Teaching Philosophy
An excellent teacher in the humanities and social sciences is able to cultivate in students a thirst for knowledge, to develop their skills at critical thinking, and to invite them to actively participate in social development. Such a teacher challenges them to think outside the bounds of preconceived notions to appreciate other points of view. Students, under the guidance of such a teacher, construct their own frame of analysis to apprehend the world and become involved citizens. Historical education should enable students to understand their world and encourage them to make their own mark on it by creatively using the knowledge they gained and by applying the skills they acquired in thinking through historical issues.
My approach to learning has been tailored by multiple influences beyond the classroom, and these have shaped who I am as a teacher. Communication of information can take multiple forms, as I have personally experienced in my work as a tour guide, youth worker, discussion group leader, university lecturer, and college instructor. Exposure to multiple kinds of audiences in diverse learning environments, as well as training in group leadership and university pedagogy has made me appreciate the necessity for a teacher to adapt to the needs of the students while respecting his or her own personality. I strive to make the classroom experience one of learning for the greater majority. Whereas the classical lecture with chalkboard worked perfectly well for me as a student, I have become aware that this model needs to be adapted to the diverse and changing needs of the students, and that evolution is the name of the game.
I use a variety of teaching techniques to further students' capacity to assimilate knowledge while facilitating their integration into academic culture and encouraging them to stretch the boundaries of their self-perceived limits. Moreover, students can develop skills useful in the workforce and broaden the scope of their own learning methods. I accept that I cannot satisfy everyone at all times and that sometimes one approach to learning is privileged over another not only to make sure that everyone gets a little something, but to better convey the subject matter. Teaching methods depend both on the topic at hand and on the audience, but remain guided by rigour and an emphasis on deeper analysis. For example, classes that particularly deal with Indigenous material also include approaches to learning that are inspired by traditional knowledge transmission while not appropriating a culture that is not mine. In this case, for example, an approach based on storytelling (but also approaching stories heuristically) forms the basis of the course.
The lecture format remains important to provide the core narrative and to guide students in approaching readings. These lectures are lively and supported by illustrative PowerPoint presentations meant to provide the basic structure of the lecture and to help students take organised notes. These are always made available online to students ahead of class on an online learning management system. This being said, I make considerable space for student interaction. I consider that a group of students, taken together, knows much more than I will ever know, and I let them know that I value their insights. This has the effect of bringing forward diverse points of view, of giving students confidence in themselves, and of challenging them to think variously about issues through constructive feedback.
In smaller classes, I see my role more as a guide than as a provider of all the information and leave considerable room for discussion. In larger classes, small group discussions serve either to address primary sources and scholarly articles, or to attain a deeper understanding of the material through analytical questions. I have been known to have students role-play to enter into the minds of people of different historical periods. I have them explore the various facets of a historical issues by asking groups to take the position of a variety of collaborating and conflicting historical actors. I try when possible to make complex ideas more tangible, using for example a beaded timeline to illustrate the scope of human presence in North American soil by means of a 125-foot beaded timeline representing over forty thousand years of human presence in the Americas, which puts into perspective the short time settlers from other continents have been present. Finally, I integrate music and film whenever possible to relate academic knowledge and popular culture. Historical analytical methods are thus brought to bear on different objects as well as written texts, demonstrating that a critical approach can be used for any type of document.
In the last few years, I have become keenly aware of the challenge that the surfeit of information available to students constitutes for them. I have been working to develop an approach to history deeply informed by questions around information literacy/fluency and a critical approach to historical thinking. This has led me to collaborate with library staff to build different andragogical strategies for students to find and to engage with the source material. In Canadian history classes, students have had to develop presentations of their research projects to engage them in teaching the material. In world history classes, I have had students editing and rewriting Wikipedia articles. This has led not only to improved historical research, but also to students developing deeper understanding of the topic they research because their audience is no longer limited to their sole instructor. Collaborative learning becomes embedded in these classes and students appreciate the quality of learning they get from them.
Teaching is also about evaluating students’ progress, and I strive to make evaluations as coherent as possible with the outcomes I set out for each course. I leave few surprises to students, and I use detailed marking rubrics for essays and other written assignments, some of which were developed or modified in collaboration with students. I evaluate for understanding, not for memorisation, which is why I have been using open-book and take-home examinations in which questions force students to do research rather than simply memorise material. Syllabi are clearly organised along learning outcomes from which assessment derives, and they follow clear time-lines and/or thematic structures meant to make the topics covered as coherent as possible. Each lecture opens with questions tying it to the previous ones and ends in lecture questions meant to help students pick out key issues in the subject-matter as they review.
Over the years, a preoccupation for accessibility, inclusion, and anti-racist andragogical approaches has become paramount in my teaching. I have been privileged in teaching students of various ability levels as well as students who were struggling with aspects of their identity that at times made them social outcasts. I have therefore adhered to some of the principles of universal design, but beyond that, strive to ensure that students are included and feel that they can contribute to class even when their point of view may differ from that of the majority (or even mine!). Concretely, I have taught an entire course to a group of deaf students using a sign-language interpreter, I have integrated students whose native language was not English and who required support, and more recently, with support, a student who struggled with intellectual handicap. While these largely entailed adaptation to course delivery or the design of particular assignments (such as enabling students to use sign language with interpretation and video capture to supplement writing in examination), each of these instances has raised the issue of making the material accessible to all students, regardless of ability. Anti-racism is more complex, as it leads to the redesign of entire classes that, for example, must be deconstructed to replace white-normative narratives and frames of analysis. I have been a particular champion of following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report's Calls to Action in this regard, and not only in teaching Indigenous history. I am in the process of entirely redeveloping my survey Canadian history courses to better include Indigenous perspectives.
Overall, teaching continually provides me with a renewed sense of fascination. Of course, there are the occasional disappointments with students trying to take shortcuts of various kinds, but I remain impressed by the thirst for learning displayed by the majority. I try my best to help them discover history as a tool for further learning about the world around them. I constantly challenge them to think differently about historical questions in hopes that they can apply that critical mind to the issues with which they are faced daily. In this process, I myself am constantly challenged to remain creative in approaching history even in my personal research. This is in part why my research has been shifting from the history of the deaf in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to researching the teaching of history at the undergraduate level.