Teaching

Teachers presently face overwhelming competition from social media in grabbing the attention of our students. With the advent of artificial intelligence, academics now find previous pedagogy may feel compromised, as our traditional belief in the rigors of writing-as-thinking (which formed the antidote to the notion of “what ails us”) has been outflanked by technology. Yet, the need to teach the analytical skills of the historian have never been more essential to the functioning of both national and global citizenry. We collectively offer insistence on the fundamental modalities of truth-seeking against the powerful pull of alternative narratives, online-influencer consumerism, and pervasive political disinformation. Overall, we will have to become even more creative in our educational response. In my classes, I find myself using more simulations, more creative projects, and more intense conversation to reinvigorate our shared time. 

If, as Benedict Andersen suggested, a nation is at its core an “imagined community,” social media has splintered that imagining, challenging the hold of collective values based in tolerance and civil rights and replacing with the cries of culture war. Even things as evidentiary as climate change have been dissimulated by counter-narratives. As an Americanist, I find our subject remains lodged in questions of how national identity and culture have been shaped or imagined. I see dynamics that are recurring and even predictable, as matters of race, gender, and sexual identity become increasingly contentious. When I introduce the ideas of luminaries, such as environmental historian William Cronon, I ask students to consider the question “why are historians, who spend their time immersed in the past, generally the most forward-looking individuals in a particular culture?” I note, as Orwell said, “he who controls the past controls the future” and that in a very real sense the fight for the future begins here in this classroom. To students who often feel disempowered or disinterested by the clamor of current events, the notion that the past matters in a determinative way can be deeply empowering.