4 Skills for Lifelong Learning

Since completing my third-year review in the spring of 2017, I have only taught during the January term and spring semester of 2018, but I had some of the most exciting and rewarding moments of my teaching career so far. I remain more committed than ever to helping students become lifelong learners and develop skills that will serve them well beyond their college years. Given the changing landscape of higher education and the challenging times we are living in, however, I have also tried in the past year to innovate and emphasize how studying history and might be one of the best tools we have at our disposal to navigate and fight back against the world of fake news, the attacks on democracy, and the regular dehumanization of immigrants, refugees, and minorities. Although I teach U.S. history, these realities are global, and the United States plays a unique role in shaping what other countries are doing. My native country of Italy is the latest and, unfortunately, one of the most successful examples of U.S. influence around the globe as xenophobic politics inspired by figures in the U.S. alt-right movement have taken root in the government and public discourse.

In January 2018, I taught my first digital humanities (DH) course at Gustavus. The course was part of a Mellon Digital Humanities Grant program that allowed faculty to experiment with DH courses while receiving support from colleagues across campus. Although many of my courses are digitally inflected, I welcomed the opportunity to design a course entirely grounded in DH pedagogy and develop an assignment that pushed students out of their comfort zone while giving them skills that they could use well after taking my class. Building on the positive feedback I received last spring from the students in my immigration history course, I decided to center my J-Term course around what it feels like to be a minority in Minnesota. Students read essays from immigrants, people of color, refugees, and international and transracial adoptees who call Minnesota home. For each reading, I provided short historical contexts and placed Minnesota in a national context. For the white students in the course, these readings were an opportunity to grapple with realities that are very different from their daily lives. The first-person accounts also allowed the students in the class who found echoes of their own lives in the stories to share their own experiences. At a time when immigrants, refugees, and people of color are criminalized and vilified daily, the students had a chance to see the world through their eyes and reflect on how they can contribute to or challenge the status quo. Students reflected weekly on the connections between what they were reading and their daily lives on campus, at home, and in the United States. I find this work particularly important, especially considering that immigrants founded Gustavus.

In a continuing effort to craft assignments that students find relevant to their lives and connect to what we are studying, students in my J-Term course created a 3- to 5-minute video about a personal immigration experience or the immigrant experience of someone they knew. For the purpose of this project, I defined “immigrant” broadly. I emphasized that there is no one way to tell an immigrant story because there is no single story that represents all immigrants and their histories. They could tell a personal immigrant experience or help an immigrant, refugee, international student, transnational adoptee, or the descendant of any of these people tell their story. The project was inspired by Immigrant Stories, a digital storytelling and archiving project run by the University of Minnesota’s Immigration History Research Center (IHRC). As an affiliate member of the center, I strongly encouraged my students to share their stories to help preserve history for future students and scholars. To emphasize the importance of clear and strong writing, even for digital projects, students spent most of the semester writing, revising, and workshopping their script. We also watched several videos that were already part of the database to tease out the most compelling narrative strategies and the most effective media. In addition to writing the story, students recorded an audio voiceover and selected images and media (such as personal photos, family documents, home videos, and music) for the video. As seen here and here, students produced thoughtful and deeply researched videos. One of them even composed the music to his own video. Two others students visited the local archive on their own to find images for their stories. The next day, they brought to class a treasure trove of photos about their grandparents and great grandparents. Those who chose to tell someone else’s story went to great lengths to represent their experience as sensitively as possible and regularly communicated with their subject to make sure they were representing their stories accurately. They were all proud of the videos they produced, but they didn’t expect how supportive and excited their families and friends would be about them. One of them even shared it during an interview for an internship and is convinced that that’s what earned her the internship!

In the spring semester of 2018, I taught the most challenging and rewarding course of my teaching career so far. I had the amazing opportunity to co-teach a class with Professor Laura Burrack from biology: The History of Eugenics and the Future of Genetic Testing. Building on the theme of the 2017 Nobel conference (Reproductive Technology: How Far Do We Go?), Laura and I designed an interdisciplinary course that explored the intersection of science, reproduction, and the use of reproductive technologies in U.S. society in history and today. Students learned the history of eugenics to explore its impact on debates over reproduction and belonging in the United States and studied the science underlying recent developments in genetic testing for human diseases. The course also tackled the ethics surrounding the role of science and history when it comes to reproduction. Thanks to a Curriculum Development and Revitalization Grant from Kendall Center, Laura and I had the opportunity to meet regularly to tease out the details of the syllabus and discuss best practices in team teaching. We spent countless hours mapping out the topics we would cover to make sure that the history and biology portions aligned, complemented one another, and related to the course topic. We also talked at length about our course policies and the best way to introduce students to our disciplines’ different research methods before they began working on their research projects. We continued our conversations throughout the semester with weekly meetings, but we also committed to modeling our disciplines’ approaches to knowledge in the classroom. We asked each other questions and worked through the readings together. Students found this encouraging and stimulating and responded well to the demands of the class.

