Teaching

As a transnational historian of cultural encounter and exchange, my scholarship and my teaching are both deeply informed by deep reflection on the development of the concepts that structure our interaction with the world. As a teacher, I work with students to think about the ideas and values of the past and the ways in which they continue to inform the present. I challenge students to engage directly with the ideas of the past and think critically about the ways in which their own values and ways of understanding the world reflect the intellectual traditions in which they are based. Students think about how ideas from the past shape social justice and citizenship in the 21st century.

I have taught diverse student bodies at multiple institutions across the country, all of which inform my pedagogy. Currently, I teach at Jacksonville University, a small liberal arts and sciences college in North Florida. I teach lower- and upper-division courses in European, African, and world history. In the small-college environment, I have oriented my teaching more heavily toward discussion of primary sources and incorporated Reacting to the Past games in multiple courses, which ask students to play the role of historical actors in influential historical events, working with secondary and primary sources to achieve their desired outcome and better understand contingency and causality in history. Many of our students arrive without the reading and writing skills needed to succeed in college, a challenge I have turned into an opportunity to work closely with primary sources on in-class assignments.

At Washington State University, I worked with mostly first-year students to develop college-level skills in the humanities and think critically about historical roots and approaches to social justice in the Roots of Contemporary Issues program. I introduced students from all majors to the importance of the liberal arts, reflecting on the social and historical aspects of many fields. At WSU, I worked with Residential Life staff, librarians, and writing instructors to develop student critical thinking, communication, and information literacy skills in and beyond the classroom and the Office of Diversity Education to develop workshops on diversity to help students understand their positionality and the functioning of racial and other inequalities in the present-day world as we study the historical development of racial inequalities. Prior to WSU, I taught classes in modern European and modern world history at a mid-Atlantic public school, Temple University.

My assignments focus on developing students’ ability to construct a critique through close readings of primary and secondary sources. I assess student learning with thesis-driven writing assignments, which I begin in the early weeks of a course. My writing instruction centers on developing students’ information literacy and written communication skills. Students in my world history course work closely with me and librarians to develop a digital history research project on the WordPress platform. Students, most of whom take the class for general education credit, develop their own research questions based on their interest in a contemporary issue of their choosing, learn about types of sources, library resources for finding them, and produce a final project that combines the thesis-driven argumentation and historical evidence of a traditional research paper with skills in digital presentation and the use of open-access media. Students work with peers in writing workshops to develop their written communication skills.

My seminars are student-directed: students develop discussion questions, responding and learning from each other while I direct discussion. Students in my writing seminar work with their peers in a series of writing workshops with their classmates to develop more formal research papers that place local histories within a transnational framework. In evaluations, students frequently praise my ability to create a classroom environment conducive to learning and respectful of diverse perspectives. As the historical subfields I teach are often remote from students’ personal experiences, I believe it is particularly important to create an environment in which students can grapple with difficult concepts.

My pedagogy is dedicated to creating an environment in which students can explore the ways in which history is a living creation and part of ongoing cultural and political debates while developing essential critical thinking, communication, information literacy, and diversity skills. I ask students to reflect critically on the ideas and values that have shaped their world and work with them to develop their own historical consciousness and abilities that will make them more engaged citizens in the 21st-century world.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

100/1000-level courses

  • Modern World History, Jacksonville University
  • Freshman Seminar: The Past of the Present, Jacksonville University
  • Roots of Contemporary Issues, Washington State University
  • Hitler and Nazi Germany, University of the Sciences
  • History of Nazi Germany, Temple University
  • Modern Europe, Temple University
  • Gender and World Societies, Temple University
  • Turning Points in Human History: Modern World, Temple University

200/2000-level courses

  • European History through Film, Temple University

300/3000-level courses

  • Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Jacksonville University
  • Berlin: Capital of the Twentieth Century, Jacksonville University
  • Twentieth-Century Europe, Jacksonville University
  • Africa, Jacksonville University
  • Intermediate Writing Seminar in European History, Temple University
  • Revolutionary Europe, Temple University

400/4000-level courses

  • The Technique of History (methods seminar), Jacksonville University