Tag: public speaking

What Happened When I Taught Historical Thinking at Church

Jonathan Wilson

Today, I’ve been invited by Chris Gehrz to contribute a guest post at the Anxious Bench group blog.

In the post, I briefly describe a three-session course I taught last month at an Episcopal church near Philadelphia. Rather than focus on a specific historical topic, this series examined “historical thinking” itself.

As I explain in the post:

At a time when public debates over history are fierce (and often very embarrassing), I’ve come to believe that one of the urgent tasks facing historians is to help our fellow citizens understand what history’s all about in the first place. We need to help people step back and gain some perspective before, or at least while, they charge into partisan debates. …

Can we try a variety of experiments like this? Can we find ways to bring historical investigation into the life of the church as something more than an instrument of adversarial apologetics or politics? Conversely, can our churches be dissemination points for humane historical thinking in our larger communities?

The post briefly summarizes each of the three sessions I put together, and it offers some tentative thoughts on how well the series worked.

The Invisible Storyteller

Jonathan Wilson

A storyteller should be invisible, as far as I’m concerned; and the best way to make sure of that is to make the story itself so interesting that the teller just … disappears. When I was in the business of helping students to become teachers, I used to urge them to tell stories in the classroom—not read them from a book, but get out and tell them, face to face, with nothing to hide behind. The students were very nervous until they tried it. They thought that under the pressure of all those wide-open eyes, they’d melt into a puddle of self-consciousness. But the brave ones tried it, and they always came back next week and reported with amazement that it worked, they could do it. What was happening was that the children were gazing, not at the storyteller, but at the story she was telling. The teller had become invisible, and the story worked much more effectively as a result.

—Philip Pullman, “Magic Carpets: The Writer’s Responsibilities,” Society of Authors’ Children’s Writers and Illustrators Group Conference, Leeds, Sept. 2002; in Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling, ed. Simon Mason (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), 9-10. Ellipsis in original.

PowerPoint Basics for Historians, Part 2

Jonathan Wilson2 Comments

powerpoint-for-historians

Part 2: Shortcuts for Smooth Presentations

In the previous post in this series, I discussed three key design principles. 

Today, I want to consider the actual moment of delivery. You’re in a classroom or conference venue; you have a PowerPoint slideshow ready to go; you’re hoping not to fumble around like a fool in front of your audience. What can help?

For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to assume you’re using a recent edition of PowerPoint on a Windows PC, since that’s the most common scenario for presenters in American classrooms. The following technical tips can make your PowerPoint delivery much smoother. Perhaps you know all these tips already, but unless you’re fairly experienced, there’s a good chance something in this post will be new to you.

Continue reading “PowerPoint Basics for Historians, Part 2” →