We designed two research group projects that guided students through the conceptualization, research, and writing of a humanities and scientific project. We intentionally created groups that included students with different backgrounds and created an assignment structure with multiple steps, several opportunities for feedbacks, and group meetings that allowed students to thrive and minimized the challenges of such assignments. It also helped that Laura and I tried to be flexible when something needed additional explanation or students felt that they needed more time. The students also presented their projects to the other team-taught course on campus, the two visiting Rydell professors, and the provost! This gave us an opportunity to professionalize our students and to organize discussions about the scientific and humanities research methods at the beginning and at the end of the course. The presence of the two Rydell Professors (a classicist and a scientist) during lectures, labs, and class discussions further contributed to our ability to show our students how different disciplines do research, approach a topic, and think critically about contemporary issues. Not surprisingly, students began the course assuming that scientific research would be far more difficult than humanities research. By the end of the semester, they came to appreciate that both are equally challenging and that neither is completely objective. They also realized the benefits of approaching the same topic through the lens of more than one discipline. Their final reflections, which asked them to make a case for similar courses to a broad range of stakeholders, demonstrated the intellectual value of the course but also the personal rewards for students. Many surprised themselves by how much more comfortable they had become in the discipline with which they were less familiar at the beginning of the semester. Others were so taken with their research topics and the course that we would regularly receive emails from them. We have continued to hear from many of them even after the end of the semester. I sincerely hope that I will have the opportunity to teach this and other similar courses again. I learned a lot from Laura as a teacher and a scholar, but I also liked being a student again. I had to work hard on some of the biology readings!

The team-taught course also reinforced my commitment to fostering a class environment of mutual respect and collegiality, where students feel comfortable contributing to class discussions, asking questions about sensitive issues, and disagreeing without offending anybody. Studying history inevitably asks students to come to terms with difficult and sometimes uncomfortable legacies of their past. Studying the history of eugenics, especially amidst a resurgence of white supremacy in American society, required even more thought and care. By promoting a friendly environment where everybody’s ideas matter but can also be challenged, students learn to defend their ideas and ground them in solid evidence rather than just formulate an opinion.

During the spring of 2018, I also taught the history department’s capstone seminar for the first time. Although I had a taught an interdisciplinary capstone course at a previous institution, History 300 was essentially a new course for me. Thanks to the generosity of my colleagues, developing the course became a pleasure and gave me the chance to think carefully about how best to help students enjoy and finish a substantial research project. Given the recent uptick in mental health issues, I made sure to provide a course structure that helped students succeed with the least possible amount of anxiety that often comes with taking on such big research projects at the undergraduate level. I also incorporated opportunities for students to provide feedback to each other, meet with me on a regular basis, and reflect on how the skills and knowledge they had acquired in the previous years now transferred into crafting and completing a research project. As I explained to them: until the beginning of the semester they had been history majors. For a semester, they would be historians thinking critically about a research question, digging through primary sources for evidence for their argument, and grappling with how to frame their project within the existing historiography.

The capstone course was by far the most labor-intensive class I have taught at Gustavus so far, in part because I decided to provide feedback every step of the way, including three drafts. Nonetheless, the payback was just as rewarding. The students’ final presentations demonstrated how far the students had come in thinking about their project in more sophisticated ways. It was also clear that they had learned a lot from our discussions about how to talk about historical research to a diverse audience. This aligned with one of my most recent teaching goals, which is to teach students how “to translate” what they do in class and in college to people beyond the classroom and the hill. We talked regularly about how to use their research projects to demonstrates the type of skills they have acquired and the kind of higher level thinking and research they can do.

Advising and mentoring remain a critical element of my responsibilities as a teacher at Gustavus. It’s also one of the most enjoyable aspects of my job. While now I have my very own advisees, I continue to mentor and meet informally with many more students. Over time, my approach has become even more holistic, ranging from discussions about coursework, internships, studying abroad, and personal interests, to dreams, self-imposed and external pressures to succeed, and, more often than not, mental and physical wellbeing. Our students, like too many of us, tend to take on too many things at the same time. This is particularly overwhelming and taxing for students, but especially so for international students, students of color, and first-generation college students. As a former international student, a first-generation college student, and a scholar of race and ethnicity, I know firsthand what it feels like to belong to any of these groups. Since this is the type of students who usually come to see me, I do my best to offer strategies, direct them to campus resources, and model how to navigate these exciting but often challenging college years.

Last spring, I also had the pleasure to serve as the second reader for two history majors working on their capstone. I was incredibly lucky not only because I advised two very hardworking students, but also because one of them decided to create an exhibit rather than write a traditional capstone paper. Titled “The Age of Hobohemia, 1865-1920,” the student and I had great conversations about how to convey an argument through an exhibit, how to use a broad range of sources to tell a story and captivate the audience’s attention, and about the importance of creating a script that was clear and easy to follow but also analytically sound and engaging. At the end of the semester, my colleagues David, Glenn, and I, inspired by the three students who had worked on alternative projects, revised our capstone parameters to offer guidelines to spell out best practices for such projects.

From my first day, I have worked closely with international students, minorities, women, and first-generation college students. I have continued to collaborate with Jeff Anderson in CICE to help international students adjust to college life in the United States and have recently begun working with Carly Overfelt to help all multilingual students have a successful college career at Gustavus. Since my third-year review, I have worked more and more with students who struggle with or seek help with issues of wellness, mental health, and self-care. The number of students who have reached out to me to discuss these issues, even while I was on leave last fall, has truly surprised me. While I understand it’s a national trend, I find heartbreaking and disconcerting their stories about daily struggles to thrive and outsized expectations that set them up for a world of emotional pain and physical exhaustion. I had the opportunity to discuss some of the causes behind these spikes in a forum to which I was invited to contribute titled, “A Shadow on the Past: Teaching and Studying Migration and Borders in the Age of Trump.” Published in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the editors invited a range of professors teaching at different institutions in various parts of the country to share their experiences teaching and researching migration after the 2016 elections. While it was difficult to read about some of the challenges that some of my colleagues and their students at other institutions face, the forum gave us an opportunity to strategize together and discuss productive ways to move forward.