Tag: university teaching

Things I’m Reading to Prepare for Fall

Jonathan Wilson

We’ve somehow reached that the point in the summer when I suddenly have just four to six weeks left to finish planning all my fall courses. That means I need to find my focus and motivation … fast.

Typically, for me, that means reading things that could fire the imagination, generating excitement about what’s possible in the upcoming semester. This week, I’ve queued up a few freely available publications—open resources that don’t require access to a library (or venturing out into the heat).

First, there’s The APA Guide to College Teaching: Essential Tools and Techniques Based on Psychological Science (PDF), published in 2020 by the American Psychological Association’s Committee on Associate and Baccalaureate Education. (It was inspired by an earlier publication for K-12 teachers.) This 46-page report identifies 21 evidence-based principles for teachers working in higher education, pairing each principle with brief but specific advice.

For the sake of balance, though not necessarily contradiction, I’m also reading a brief appeal the English instructor John Schlueter wrote for the AAUP’s newsletter in 2019, called “In Search of What We Do”—together with a classic article that helped inspire it, Elliott Eisner’s 1983 essay on “The Art and Craft of Teaching.” Both of these texts warn against overly prescriptive and rationalistic (“teacher-proof”) theories of undergraduate education, which run the risk of making us forget that getting a college education is about liberating one’s imagination as a member of specific and dynamic communities of students.

Next, to assist with my effort to do a better job helping burned-out COVID-era students identify the importance and relevance of history—and perhaps also to teach U.S. history more persuasively in the current political climate—I’m studying the American Historical Association’s 2021 report History, the Past, and Public Culture: Results from a National Survey (PDF). This 112-page publication offers very detailed information for thinking with, as well as a series of ten summary statements on the “challenges and opportunities” the data reveal.

I’m also revisiting a great article by Kimberly D. Tanner, “Structure Matters: Twenty-One Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity,” which was published in CBE Life Sciences Education in 2013. Why am I reading an article for biologists? Because it’s applicable to any undergraduate course. Tanner’s article is an especially clear and well-organized discussion of basic challenges and almost two dozen practical techniques for encouraging participation from students who otherwise might be left out.

Finally, because I’m teaching at two Catholic colleges again this fall, I’m rereading a 1993 educational statement released by the Society of Jesus: “Ignatian Pedagogy: A Practical Approach” (PDF). Most history teachers, of course, don’t need to worry about the specific theological commitments than animate this text. But the Jesuit order has a 500-year tradition of conceptualizing education as an imaginative, reflective, and aesthetic enterprise that prepares learners to become leaders in the world. Though not a Catholic myself, I always find this text energizing.

Celebrating an Award

Jonathan Wilson

Today I had the honor of receiving a Presidential Teaching Award from the De La Salle Institute for Teaching and Learning (DLSI). This recognition is given annually to one part-time and one full-time faculty member at La Salle University in Philadelphia.

Part-time faculty members are eligible to receive the award after teaching at the university for at least five semesters. Other criteria include a record of “enthusiastic engagement with students,” “incorporation of key elements of Lasallian pedagogy,” or innovation in “pedagogical methods that are intellectually rigorous, creative, engaging, and accessible.” The final decision of whom to honor is made by the university president, guided by the recommendation of a faculty advisory panel from across the university.

I was invited to offer brief remarks at the faculty awards event. So I delivered some thoughts that I hope went something like this:

Jonathan W. Wilson, speaking from a lectern at an event at La Salle University. Photograph courtesy of La Salle University Office of Marketing and Communication.
Photograph by Dan Nguyen, La Salle University

In 2022, a lot of us—educators at all levels—have the sense that we’re working in a time of general professional crisis. It’s a time of anxiety for us, and it’s certainly a time of anxiety for our students. The pandemic is only one part of it. Many of us now wonder whether our work is sustainable at all.

Three hundred forty years ago, it was in another time of general upheaval that Jean-Baptiste de La Salle established the Brothers of the Christian Schools. During that crisis, poor and working-class children in France needed better access to basic education, but teaching them was a badly regarded—and poorly compensated—line of work. La Salle’s solution, ironically, was to embrace poverty and humility.

That’s what the Lasallian watchwords “together and by association” meant in the seventeenth century. The teachers of La Salle’s order were supposed to live in solidary with each other and with their students. La Salle himself gave up both a personal fortune and excellent prospects of advancement through the ranks of the Catholic clergy. The trade was for a sense of meaning: deprivation now, but the confidence, shared with others, that your work had a higher, long-term value.

