Courses:

Vietnam: America's Lost War. Carnegie Mellon, Fall 1998 & Spring 2000

Global Studies. University of Kentucky, Spring 1998

Historial Methods (Junior Seminar). University of Kentucky, Fall 1996

Western Civilization to 1715. University of Kentucky, Fall 1997

US History Survey to 1865. University of Kentucky, 1990-1992

US History Survey since 1865. University of Kentucky, 1990-1992 (Spring 1992 I taught an experimental version of this course organized topically rather than chronologically.)

     My ultimate goal in any class is to engage the minds of the students in such way as to precipitate synthetic thinking. I believe that the liberal arts and sciences should literally "liberate" the mind, and free it from the assumptions and dogmas of received culture. Too often today's students leave college without ever seriously examining larger societal issues. Our failure as teachers is evident in history when students say "I hate history, its just memorizing dates and facts." As teachers we not only have a responsibility to communicate the important ideas, we must help student understand how to learn, must give them an idea of what learning is all about: expanding the horizons of the mind.

     To accomplish this, I combine traditional lectures with a variety of classroom techniques. I'm fond of film, for instance, because students are accustomed to being passive observers of what they see onscreen. When prompted to interrogate the displayed version, they begin to appreciate the viewpoints involved. Another method I use is to incorporate historiography into my courses so that students begin to see that history is about interpreting the past, and that the answers we get from the fragmentary record depend on the questions we ask.

     I have noted a danger teachers face when dealing with today's students: a tendency to lapse into a position of total relativism. "There are no real truths," they might think, "only viewpoints." I recall the horror of an English Lit teacher in a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed a while back, when she recounted teaching Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." Students nowadays, the teacher reported, are reluctant to condemn the stoning of an innocent woman merely for the sake of tradition. "We have to respect their culture," was a response.

     There are, indeed, genuine facts to be had in history, and there are, indeed, actions that are abhorrent, and students need to be able to see it. To liberate the minds of students into a monochrome world of intellectual and ethical relativism is not to accomplish much liberation at all. To be intellectually free, students need to be able to interrogate received wisdom and dogma for themselves, to be genuinely open to consideration of alternatives, and to be able to synthesize perspectives of their own. Such skills are, I think, becoming increasingly important.

      As an example of this importance, let me digress to say that one of my own interests is the intersection of culture and technology, a phenomenon is nowhere more explicit than in the emerging online cultures of the Internet with which students are increasingly familiar. Of course, I use internet technologies in my classes now, but there's more to this phenomenon vis a vis teaching than its function as a tool. As Ben Franklin put it, freedom of the press applies only to him who owns one. The potential of the World Wide Web to enable almost anyone to publish internationally is now realized, it is one of the most exciting applications of science this century, possibly eclipsing the impact of radio. Chat rooms and Usenet News groups enable like-minded people from all over to exchange ideas and build a sense of community. E-mail enables near-instantaneous communications. But even as the Internet is in its infancy, we have already seen legislation designed to stamp out some kinds of speech, and various national governments have imposed limits on the information that may travel across their borders. Moreover, there are indeed some disturbing groups out there in cyberspace: neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, hate-groups of all stripes, child-pornographers. The Internet is remarkably democratic in facilitating the building of community among the good, the bad, and the ugly. Indeed, the very concept of community and intimacy and friendship are metamorphosing as ideas are freed from physical representations, time, and space. In this world of frenzy and "internet standard time" it is absolutely crucial that students develop habits of critical thought and evaluation. I believe the teaching of history is important in this development.