Jennifer A.

Lyon Graduate Teaching Award Application, Teaching Philosophy

When entering the classroom, my teaching philosophy is guided by two basic questions. First, how can I best reach my students? Second, how can my class have the biggest and best impact on each of them? To accomplish the first, I purposefully model my teaching style and lectures after Franklin D. Roosevelts fireside chats from the 1930s. Roosevelt took care to use simple language and clear explanations when he spoke, ensuring that he was understood by the largest number of listeners possible. I work to do the same, using accessible word choice, examples, vignettes, and humor. I want my lectures to feel like a conversation, so my students ask questions and contribute to the discussion without hesitation. For this same reason, I make multimedia a priorityboth in class, and in the assigned material. Rather than just read a book, I have the students watch documentaries, historical television programs, read primary sources, and critically analyze photographs. Too often they believe that history is boring, but I believe that by making the material as interactive and its presentation as engaging as possible, the students can become as excited as I am about history. With the second question in mind, one of my fundamental goals is to transition students from seeing history and learning as an episode of Jeopardythat is, discrete facts to be memorized, recited, and then discarded. Instead, I want them to recognize connections between the past and present. To accomplish this, I purposefully incorporate analogies and contemporary examples to clarify the lecture material, and hopefully make them think more deeply about current events. For example, the crowning of Nina Davuluri as Miss Americathe first Indian American to winhas recently provoked a storm of racist comments on social media, with the overarching message that she is not American enough to hold such a title. The same week of the pageant, I lectured on immigration and nativism, showing caricatures of European and Asian immigrants from the early-twentieth century. After the class stated their belief that such sentiment would never be voiced in mainstream society today, I showed a compilation of the tweets related to Davuluri. It was in that moment that the class better understood anti-immigration in a historical context, as well as modern-day nativism. Seeing those a-ha moments is exciting for any instructor, and it is something that I want to accomplish in every single class. It is unlikely that my students will become professional historians. And it is likely their knowledge of events like the Teapot Dome Scandal will fade after the final exam. But by pushing them to improve how they communicate, analyze information, and form arguments, I believe I can help my students strengthen skills they will use long after college. To be sure, I do secretly hope I am creating a pack of armchair historians...but I will settle for better informed students who feel that my class has helped them see the past, and hopefully the present, in a new way.