TEACHING AWARDS
Teaching Goals, Approaches, and Accomplishments
Teaching is one of the most rewarding callings, for its aim is to guide people toward the acquisition of knowledge. Because teaching is an interactive process, students impart to teachers as much in the way of intellectual stimulation and human fellowship as they receive from them. As a result, the teacher is in the enviable position of being paid to learn.
I have found teaching history at UIC exciting. The range of courses I have been able to teach is broad indeed, from weekly independent study meetings with one, two, or three graduate students, to specialized undergraduate and graduate courses on Russian and Soviet history with enrollments of fifteen students, to sweeping survey courses on the history of Western civilization with up to 140 students. The students I have had the pleasure to teach have ranged from history undergraduate majors and MA, MAT, and PhD candidates in history to a rich diversity of majors in my survey courses. The diversity of my students has also been great from the point of view of ethnic background, race, national origin, and stage in life. My students hale from dozens of different countries; many are full-time students, some take courses while plying a host of different professions and trades.
Naturally, I have tailored my pedagogical approach to the specific nature of each course. I generally structure my upper-level undergraduate courses and graduate courses in the form of colloquia, with an emphasis on the discussion of assigned texts in-class and the writing (and re-writing) of three to five short (4-6 pages) essays on assigned or agreed-upon topics. In most cases, the students present one or two oral reports to the class on their readings, which have in some courses depended more on student choice than on instructor assignment. Most recently, in my Writing in the Disciplines courses (Hist 300), I have so organized the writing assignments as to permit the students to integrate their several shorter papers into one relatively long (15-20 pages) term paper based on both assigned and outside readings. My discipline-specific goals in all of these courses are to help the students to acquire valuable knowledge about the past while developing their ability to think as historians, that is, to piece together an understanding of the past through a judicious, critical reading of historical literature and primary sources. Equally important to me as an educator is to aid my students to increase their facility for self-expression, both written and oral. As I often tell my students, there is little point in acquiring knowledge if one is unable to communicate what one has learned to others.
My survey courses, on the history of both Western Civilization and Russia (Hist 237), emphasize lecturing over direct participation by the students, although the students devote one hour in three of in-class time to discussion. I try as much as possible to make each lecture a little "show," integrating spoken text with visually presented texts and images, as well as examples of musical works related to them. The new multimedia classrooms have greatly expanded my ability to make my presentations attractive and compelling.
Overall, I have been grateful for the opportunity of taking part in the education of hundreds of students at UIC. There are few more exhilarating feelings for a university professor than to witness the return of students to campus at the start of an academic year. It signals the yearly rebirth of the university, a rebirth the more welcome as the physical world is just then leaning toward its yearly decline.