I formally entered the world of undergraduate teaching as a “part-time professor” (sessional instructor) at the University of Ottawa in April 2004. I was fortunate in that my first assignment was to teach the introductory course in Canadian history in French and Québec Sign Language (LSQ) to a group of deaf high school teachers from the Centre Jules-Léger. This merged my teaching and research interests. I faced some peculiar challenges, the first of which was the lack of a university-level survey text in French for Canadian history. Further, I had to adapt to interacting with sign-language interpreters, since I was not fluent enough to teach the course in LSQ myself. I had to use an appropriate communication level while maintaining university standards. One major hurdle was assessing learning. In order to overcome the problem posed by inadequate writing abilities to evaluate students’ acquisition of knowledge with some level of fairness, a sign language interview (filmed and interpreted) formed part of the examinations. I described this experience in detail in French in the Bulletin of the Canadian Historical Association, (vol. 30, no. 1, 2004).

That same summer, I taught a second-year course in Canadian History from 1867 to 1939 to a group of regular history students (about 40). I had very little time to prepare for these courses (I learned I was assigned to them at the end of March, while I began teaching mid-April) and to gather the necessary materials. I practised in that course what I had learned about group leadership, and made group discussions a significant part of teaching. This had the added benefit of making a spring/summer course more palatable to the students. The readings for these discussions provided key contents to a course which once again had no textbook. My rapport with this class was excellent and the feedback I received from students was largely positive : they particularly appreciated the group discussions, which were structured and in which members were to evaluate their group leader. I however learned from that experience to better gauge the length of examinations and swore that future classes would incorporate more visuals.

The fall of 2004 was challenging. I taught four courses, but class preparation was only one part of the challenge. Class management became a more pressing issue, since three of these classes had over a hundred students. I also had to learn to work with teaching assistants. I approached this as a teamwork exercise, but quickly discovered that adjustments would need to be made over time: some assistants had goals different from mine, mostly working for the subsidy rather than for the experience. This required a few delicate discussions and I also had to adapt my expectations to a reality which did not entirely fit my ideal. I learned useful negotiation skills that would prove useful later on as I was engaged in committee work that dealt with sensitive issues.

My academic experience at the University of Ottawa centred on teaching ever larger groups of first-year students three core first-year courses: “The Making of Canada”, “The Twentieth-Century World to 1945” and “The Twentieth-Century World since 1945”. Over time, I developed PowerPoint presentations for these courses which I continuously improved by tightening their focus and making them more useful to students as study tools. In these courses, I also came to realise that asking students to produce traditional research essays was unrealistic given their lack of preparation for this exercise. I used a variety of other research assignments, such as critical assessments of primary sources drawn from an edited collection for the world history courses. For the Canadian history survey, I asked students o write comprehensive book reviews of select monographs. I found that these exercises made it easier to assess students’ ability to apply the methods of historical analysis and to reduce opportunities for plagiarism.

In the summer of 2005 I took yet more training workshops from the Centre for University Teaching and discovered online applications such as WebCT (now Blackboard). Despite the fact that I had no job security or certainty that I would teach any given course more than once, I decided to design online components for each of my courses. These proved invaluable as means of communication with students and among them, in addition to serve as content repositories. I developed them over time to include forums for group discussion for people working on the same documents (I always allow collaboration and teamwork within certain limits). Students' focused note-taking in class was helped by the PowerPoint presentations ahead of the lectures, which many of them printed. Students also could find a copy of the course outline, contact information, as well as discussion forums and useful web links on WebCT.

In addition to the roster of first-year courses I taught pretty much every year, I also had the opportunity to teach a methodology course on the use of primary sources and a few second and third year courses. The methodology course was a particularly interesting challenge, as it was the first time I was exposed to having to purposely explain how historians think through and develop a research project, in addition to shepherding them through the joys and pitfalls of primary sources. While I have not had to teach methodology course since then, this experience has influenced the way I weave methodology concerns into various courses, and it was the spark that ignited my interest in the issue of "historical thinking" as an area of research. This led me to participate in the 2015 Historical Thinking Summer Institute led by Peter Seixas at the University of British Columbia.

In the spring and summer of 2007, in addition to two courses at the University of Ottawa, I started teaching at Carleton University, having developed a 4000-level seminar in the history of French Canada. This was an intellectually stimulating experience in a congenial academic environment, and an interesting change from the mostly first year courses that had become my staple at the University of Ottawa. It allowed me to hone my skills in seminar leadership, guiding students through course material mostly made up of readings. This would prove useful in the development of some of the more senior courses I taught later on.

Over three years as a sessional lecturer, the most challenging aspect was the uncertainty of contract work. I eventually prepared eight different courses over that period, some of them far from my area of expertise. While there was some stability in the first-year courses which allowed me to use them as a staple resource, I had no guarantee that the energy and time invested in preparing a particular course would be of use in the future. While this led me to discover skills, techniques, and even contents that could be transferred from one course to another, I looked forward to a more stable environment in which to teach, which led me to move to Alberta to take up a full-time permanent position at Red Deer College in 2007.