Teaching Philosophy
From helping students master the fine art of troweling dirt in the bottom of archaeology trenches in Bermuda to teaching English as a second language in Turkey to helping Digital Media Studies majors style and code websites here in Rochester, my experience and philosophy of teaching encompasses a capacious and multifaceted approach. Having personally witnessed the way that augmenting traditional teaching techniques with different ways of investigating the past, I have been deeply impressed and inspired by students' enthusiasm, engagement and appreciation for history viewed through a different lens. I strongly believe that history can and should include direct, tangible experiential dimensions and the integration of emerging digital technologies as ways of more fully and more clearly understanding the past.
Of course, I remain committed to teaching students the core skills of the historians craft such as careful research, critical reading and the crafting of lucid explanatory and argumentative prose. However, bringing direct, tangible and experiential dimensions to historical teaching has proven critical to fostering ancillary skills amongst students such as historical empathy and imagination a sense of historical context. As an historian, it not only incumbent upon me to teach my students about the past, but also to prepare them for the future; as a digital humanist, I bring emerging technology and dynamic new mediums into the classroom to help students apply their historical training in the digital sphere. Now more than ever, historians must be willing and prepared to help students expand their repertoire of competencies and to bring the deep wisdom and analytic skills of history to bear on the evolving world of information technology and new media.
Instructor of Record
HIS191 - Violence in Colonial America - Spring 2019
A history of both the role of violence in shaping early America, and the way that the unique conditions of early America shaped violence across the continent during the colonial period. Students will be called upon to engage thoughtfully with the cultural context of colonial era violence and to analyse its significance in the development of early America up until the late eighteenth century.
HIS326 - Doing Digital History - Spring 2020
A history of digital historical projects, tools, and techniques. The class features a number of guest appearances by practitioners of digital history, and offers students opportunities to gain direct, hands on experience with the process. Students also engage with a wide variety of tools and evaluate ongoing efforts to incorporate the digital into the work of history. The class culminates with the presentation of collaborative digital history projects conceived and developed by the students.
