My goal as a teacher is to help students develop skills of analysis and communication grounded in a deeper understanding of the past. A consistent theme in all my courses is engagement with primary sources: students work not only work with written texts, but also with music, film, radio, television, maps, speeches, architecture, urban space, and the visual arts. Then, through multimedia-based lectures, classroom activities, field trips, guest speakers, and projects, students and I seek to contextualize source materials by applying different methodological approaches, examining past debates, and linking classroom study to broader issues of public life.
I believe the classroom can be a far richer environment if it moves beyond the standard lecture format. In my courses, students conduct interviews, develop Internet websites, attend intellectual events of interest, go on field trips, and even act out the past themselves. For example, to investigate industrialization in the United States during the nineteenth century, my students break up into three groups—upper-class owners, working-class laborers, and middle-class managers—to debate the question posed by the American Social History Project: Who built America? Utilizing materials they have read and studied, each group of student makes their case. Once, my “working-class laborer” students staged a strike and threatened to walk out of the classroom!
I have also grown interested in how to teach effective historical writing. In my U.S. History Since 1865 course, I work with the Northwestern Writing Center to develop a set of related assignments that serve as building blocks toward a final essay. Students move through assignments on the component parts of a successful piece of analytic writing: a thesis; a successful body paragraph that analyzes evidence; introduction; conclusion; and transitions between sections of an essay. As they work on these smaller assignments, students receive feedback on their writing. The assignment culminates in a final essay in which students put together the materials and the writing skills they worked on during the term.
More recently, I have explored the use of digital tools for historical writing: students in my research seminar use annotation software, database tables, and interactive mechanisms to better track how they are moving from evidence to interpretation; digital technology becomes a way not of speeding up, but rather of slowing down the writing process so that students can begin to examine and improve their analytic skills.
I have also worked extensively with graduate students. I encourage graduate students to delve into both primary sources and historiographical debates through intensive reading, discussion, and writing. I have also overseen thesis projects on a range of topics: American nurses in the Vietnam War; the development of Old Town as a countercultural neighborhood in 1960s Chicago; the emergence of the contemporary craft movement; portrayals of the Civil War in high school textbooks; “scramble” marching bands at U.S. universities in the 1960s; and muckraking novels during the Progressive Era. Interacting with and mentoring graduate students has been one of my most rewarding intellectual experiences as a teacher and scholar. Most recently, I have introduced a course, Introduction to Cultural Analysis, in which students draw upon a wide range of intellectual sources to help shape their particular research interests.
My teaching of history also extends beyond the classroom. Museums, historical societies, outside speakers, film screenings, plays, concerts, and other institutions and events provide new pathways to knowledge. For instance, in a course I taught to gifted high school students on the cultural history of the Americas, we traveled to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art to learn about an exhibition focused on the Brazilian Tropicalia arts movement. Meeting with the show’s curator, students learned about the decisions that determined which art objects were chosen and why. The class had an opportunity to see how the history of Tropicalia—its controversial aesthetics and continued political relevance in Brazil—affected the creation of a contemporary museum exhibition. I have also taught courses in the emerging field of public humanities, including a graduate colloquium for students pursuing civic engagement opportunities as well as an upcoming Northwestern University course that will convene at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Students will learn about the museum world while practicing digital cultural criticism in a contemporary museum setting.
Increasingly, I am focusing on teaching digital history. In a course called Digitizing Folk Music History, students develop interpretive digital research projects based on primary sources in the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Collection at Northwestern University. Students not only acquire digital skills and literacy in the course and learn more about the folk music revival, they also confront basic methodological questions in historical scholarship: how does one frame a research question, describe existing interpretations, and offer a new analysis based on archival sources? Helping students to think about these questions, my digital history course looks toward future versions of history in the digital era while also suggesting to students that this future reinvigorates core aspects of historical study. I also teach a lecture course on the history of digital culture itself since World War II and a methods seminar on digital history.
Above all else, my pedagogical philosophy is grounded in the concept of critical thinking. Bringing together primary materials, raising relevant questions, mapping out explanatory problems and quandaries, connecting the classroom to public life, and helping students improve their skills of communication, I work to foster an atmosphere in which students can discover and relish history as a deeply relevant field of intellectual inquiry.