Ethan Mark
Grensverleggend geschiedenis leren.
Naar een ingrijpende periode als de Tweede Wereldoorlog kun je vanuit totaal verschillende perspectieven kijken.
Ander perspectief
Door studenten grensverleggend geschiedenis te leren, komen ze in aanraking met een totaal ander perspectief op de Ander maar ook op onszelf, en op onze wederzijdse interdependentie. Wij hebben bijvoorbeeld een bepaald beeld van de Tweede Wereldoorlog maar het Aziatische perspectief is radicaal anders en dat kennen we te weinig. Ik wil de discussie verdiepen naar WO2 als Globale Geschiedenis door een SPOC te ontwikkelen in samenwerking met collega's en studenten van verschillende specialisaties uit verschillende landen.
Voortgang van het project
The past year has seen substantial progress in my Leiden Teachers' Academy (LTA) project, which involves the designing and implementing of the textbook/online course “Crossfire of Empires: Global Histories of WWII.”
In June a group of expert colleagues from Europe and the US specialized in the modern histories of Asia and Africa came together in Leiden to present and share ideas in a two and a half-day workshop to this end. Out of these exciting and fruitful presentations and discussions - along with exchanges with my LTA colleagues and several seminars on education innovation over the course of the last year, including one in particular led by Dilly Fung from University College London’s “Connected Curriculum” program - came new ideas regarding the shape of the textbook, the online course, and their potential interaction. Alongside the more general idea of making greater use of online resources and multimedia to change/augment the way we teach - blended learning, flipping the classroom and the like - what I’ve found particularly inspirational is the idea of integrating research and teaching more actively into our curricula by getting students more actively and consciously involved in the research process and the motivations and thinking that animate it.
Most appealing to me here is the notion of inspiring student passion for knowledge, learning, and critical thinking by using teaching as an opportunity to expose them to our own passion for what we do, where it comes from, and most importantly why it matters: how we envision our research and the stories we tell as a way of changing understandings of the world for the better. More specific ideas include making the planned textbook part of a larger toolkit rather than a stand-alone work, a role that can be enhanced through publication in an open-access, on-line format that allows use of multimedia linking and the supplementing of written chapters with web interviews of each author, for example. These interviews could cover questions including personal scholarly motivations, conventional approaches and the benefits of new ones, and linkages between local, regional, and global histories. Students could then be asked to view these interviews on their own, or in class and then discuss how such approaches might be deployed in other contexts more familiar to them, in their own research projects.
Ethan Mark (Geesteswetenschappen, Japans)
'De eigen ervaring heeft geleerd dat we veel meer gemeen hebben met Aziaten/Japanners dan we denken.'