Teaching Approach/philosophy
My approach to history emphasizes story telling. So often, history is presented as a dry series of facts and numbers, stripped of any meaning to the students who are supposed to be learning them. Why? Because the state says that they’re supposed to. This badly misses the mark in what makes history interesting in the first place. Namely, that it is the story of us, as a species, as a nation, and as a community.
As such, learning history means listening to or reading the stories of those who have come before. Sometimes in their own words, where those are available, and sometimes from secondary sources. Either way, stories of the people who did the things written of in the history books are much more likely to stick with a person than a simple recitation of the events themselves. Why did they act as they did? What were their goals? I hope to bring this personal lens to my unit as well by looking at the colonists and the colonized peoples both on a wide scale and individually. Why did the colonists exploit the natives? What of those that knew it was wrong? On the other hand, were the people of Africa and the Americas initially glad to see the Europeans? When did this change, if it did? Why? Who led resistance to the colonizers?
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