Campus Voices
Upper School
I have found that one of the great things about teaching at BB&N is that the students can be some of the best teachers around. Let me explain.
After many years of teaching at the high school, college, and adult level, I have developed three basic teaching methods. First, I have been a mediator between the material and my students. Second, I have been a facilitator, providing a safe environment for my students to experiment with new themes. But the linchpin of strong teaching has been to become a learning partner with each of my students. In a class of ten to fifteen this can be challenging, but I hope that my students recognize my efforts to learn from them even as they are learning from me. The ideal learning partner relationship would be having the luxury of a one-on-one experience with a student, an independent study on a topic of mutual interest.
Last spring one of my junior AP US history students asked me if I would supervise him on an independent study. After much brainstorming, we agreed on the topic: History from the Perspective of the Other. Throughout the fall and into this spring, we have studied several peoples to see how they reacted to an invasion by a foreign power. We narrowed what could have been an endless list down to three: pre-Columbian America at the time of the arrival of the Spanish; the Arab lands at the time of the Crusades; and the History of India during the late years of the East India Company’s control. For each people, we read (dissected is closer to the truth) historical works, looking not only at the history from the varied perspectives, but also at the scholarly techniques used to tell those stories. Does the perspective of the author matter? This has been as close to a college-level tutorial as I have had in many a year.
In that, it has been an exciting course to teach. But I have also learned much by working carefully as a team with the BB&N senior. As the year has progressed, we have had to rethink many of our preconceived notions about the pre-invasion cultures we have studied. In each case, the invaders came upon societies which were more fractured by cultural and political upheaval than we imagined. All were in flux. Most striking of all was how long it took each of these societies to understand what was actually happening. Our historical hindsight of 20/20 was at worst a hindrance to real understanding.
Overall, my independent study experience has already provided me with two valuable lessons. One is that the History Department’s desire to globalize our curriculum will be more complicated and much more rewarding than simply adding a topic here and there to the basic courses as I have taught them in the past. And second, that at BB&N the best way to learn often comes from the learning partnership of two dedicated individuals, each willing to be both teacher and student.
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