Today, one of the things that sustains me as a teacher, despite the insecurity of our time, is getting to participate in the long Lasallian tradition. I draw strength from its unusually vehement insistence that, in spite of everything, we don’t work alone, and our work has a long-term purpose. That’s why this particular form of recognition means so much to me.

How Footnotes Work: A Scavenger Hunt

Jonathan Wilson
The first page of Steven Watts's article "Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century."

Following up the small group activity I described last week (“Reverse-Engineering a Scholarly Article”), I developed a similar classroom exercise this week. The new activity was a “scavenger hunt” designed to help the same students become more comfortable using footnotes.

(I’m asking this class to use footnotes to cite the sources in their final projects, and I was aware that some students had very limited exposure to this form of scholarly architecture.)

I based the activity on Steven Watts’s article “Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century,” which was published in 1995 in the Journal of American History.

I printed enough copies of Watts’s article for each student to have one—but with a catch. Each student would have only part of the article. They would have to pair up to compare their versions. Some students got “Version A,” which included the first half of the main body of the article. Others got “Version B,” which included the second half. Both versions included the introduction and conclusion.

This was my way to make sure the activity would involve plenty of interaction.

Continue reading “How Footnotes Work: A Scavenger Hunt” →

Reverse-Engineering an Article: A Small Group Activity

Jonathan Wilson2 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I tried a simple new activity. The students in this course, all first-year undergraduates, are working on original research projects. One student had asked me for practical advice about how to outline their history paper—an essay that will be longer than anything they’ve ever written before. I came up with this activity for a subsequent class meeting. As I expected, the activity took an entire 75-minute period.

The first page of the article "Forgotten Habits, Lost Vocations: Black Nuns, Contested Memories, and the 19th Century Struggle to Desegregate U.S. Catholic Religious Life"

First, I located a scholarly article that seemed appropriate in various ways. I was looking for something with a reasonably accessible subject matter and writing style, clear organization, and some identifiable relevance to our course. I also wanted the article to be of moderate length: not overwhelmingly long, but not too short, either.

I settled on Shannen Dee Williams’s “Forgotten Habits, Lost Vocations,” an important article published in 2016 in the Journal of African American History. Among its many other virtues, this text would be relevant to our university’s ongoing mission-and-heritage-month celebration. (This college isn’t affiliated with the IHM sisters, who are the focus of Williams’s article, but it is affiliated with a different Catholic teaching order.) I was also pretty sure some of my students would find it very interesting on its own terms. And it would let me talk a little about how scholarship develops over time; Williams has a book coming out soon, and that book will incorporate material from this article into a larger story and argument.

I printed and stapled a copy of this article (double-sided, two pages per side) for each student. Then I prepared a set of directions.

Continue reading “Reverse-Engineering an Article: A Small Group Activity” →

“Remember the Roots of Our Discipline”

Jonathan Wilson
William Cronon’s presidential address, delivered on Jan. 4, 2013, in New Orleans.

In a distracted world …, and at a moment when there seems to be widespread public doubt about whether to continue supporting the study of the past as this organization has traditionally understood that activity, what is the future of history? There are many answers to this question, of course, and it is the job of the American Historical Association—and all of us—to offer those answers as effectively as we can to defend in public the continuing importance of history both in the United States and in the wider world. But for me, there is one answer that is arguably the most basic of all, and that is, simply: storytelling. We need to remember the roots of our discipline and be sure to keep telling stories that matter as much to our students and to the public as they do to us. Although the shape and form of our stories will surely change to meet the expectations of this digital age, the human need for storytelling is not likely ever to go away. It is far too basic to the way people make sense of their lives—and among the most important stories they tell are those that seek to understand the past. …

[T]he undergraduate classroom, far more than the graduate seminar, is where we take the results of our monographic research and place them in a much larger interpretive frame where we can show our students—and, by extension, our non-professional readers and ourselves—the larger meanings of our work. Original research is of course indispensable and lies at the cutting edge of disciplinary growth and transformation. But no one else will ever know this if we fail to come back from the cutting edge to integrate what we have learned into the older and more familiar stories that non-historians already think they know and care about. This is where we join other historical storytellers—journalists, novelists, dramatists, and filmmakers, as well as our academic colleagues in all the other historical disciplines—to keep asking what the past means and why ordinary people should care about it.

—William Cronon, “Storytelling” (presidential address to the American Historical Association), New Orleans, 2013