Teaching

As an educator I aim to inspire my students, to encourage in them a pursuit of lifelong learning, and to instil values of responsible citizenship.  Key to this is the promotion of critical-thinking, reading, and writing skills.  As an historian, I also aim to foster an appreciation for the past as a wealth of instruction for today’s complex and changing world.

I honour the diversity that students bring to the classroom.  I vary my teaching regularly to accommodate the full range of learning styles by offering a variety of assignments, combining audiovisual and traditional teaching materials, and varying modes of participation when feasible.  For students with special needs, including ESL students, I arrange opportunities for remedial work and seek out compensatory strategies so that they can perform equally to their peers.  My research looks at ethnicity, gender, and transnationalism, and I use my sensitivity to these in order to work with students both fairly and effectively.

The course materials I design aim to promote student engagement and participation.  I keep notes on how students respond to my lessons and performance, and gather formal and informal feedback from them periodically as part of my ongoing process of self-reflection.  I assess students on a continual basis to gauge where I need to reinforce learning and to provide students with feedback and opportunities to improve.  In these assessments, I ensure that expectations are specified clearly and that I solicit concerns from students well in advance of due dates.  My desire is for my students to perform honestly and to the best of their abilities. 

In keeping students motivated, I employ new technologies and orient the learning environment to hands-on, student-centred learning.  In a colloquium on the memorialization of World War One, I made students select online an interwar monument and tweet a picture of it to our class Twitter account. Then, in class, they discussed who constructed the monument and why. Students were able to learn the politics of memorialization from various countries in a dynamic and participatory way. In my courses, I aim both to challenge students and make them feel comfortable and secure, and stress the importance of cooperation in their interactions with their classmates and with me.  In seminars or tutorials, I ask students to tweet questions as they are doing the readings. Those students whose questions I select, are in charge of leading a 5-minute debate on that particular topic. I evaluate them on their understanding of material and how successfully they interact with their classmates.  This is one way I emphasize active participation in learning and the acquisition of soft skills such as respectful listening, building on other student’s opinions, and learning how to constructively disagree. 

Finally, in an effort to impassion students, I find ways to bring my research into the classroom. I use oral history interviews in my research to capture the agency of Muslim immigrants in Europe and understand anti-immigrant discourses. In my postwar Europe course, I design course assignments that build up students’ skills so that they are able to carry on an oral history interview as part of their final written assignment. In 2014/15, one student interviewed a Holocaust survivor and another a former Stasi spy. The more I am able to embody a love of learning in my experience, the more I am able to connect with students and furnish them with skills that they can apply to their future pursuits. 

Guy Bouffard, a mature student who took three year-long courses with me stated that “I truly enjoyed this course along with the others. Your passion, knowledge, and style inspired me throughout the year. I will model some of your teaching methods for my own classes in the future. I loved how you constantly challenged me to get the maximum results. I honestly think that you are a true inspiration to university students.” Personal email, April 12, 2014.