One of my favourite aspects of my job is that I teach mostly to non-historians. The International Foundation Program is aimed at international students who performed just below the minimum IELTS/TOEFL score required for direct admission into U of T. Instead of being denied admission, these students get a chance to take a transitional year in which they improve their language skills by taking an academic course and extra classes in academic skills, writing, and speaking. I teach the academic course – a first year world history course that I run pretty much as I would if I were teaching it in the history department. The main difference is that my students did not choose to take my course. Many of them are going into the sciences or commerce and are not particularly fond of history. They confess to me that they actually hate history.

Instead of seeing that as a hurdle, I see it as an opportunity. I can relate to how they feel. I too came from an educational system in which history was boring, based on rote-learning, had absolutely no meaning. A system in which you were discouraged from asking questions because that would be the same as telling your professor that he did not explain the lesson well. You needed to show respect and the way you did it was repeating his or hers exact words in the exam. Although I loved reading historical novels, I found academic history very painful. That was until I came to Canada and took history at university and realized that it didn’t have to be that way. It changed my life. If I can share some of that feeling with my students, I would consider my job done.

My students are the elites in their countries. They come to Toronto to become doctors, scientists, businessmen and women. I don’t want them to become historians instead. There are enough historians in the world. But perhaps they can become doctors, lawyers, businesswomen who think more critically, question more, consider the historical implications of what happens around them.

In the last day of class this term, I asked my students to write in a small card what was the main thing they learned this year or what they enjoyed most. Many commented that the course changed their views of what history is and that it is much more interesting than they believed. It also changed the way they think in general. Last night a group of students organized a party for me and their academic skills and writing instructors and each student present (about 15-20 students) spoke for a couple minutes about how much they appreciated the year. I’ll miss this bunch. I love my job.

This year I followed the ten days model to teach IFP100Y, a world history class for international students. When he taught here at U of T, Tim Brook, a Chinese history specialist, taught world history by focusing on ten separate events spanning the world from 1500 to the present. I attended a workshop he gave in 2004 about the rationale behind such course and have wanted to teach it ever since. I look at it as the microhistory approach to the survey course, which fits well with my own preferences in terms of research and writing. A number of us actually took the course to other instutitions – I have friends teaching it at Ryerson, Western, University of Mississipi, University of Texas, possibly in the future at UNBC. It’s fun to be able to focus on only ten events and go into more depth but it is also very challenging for students since the connections are not immediately apparent and they want a more predictable, narrative course. There is also no textbook, which puts the onus on me to present enough material in class for students to be able to get a sense of the topic and evaluate the readings.

While I thought of some of those issues at the beginning of the course, what I didn’t think about enough was that some topics would be difficult to face for some students. We are currently discussing women in Iran and the effects of the Iranian Revolution. Turns out one of my students is Iranian, has suffered personally in Iran, and wanted to forget about that past and now finds it back haunting her. I have tried to be supportive of her feelings and have also tried to keep other students from falling into Islamophobia and have worked hard to keep the Muslim students from being put in a position in which they have to defend their faith. I’m not sure how successful I am at all those things. I would be happy if I can teach my students how to appropriately discuss these difficult topics respectfully and without drawing from their own prejudices. I feel this would be key to be able to successfully integrate into life in this very multicultural university.

I wish I could say I did it on purpose, but I can’t get over how fitting it is that yesterday, March 7th, was the first of two lectures in my world history course on the protests in Iran after the announcement that all women had to wear the hijab (March 8, 1979). In tutorial today we’ll be discussing Jane I. Smith, “Women in Islam: Equity, Equality and the Search for the Natural Order.” I was very taken when a Kazak, a Turkish, and a student from Azerbaijan came to talk to me after class to talk about how these debates have been discussed in their country. My Chinese students seemed puzzled and some came to talk to me after.

A good way to celebrate International Women’s Day.

I wish we could also discuss this:

January 16, 2012 at 2:00 PM. The date of my defence (defense?) has come and gone and it feels a bit surreal. Hard to believe the PhD is done.

