My students love to talk about “bias.” They want to describe certain primary sources as “biased” and therefore unreliable, or compromised in some way. This discussion often comes up in one of the first classes when we discuss the differences between primary and secondary sources, but then recurs throughout the semester. Although I devote much […]
Last year, I was inspired through my Humanities Alliance mentorship with Dr. Karen Miller to finally move away from teaching with a textbook. I had used textbooks in my classes the previous few semesters, but never felt that it really aligned with my teaching philosophy or the interpretations of history that I wanted to encourage […]
I like to alter my syllabus every semester. Even when I am teaching the same course as in the previous semester, I try to change the syllabus to reflect the success or failure of assignments and lesson plans from the previous semester. I hope to plan more of whatever felt like it was […]
I like to end the semester with an optional in-class course evaluation of my own design. I enjoy reading students’ reflections on their work over the semester, and I find their feedback on particular pedagogical techniques very useful. I often ask what their experience was of particular assignments, and if they found certain teaching techniques […]
In the fall, I applied for and was awarded a mini-grant from the Teaching and Learning Center at the Graduate Center to use in my Spring history course. I planned to use the grant to take my students on a field trip to the Museum of Chinese in America to model part of a scaffolded personalized research […]
I have been observed four times as a college-level instructor, and formally evaluated three times. I felt nervous while teaching during all the observations, but I also found them all to be useful. In each case, I reviewed the evaluation with the observer and discussed elements of the class that seemed to work particularly well, and ones […]
Most graduate students have had the experience of reading work written by their professors in classes. In the courses I’ve taken at the GC these class sessions have often included useful conversations on the processes of crafting and completing academic research and writing. My professors have discussed how they formulated their research questions, problems or […]
“But how did the immigration officials know?” A student interjected into a discussion of the mechanics of Chinese exclusion in class on themes in U.S. History.We had been considering a chapter from Stacey Smith’s Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle Over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. In the chapter Smith explores California’s antecedents to the […]
