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The rose may smell as sweet regardless, but names still matter. Image from wikimedia commons.
Some weeks ago, not for the first time, I received a compliment from a student that both gave me a little glow inside and flabbergasted me at the same time. There are clearly some things I regard as a baseline effort in the classroom that other people just don’t. Naturally, it’s gratifying when students recognize their tutor’s hard work. It’s also extremely lovely when they are appreciative enough to let one know. As I replied, it can be unexpectedly difficult to tell from the front of the classroom how things are being received by students. (Are they quiet because they’re listening and thinking hard? Or are they all secretly stifling yawns?!) Letting tutors know when they do something right is important because it helps them – at least in theory – to refine their practice.
On this occasion the student remarked that my commitment to teaching was evident in the fact that I could remember my students’ names. Names? The fact that this should be something worth complimenting a tutor on is, quite frankly, horrifying.
I know some people find names hard. I know some people have been teaching for an awfully long time, and a staggering number of names and faces have passed before them. For all I know, this student’s other tutors are all suffering clinical prosopagnosia. If that applies to you, you have my deep sympathy. But for myself, I look at it this way: you, the tutor, have to meet with these young people on a weekly basis for at least three months. You might have a number of groups, but probably no more than (in our system, at least) five groups of twenty or so. That’s one hundred people, give or take. If it’s not the first semester of first year, it’s reasonably likely that you’ve met some of them before. You also have (or at least, we have in my institution) the facility to print off a photographic roll. You have to lead these students in discussion, teach them, advise them, collect and assess their work and, determining whether they’ve taken on your advice, return it to them, and eventually sign off that you are satisfied that the final grade they receive is appropriate to their level of effort and achievement throughout semester… and you propose to do all of this without being able to identify them as individuals? I’m sorry, but words actually fail me… Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t think I’m really adding to knowledge here, but it always comes as rather a shock to students that Luther didn’t simply spring out of the virgin earth as the ‘inventor’ of calls for reform of the Church. It says something, I presume, about the success of post-Reformation movements in discourse, casting everything that was thought or done before about 1500 (excepting, perhaps, the composition of the Bible) into superstitious and ignorant darkness. However, this is not the time or place for me to get started on a rant about that!
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I prepared a lovely and offensively vibrant handout for my students to illustrate, if not the entire (pre)history of reform, then at least some of the major points that should, I hope, enable them to contextualize the Reformation somewhat more securely. They hadn’t had the Schism in lectures, for instance, so reading from Nicholas of Cusa about the powers of councils to constrain popes rather flummoxed them until I did my ‘well, you know there were three popes at one point?’ gag. It’s the history tutor’s equivalent to the stand up comic’s fall-back oneliner. Always gets a reaction.
I’m putting this handout here not with any significant purpose in mind, but mostly just because I’m rather proud of my design efforts, and given how many hours it took me to construct, it may as well have an appreciative audience. Click through for the full hypercoloured glory. Enjoy!
What’s not to love about a brief history of Reformation in a multicoloured flowchart? Hint: start at the top left! Text & Design © Kathleen Neal.
Well, every humanities unit these days seems to have a week on gender, and here we are again. I’m going to get to a pleasing aspect of teaching the topic this time in a moment – but first let me get something off my chest…
A gender week.
Is it just me or are there problems with corralling gender into a corner of its own, and going off happily afterwards, dusting the hands, and saying “Right! Well at least that’s got *that* over with for another semester!”? I’ll allow that this is an issue most undergraduate students haven’t previously dealt with in the ways that academics tend to take for granted, and it’s complicated, so they need some careful guidance and signposting through the process. In that respect giving it some dedicated time and attention is clearly necessary and valuable, as was raised in the comments last time I talked about this matter. On the other hand, it seems to me that by so structuring it we risk perpetuating the marginalization of all things ‘gendered’: of confirming in young minds that women and femininity are peripheral concerns to History, and that men and masculinity can go on happily being the assumed centre while remaining essentially unexamined. I know there’s debate about this,[1] but I think I, for one, am becoming more determined in my view that what we need here is some integration, rather than reiteration of the battle lines. It appears that pedagogy hasn’t quite figured out the best way of achieving this yet. I can’t say that I currently I have any inspired answers to offer, merely a gripe.
So anyway, this semester I’m out of my comfort zone, teaching a unit on the (mostly Italian) Renaissance. Whodathunkit!? It’s quite fun, despite the risk of a nose bleed from straying so far forward in time.[2] For one thing, as a friend pointed out, teaching outside one’s own research specialty enables one to focus on teaching as a process. I try to practice active reflection on my teaching at any time, but there is an element of truth to this. Being less invested in the role of gate-keeper for the content of a specific discipline does free the mind to reflect on the structural aspects of how most effectively to convey any information, coach any skills, and so on. I have found myself taking a much more hands-off approach, allowing students to take a greater degree of control over the discussion, and to arrive at their own interpretations (which is not to say I don’t intervene if the conversation threatens to derail!).
Most of my students seem to have responded well to this responsibility/burden. They are rising to the challenge, and it’s a joy to see them develoing a better understanding of what being a tertiary student of history is about, and realising the raw potential of ideas themselves. Given that many of my students in this unit were also in my classes last semester, I can really see the development of their academic maturity since they arrived on campus, and I feel no small satisfaction and pride at their achievements. In some ways, one might say it’s all rather maternal!
