Teaching statement 2:
Learning begins with an involved student, who brings personal beliefs, knowledge and experience to the classroom. The student learns well who draws on internal motivation, finding important hooks into information and assimilating it into their recognizable cosmos. Students learn with different tools: verbal, visual, analytical. Teachers approach pedagogy from a similar matrix— a variety of intellectual inputs grafted onto personal experience. Teachers will use different tools to teach: verbal, visual, analytical.
To teach how people of the past thought or lived in a meaningful way, I believe it is important to combine verbal, visual and analytical practice in way that allows students multiple “entry points” into material: through personal connection, through arresting facts, by appealing to simple curiosity and imagination. Working together in a classroom examining artifacts and brainstorming their importance is one way to teach history.
Example: Display four pictures of colonial harbors, printed as marketing material in the seventeenth century for use in soliciting investments in colonial ventures. Students view the maps first individually and then side by side, and then “analyze” tin a guided series of question and answers. From the outset, the students understand their objective: to uncover a) what the maps show on the surface (i.e., the geographic and other features the colonists chose to highlight); and b) what the hidden messages are for each feature.
The students began by identifying the similar aspects on each map: water, harbor, land. Why would the colonists want potential to investors to understand that there was a natural harbor at the proposed location? What features did the colonists highlight about the land? Why did they want investors to see the land as wooded/fertile/etc. Then we looked at symbols the colonists included. Why would they show exotic sea serpents frolicking in the harbor? Why would they show shipwrecks? Finally, why would the colonists depict Indians on the maps? What did the colonists intend to convey about Indian relations?
These questions and answers provide an object lesson in using historical evidence to learn uncover the past. The maps demonstrate that the colonists had definite messages (the land will produce wealth; the Indians aren’t savages’; the harbor will support trade) to entice investments, but also to keep potential investors patient (the land is undeveloped; the sea is treacherous; the Indians are a potential threat).
The maps and this pedagogical device also teach a great deal about European attitudes toward the New World, due to their Euro-centric spatial orientations.
This teaching/learning experience works because it involves student participation—wrong guesses, correct guesses, imagination, discussion and debate—in a structured environment with stated goals.