More First Year Teaching Reflections: Two Different Experiences

Caroline Campbell, Department of History, University of North Dakota

I think I can speak for many of my first-year colleagues, especially those of us in the social sciences and humanities, when I say that my experiences were shaped by the fact that I was fortunate to find a good job in a terrible market. I was looking forward to beginning work at an institution that I was excited to join, which was located in a city that I had always thought of as a nice college town.

Teaching at the University of North Dakota: Two Different Experiences

Having just completed my first year, what are my reflections on teaching? I’d like to talk about the different experiences I had in teaching two courses in the History Department. First, I should note that I had a good deal of teaching experience coming out of the institution where I earned my Ph.D. I had created several of my own courses from scratch, which I designed based on my own interest areas, and then redesigned as I taught them multiple times. Perhaps most importantly, these courses were small and discussion oriented, usually comprising around twenty-five students.

Here at UND, however, I was to design and teach a large survey course, Western Civilization II (1500-present), something that would be a new experience. After teaching Western Civ for the past two semesters, I’ve come to several conclusions. First, familiarizing myself with new content, writing lectures from scratch, and creating effective assessments was incredibly time consuming. Second, there were tensions between what I knew I should be doing pedagologically and what actually happened in most class sessions. I’m well aware of important pedagogical approaches to teaching that include maxims such as “interactive learning is best,” “students retain what they learn at higher rates if they are active learners,” and “one should not run a course in a manner that the instructor’s notes are merely translated to the notes of the students.” Yet, understanding these approaches, trying them in the classroom, and actually having them work, are three different matters. I found myself constricted by teaching in a fixed-seat lecture bowl that met for an hour and fifteen minutes, where many students expected to be lectured to and remain anonymous. In other words, the course was less interactive that I would like. Third, there were a wide range of student abilities and attitudes, which I found to be very similar to the public university where I received my degree (the University of Iowa). Like at Iowa, some Western Civ students were diligent, dedicated, and engaged, while others were less so, including some who did not take notes during class and exhibited the type of problematic behaviors with which universities and colleges across the county are struggling. Last, and most troubling, were the surprising number of students who complained that the class focused too much on feminism. In reality, I had only touched on what historians consider to be one of the most important social and political developments of Western history – the centuries-long (and ongoing) fight by women and men to make the societies in which they live fair for both sexes. I had believed that I talked too little about feminism, not too much. Perhaps most telling, was that I did not get complaints from students that we focused too much on the rise of other political and social developments that have played a key role in shaping modern life, including liberalism, nationalism, socialism and imperialism. It is striking to me that among so many topics, some students singled out feminism, and I must say that I find it troubling.

On the other hand, I have also had some of my most enjoyable teaching experiences here at UND. I taught an upper division course on the Holocaust that was filled with students who were sharp, diligent, and willing to engage in respectful discussions. While this was a course that I had taught multiple times in the past, students this past semester regularly approached the problems we grappled with in ways that I had never thought of before. All topics of historical inquiry are laden with complexities, nuances, and contradictions. A course on something as prominent in popular culture as the Holocaust often lends itself to oversimplification (people killed Jews because they were “just following orders,” Hitler “brainwashed” Germans into supporting Nazism, if Jews had been armed they could have fought back against the Nazis). However, as a whole, this class had an intellectual curiosity that cultivated an atmosphere where we could explore why simple answers to complicated questions don’t hold up. I came away from this class impressed with students’ analytical abilities and intellectual engagement.

UND’s Role in Preparing Students for Life in a Global World

What I’m taking away from this first year is the conviction that fields of study like History, which encourage students to build skills – reading, writing, critical thinking – is crucial to teaching students what they need to know to be competitive in a knowledge-based economy. This includes cultural literacy in a global world. There is intriguing work coming out showing that hard work and perseverance play a more important role than natural talent or intellect in how individuals build successful careers and fulfilling lives. History courses lend themselves to teaching students the types of skills that employers want and that this country needs to remain vibrant. Universities that produce students who are culturally literate, skilled in reading and writing, and understand the value of perseverance, are making crucial contributions to our society. Having just come out of a brutal job market, I believe that it is vital that we here at UND help our students to develop the skills necessary that will prepare them to enter into a competitve, increasingly global world.