Which brings me back to gender. This gender week – despite my reservations, above – has been one of those moments when the students’ increasing intellectual maturity and grasp of historical discipline has been born home to me. In conversations, I was glowing inside to hear students arguing that “maybe what this author meant by ‘love’ when discussing marriage was really what we might call ‘respect’?”, or that “maybe the ideals put forward for a marriageable woman in a text written for men contemplating matrimony weren’t a full or representative expression of women’s roles in marriage?”, or that – amazing! – “perhaps men were also constrained by social forces and norms over which their personal control was limited?”… These kinds of comments show me how far we’ve come since the essays in semester one. These are the moments that make teaching so much fun, and so darn satisfying.
Students, take note!
[1] See, for instance, Dyan Elliot, ‘The three ages of Joan Scott’, American Historical Review 113.5 (2008), 1390-1403.
[2] I wish I could take credit for this lovely and evocative metaphor, but in fact Joanna Huntingdon first brought it to my attention.
I’m in the midst of preparing a lecture on the use (and abuse) of King Arthur by twelfth- and thirteenth-century historians in Britain. This has been a real privilege, since a desire to study the ‘history’ behind the myth was one of the reasons I chose my particular undergraduate degree and institution, more years ago than is generally mentioned in polite society. As a bright-eyed eighteen year old, I envisaged my future as revolutionizing the understanding of this murky figure. Ah, the naïvety of youth! Somehow, despite being older and considerably more cynical now (if not necessarily very much wiser), being invited to take on this task feels like ‘arriving’, or at the very least, achieving a long-forgotten goal. It’s been a fair while since I considered the literature on this topic, so I thought a compilation here of what I see as the most pertinent and recent arguments would be a useful exercise for me, if not of gripping relevance to the rest of you. You have my permission to look away if you so desire.
Speaking of the abuse of history, this is *not* the King Arthur I’m going to be discussing…
My task in this guest lecture is to fill in “what happens to Arthur in (medieval) historians’ work after Geoffrey of Monmouth”, and I’m planning to adopt an essentially chronological structure on the day. In this forum, however, I’m going to begin from the other end with where Arthur and Arthurian history ended up in Edwardian times, since we’re all about the thirteenth century here.
…nor, for that matter, is this…
The pendulum of opinion concerning Edward I’s identification with Arthur has swung between two poles since the early 20th century: what we might call the romantic and pragmatic. R.S. Loomis, himself a noted Arthurian devotee, long ago took issue with what he saw as Sir Maurice Powicke’s excessively political reading of Edward’s understanding of Arthur.[1] Powicke had commented, as if in passing, that Edward’s procession to Glastonbury and the pageantry that attended his, and Queen Eleanor’s, ceremonial disinterment and reburial of the remains of Arthur and Guinevere was intended as a demonstration of the subjugation of Wales. Loomis argued that, instead, Edward was genuinely a devotee of Arthurian literature, and that, at the very least, “sentiment too was involved”.[2] I think it would be fair to call this the minority view. Rather more recently, Michael Prestwich assembled the evidence for Edward’s association with Arthur and found it to be unexceptional and unfocused: part of his general embeddedness in the culture of chivalry, but not constituting a particular dedication to an Arthurian cult.[3] Rather curiously, however, Prestwich went on to declare that it was “not clear what [Edward’s] purpose was” in going to Glastonbury in 1278.[4] Read the rest of this entry »
I really liked this distinction, raised by Prof. Peter T. Struck of UPenn, in a recent interview with The Chronicle on his hopes for and concerns about teaching a free online unit on Greek myth (you can read it here). I particularly liked his comment: “Great education is transformative. Data transfer isn’t.”
I wonder if I have been educating students, or shoving data at them. I hadn’t considered the difference terribly consciously until now. I hope I’ve done at least some of the former. Yet I fear that some of my – and my colleagues’ – obsessions tend to focus on data transfer, perhaps because it’s the easiest thing to notice when it goes wrong or fails. When a student hasn’t realised that a unit requires a certain footnote style, for instance, it’s noticeable: you mark an essay and groan as you write for the sixth or seventh time, ‘please note, footnotes are required by all history units…‘, and wonder why you bothered spending a whole tutorial on research and citation skills if nobody was listening.
We’ve thought and talked a fair bit about how to do this better next time, for example by doubling the tutorial time dedicated to discussing these skills, by redesigning relevant assessment to emphasise key skills, changing the format of the tutorial, and so on. This week, however, a colleague and I realised in the course of our conversation that most of the measures we’ve considered involve an increase in our responsibility, as if all we – as teachers – must do is ‘more’ and that will fix it. We began to think that, instead, we might need to force each student to assume these responsibilities for themselves: this, as we said to each other, is a more valuable thing to teach them in the long run than how to conform to MHRA style.
In light of Prof. Struck’s comments, I now see this little case study as a discussion of education vs. data transfer, and I’m pleased that we arrived independently at the notion that the former was preferable. The question remains, how to do it in practice. Education is a darn sight harder to do and to design than merely dispensing information. Somehow an eagerness for knowledge, and both the tools and the motivation to seek it for oneself have to be conveyed. Can this be done when the time allotted to a unit is no more than 22 lecture and 10 tutorial hours?
Any suggestions?
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