When I got my first teaching assignment at Penn – three recitations of Professor Childers’ course on the Third Reich – I was excited, but not yet sure what I could offer my students. I was in my second year at the History Department and my prior training had been in the sciences. I was comfortable teaching statistics and electromagnetism, but this time I was about to teach in a discipline where experiments are impossible, and regularities can be called ‘laws’ only by recourse to metaphor. During that semester and in the semesters that followed, my work in the classroom enabled me to see the different academic disciplines as unique ways of inviting students to engage in precise and original thought. Classroom experiences and advice from supportive mentors also helped me to understand what I want to offer as a teacher of history. In the process I discovered that teaching is one of my most passionate commitments.

I teach because I want to support students as they become careful and confident thinkers. At the end of each semester I want them to be better equipped to understand the cultural and political frameworks within which they find themselves. I want them to expand their flexibility in analyzing the implicit and explicit values that inform their choices and actions. I want them to
feel empowered to evaluate and choose worldviews and beliefs to which they can commit themselves. To make this possible I strive to turn every recitation into a demanding, supportive, and respectful forum, in the context of which students can experiment with analytical and imaginative thinking.

I find the distinction between analytical and synthetic, or imaginative, thought especially useful in teaching. I encourage my students to reflect on the differences (and the relationship) between skills necessary to break arguments apart, trace genealogies of words, or test logical claims, and those needed to re-create ideologies that no longer exist, understand the devastation of war, or
search for meaningful patterns within available evidence. I ask students to develop their own understanding of the advantages and limits of these different ways of thinking, and to practice them in the classroom. My hope is that such practice will help them develop greater flexibility in choosing modes of thought most appropriate to the complexities they encounter in their lives.

I structure discussion sessions to facilitate students’ own exploration of significant historical concepts and phenomena. Debates and role playing help us to delve into the dynamics of ideological arguments, while work in small groups and in-class writing exercises are useful in thinking about religious practice or everyday experience. Varying the discussion format also allows students with different temperaments and confidence levels to find opportunities to
express their ideas. Early in the semester I emphasize that effective participation means developing new skills, and while for the more reluctant students this will mean trying to speak on a regular basis, for those already eager to talk it could mean working on attentive and engaged listening. To support this, I incorporate community-building activities throughout the semester so that students can get to know one another, and feel comfortable in their explorations of new skills and new ways of knowing.

To further encourage students’ active involvement in their learning I attach a great deal of importance to preparation. I prepare the structure of class meetings and identify themes that lend themselves to interesting and challenging conversations, while the students are responsible for generating interpretations and questions related to the course readings. I especially encourage them to be aware of the kinds of questions they ask, and identify whether these are inquisitive or rhetorical, meant to reach toward new ideas or confirm pre-existing assumptions, and most importantly – whether their questions are indeed their own. I ask students to feel free to discard ‘good’ questions if they find them uninteresting, and to follow their curiosity toward questions that are truly important to them. Finally, I work with students individually through extensive
feedback on their written work, and I invite and encourage them to meet with me throughout the semester, whether to articulate essay ideas, ask for clarification of facts, or think about future plans or graduate school possibilities.

Without historical awareness, individual and collective self-understanding is drastically incomplete. Yet the past is complex and unwieldy, its surviving traces are often fragmentary and difficult to decipher. Historical thinking requires both confidence and recognition of one’s limits; it requires precision and the ability to perceive both regularities and the irreducibly unique details. I want my teaching to create structured but open spaces within which students can feel personally challenged and inspired by the difficulties of history.