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Like most of us who teach for a living, the first day of classes is exciting. It’s when we get back to doing what we’re sent here to do and for all the chaos and competing priorities in our professional and personal worlds, the classroom is one place where we can block those things out and focus on the task at hand.
I enter most semesters with a sense of confidence. I do all the teacherly things that are hot these days. I design my courses backward from the final assignment of the class to how I present the syllabus, I flip the classroom (and one a good day, I can get it to loop-de-loop), I try to maintain an inclusive classroom, and I am attentive to a range of assessment needs among my students.
The one thing that I rarely fret is content knowledge. This is mostly for two reasons. First, I am so intent on issues of pedagogy, course design, and method that I rarely spare much thought for what the class is about content wise. At my best, I have packaged content into neatly organized modules around course goals and manipulate what I know (or what I can learn or teach) to accommodate what I want to do in the classroom. As I’ve blogged about before, one of the key things in, say, a flipped classroom or in a classroom that is open to wide range of views is to be tolerant of ideas and perspectives that I think are probably wrong. Learning how to learn is often about a willingness to confront ambiguity in what we know. That means, as a teacher, we have to give folks space to be wrong, to rethink, to be wrong again, and then – maybe – eventually be right (but never to think you’re so right that you can’t be wrong). In other words, encouraging students to be wrong and giving them space to be wrong is fundamental to my pedagogy. The downside to this is that I have to check at the door the privilege that I’ve acquired from my expertise in a particular area. Knowing that a student is wrong is far less important than letting them figure out – whether in my class or later – that they’re wrong.
Second, I tend to teach at the margins of my area of expertise. I teach Western Civilization I where most of the time is spent with a high altitude survey of the West. I spend as much time wandering the Ancient Near East and the Middle Ages as I do in Ancient Greece and Rome, and even when I do find myself in my bailiwick, most of what I teach is rather different from what I know about the ancient world. Describing antiquity in a general way produces an ancient world that is quite different from the nitty-gritty that I’ve spent so much time learning. Otherwise, I’ve taught graduate historiography classes, undergraduate historiography classes, and methods courses at various levels. In other words, I never teach what I know, and this has given me the space to focus on both teaching and methods.
This semester, though, some of this will change. For the first time since 2004, I’m teaching Greek History. Not only do I know Greek history (well, some of it), but it’s something that I am still actively researching through my work with the Western Argolid Regional Project, through publishing on abandoned villages in the Corinthia, and through my longterm interest in Late Roman and Early Christian Greece. In other words, this semester I feel like content matters.
This realization has sent me into a bit of a spiral. Usually my classes are tightly organized around learning goals and outcomes, pedagogy, and classroom practices. And while I recognize that this is might sound like putting the cart before the horse, I think it speaks to a classroom where our hope is to teach students broad concepts, transferable skills, and methods for learning that they can hone throughout their lives. These things are important, of course, even in my Greek History class, but perhaps because of my own passion for Greece and the topic, they are less important than actually understanding Greece.
Starting this afternoon, I have to do more than let the latest pedagogical best-practices and course design philosophy dictate what I teach, I have to teach what I want students to learn and hope that over the course of the semester we find out way together.
Wish me luck.
