creation.
And that’s when I thought of Tammy.
The “liberal” in “liberal arts education” means “broad”–both a broad education (in the arts and humanities, rather than a narrowly focused vocational or professional education) and one that results in a more broad-minded perspective.
A liberal arts education teaches us that the people we study were the product of their time and place. In a very real and significant sense, and in ways they probably never realized, their culture dictated who they were and what they believed.
Once students understand that, I hope they take the next step and realize that the same thing applies to us: we too are the product of our time and place.
That’s a big step, and not always an easy one. The idea that we are tied to our culture just as much as were the people we study–well, it can be unsettling.
But it’s an important idea, one I wish I could go back thirty-five years and teach that boy at Woodlief Elementary School, the one who was worried about Tammy’s soul.
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See, it wasn’t Tammy’s soul that needed saving ….
February 9th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Hello everyone, I’m Chris. Currently a iddle education major at the University of West Florida. I plan on becoming a world history teacher at the high school level. I found this site and felt that I would be a very good resource for me. Look forward to hearing from all of you.
February 27th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Hello! My name is Tim Lacy, and I’m currently working as a student advisor at Loyola University Chicago (IL, USA). Just last year I finished my doctorate in U.S. history at the same institution. My specializations were the history of education, and intellectual and cultural history.
I love teaching - warts and all. I have taught a number of history courses at various levels in higher education and beyond: undergraduate, graduate, and adult education. My current position as an advisor also requires/allows me to teach workshops to pre-med students (my advisees). I also continue to teach adult education seminars at Chicago’s Newberry Library.
Anyway, I look forward to the topics and discussions that will arise at SOTL. I can’t promise I’ll contribute to every thread of discourse here, but I plan on monitoring the site and blog for new developments. Cheers! - Tim
February 28th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Hi everyone, I’m Joe and I’m currently a graduate teaching assistant in history at the University of Manchester in the UK. I’m relatively new to it (this is my third year) and I’m interested in developing my pedagogic methods. Basically, when it comes to teaching I’m a believer in dialogue over instruction. I look forward to adding my voice to the discussions.
March 7th, 2007 at 3:08 am
Hello, I am David Willcox, currently teaching history part-time at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. I work full-time as a Research Associate investigating the history of chemical and biological warfare experiments on humans in the UK during the Cold War.
My own research interests lay in propaganda and public information with reference to Cold War civil defence. My PhD and subsequent monograph was concerned with press coverage of the Gulf War and Kosovo Conflict.
I am interested in developing my teaching skills and look forward to participating on this site and the overall endeavour which is an exciting one.
March 13th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Hello everyone, I’m Diana Jeater, and I have recently finished a stint as Head of History at the University of the West of England, Bristol, in the UK. UWE has an excellent reputation for teaching, and we’ve been working hard to improve and innovate in what we do. The History HEA in the UK, under the leadership of Paul Hyland and Alan Booth, has been very inspirational, and you can read about it in the SoTL newsletter.
I’ve been focusing on theory-&-practice work: the benchmarks for History degrees in the UK require a course looking at historiography and method, but very few institutions do this in a way that connects with the topic-based work that students are doing in the rest of their History degree. I’ve been working on ways to link the theory-&-practice work directly to students’ work in their other classes - on Hitler, the Reformation or whatever - while also requiring them to be self-reflective about the processes of learning and of writing and studying history.
I am thinking of posting up on this site an outline of what I’ve been doing. I would welcome any conversation about how to enable students to apply theory, rather than just learn about it.
June 2nd, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Hello all! My name is Kristen Epps and I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Kansas. I will be ABD sometime this fall, and I am beginning my dissertation which discusses slavery on the Kansas-Missouri border. I am relatively new to teaching; I have one year of TA experience, and I just finished a year as the sole instructor for HIST128:U.S. History Through the Civil War. This next semester (Fall 2007) I will be a TA for a historical methods course for history majors. I hope to use the resources on this site to improve my teaching and to aid in the development of my own syllabi.
July 14th, 2007 at 9:30 am
Hello everybody. I was an early member here, and then encountered all kinds of computer/login issues, which is why this is so late.
After a long and winding road in graduate ed, I finished my PhD in 1999 at the Univ of Pittsburgh. I am now the Europeanist at Oklahoma City University, where I now teach not only European history, but ancient (Greece and Egypt), nationalism, historiography, terrorism, World Civ and anything else we think will get history seats filled. I’ve been experimenting with different formats for classes as long as I’ve had my own classes (that was about 1989), and most recently did a learner-driven World Civ in which there were NO exams and NO lectures. (If you’re interested, that link is under A SoTL Experiment in World Civ on this site.) This fall term I’m doing yet another format, trying to integrate art into the class as a more approachable kind of ‘text’ than the regular and standard texts.