The defence was actually enjoyable; we had a good discussion about notions of legal acculturation, which is one of the topics I got most excited about in my dissertation. The week is busy at the moment but I’m planning a post on the issue for the weekend. The plan is to dust off this blog and get it going again this year.

For the first time, a THATCamp was held at the AHA attracting a big group of interested DHers who had not yet been able to make it to this popular unconference. During the introduction, Dan Cohen asked for a show of hands of those who had never been to a THATCamp before and a full 70% of the crowd raised their hands. It was nice seeing so many people interested in matters at the intersection of technology and history.

After a session on crowdsourcing,  we discussed the problem of how to rescue old sites from oblivion (in which the concept of the Internet Paramedics was coined), followed by a very fruitful session in which Jeff McClurken shared with us his experience teaching both digital history courses and digitally-inflected courses. Check out his amazing link of resources.

Listening to Jeff and reading his syllabi and the amazing work his students produce makes me itchy to try some of that in my own classes. Monday I begin a course on medieval Spain that will be digitally-inflected. Students will be required use extensively the wiki platform in which I designed the course website. One of the assignments is an essay based on the Poem of the Cid but instead of simply writing a paper and handing it in to me, I want them to create a page on a wiki project on El Cid. We may end up with about 50 pages on various aspects of El Cid, which we will then organize in a thematic table of contents. The second stage of this project will be to write a critique of a recent book on El Cid using resources from the El Cid wiki.

Another way the students will use the wiki is by writing notes on the lectures. Each week a team of students will be required to write a short summary of the main points of the lecture, highlighting three passages from the readings and explaining how it connects to the lecture as well as listing a few key terms and giving definitions. The rest of the class is expected to post comments on the readings to the page.  Can’t wait to see what they come up with!

I’ve spent the day at a workshop at U of T dedicated to developing Drupal websites. This was organized as a Bootcamp session of the GTA version of THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp). I’ve played with Drupal before and we use it to run the ePorte site but have never tried creating a site from scratch on it. The learning curve is pretty steep to play with it on your own so it’s very nice to have a whole day devoted to it at THATCamp GTA.

Our project was to create a news site, with a news content type, designing categories for our news posts, installing a theme, editing it, and so on. It was fun and I can see how powerful Drupal is since every little things needs to be set up and can be customized in many different ways. It might be an interesting platform to use for the research project Dana and I will begin next year. In a few hours, we had a site like this:

 
For simple sites, WordPress still rules though.

I’ve participated of my first Yak Lab today, organized by DISC. The idea behind the yak labs is that participants would bring a problem and we would work on it together during the workshop. I was in charge or bringing a problem to the table and I brought a pedagogical one. I’m basically shopping for a digital history project to have as class project for the third-year course on medieval Spain that I’m teaching next term. I strongly believe in teaching some basic digital literacy in all my courses but often have to contend with the problem that most students don’t have my technical background and I don’t want to lose too much class time teaching tech skills.

Some of the things I’ve done in the past is to use wikis or blogs to start class discussions but I haven’t actually had students hand in research projects in a multimedia format. I’m really keen in doing that but need to have it well prepared ahead of time so we don’t get boggled down in details once the course starts.

Some of the ideas we discussed in the yak lab include:

• El Cid wiki project – Students would read the poem of the Cid and write a wiki page on a specific topic using the poem as their primary source. It’s basically a variant of a source analysis. The idea is that I could assign 5 different theme clusters and students would basically choose a topic within those. A second stage of this project is to go back, once all students have contributed their pieces, and have students cross-reference their entries adding links to the entries written by other students. Follow up – the idea is that this wiki would be used by the whole class. In order to have that happen, a second assignment would be an evaluation of a secondary source that uses the poem as one of its sources. Students would evaluate it by using the wiki project as a source.
• A less developed idea is to work on the use of the medieval past in Spain today. I’m thinking here of having students look at brochures/websites from tourism sites from different places in Spain and analyze the way they approach the medieval period.
• Others floated the idea of developing maps/timelines as well.