Why do I teach history?
History is my passion. Since very young, I've been fascinated by thinking about how people in the past lived and how their lives shaped our society today. To think about history for me is not only to travel in the past to thousands of different places but an empathetic exercise that better defines us as humans; although past societies are different from us, history highlights the basic humanities that unites us across time and place.
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Although research is the foundational stone of knowledge, teaching, in my eyes, is the most important part of academia. Only by efficiently transmitting and communicating the results of the research can we build better societies. To teach history, in my eyes, is to develop together with students the tools and concepts to approach narratives about the past with a critical eye and what they say about us today.
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Therefore, I understand the teaching and learning of history not as memorization of names and dates, but as the study of the narratives that we make about the past, both at a macro and micro level. People from the past are both like and unlike us, hence to study history is to try to understand not only what happened and how, but why people acted in a particular way, how could it have been different, and what does that say about us. Through this empathetic (besides intellectual) approach to history, I believe it is possible to build more tolerant and inclusive societies.
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How do students learn?
History as Experience
I understand my role as a teacher as analogous to that of a guide, as Fox (1983) describes it. This means that I help my students with tools, concepts, context, and map-posting, but it is them who must go through the journey and develop their conclusions. With this in mind, I strongly believe that students learn best by doing. Although lecturing will always be necessary to an extent, we learn best by experience; therefore I favor summative projects over exams when possible.
Despite not fully identifying with one single theory of teaching, I favor a constructivist approach (Carlisle and Jordan, 2005), meaning that I understand learning as a construct built by knowledge, language, and experience. Here, both experience and language are keywords in my pedagogical approach. Although it is impossible to experience the past directly, the use of games, debates, and projects allows us to bridge over the temporal abyss that separates us from it, even if it is just a little. I understand these activities in terms of procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2008), a concept taken from gaming that states that mechanics and rules carry with them powerful rhetorical potential. I see class activities in the same terms: by carefully molding our activities and assignments we can recreate some aspects of the past within the boundaries that temporal and social distance impose.
However, history is also a narrative: it is at the crossroad where the remnants of the past and our social reality meet. Hence, a critical analysis of primary and secondary sources is fundamental as a complement to experiential learning. By inquiring about the stories told about past societies, how they were built, with what purpose, and how this compares to our experience, we can better understand how we experience our society today (please see below for concrete examles).
Student assessment and feedback
I conceive the students' assessments and activities as a single block in alignment with the learning outcomes while keeping in mind the narrative and experiential nature of history teaching explained before. This means that the various components of the class work together aiming at the final project, which is to serve as evidence of the students' learning. The activities, assignments, and classwork seek to assess the process by which the student arrives at their conclusion (use of concepts and methods, cumulative work throughout the term, argumentative capacity).
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I understand assessment and feedback as the stepping-stones towards a final learning outcome, in what Mark Rober has called the "Super Mario effect" (see video here). In a video game, being defeated is not understood in terms of "loss", but as a learning opportunity that brings the player closer to beating the game. Activities and assessments should work ideally in the same way, with them serving as learning opportunities instead of measuring the student's immediate knowledge (as grading, necessary as it is, sadly tends to emphasize). Please see the courses' samples for a clearer idea.
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I consider student feedback as a key part of this form of assessment. All the criteria are shared and consulted with students in order to have total clarity, and students are encouraged to voice their opinions if they feel that they do not align with the course's learning outcomes. In order to promote personal motivation, I design the final assignment to allow them to deepen on topics of their interest within the limits set by the course's objectives.
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I consider student feedback as a cornerstone of my professional development. Besides institutional evaluation, I design my own surveys in order to get feedback specific to my teaching and course. This survey keeps in mind the student's feedback, expectations, opinions, learning, and comments. The surveys are anonymous to prevent any conflict of interests. Please see a sample from my course Visual and Verbal Communication in Video Games, taught at the University of Debrecen, here.
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