Abigail R.

Gautreau
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Earlier this fall, as I taught my US history students about the Ghost Dance, one student
raised his hand and asked me who the president was in 1890. I told him that I did not
know off the top of my head, and stopped to look it up. I then explained to them that it
was great to know that Benjamin Harrison was president in 1890, but that such facts in
isolation were trivia, and that knowing why I had a hard time remembering who was
president in 1890that it was the Gilded Age, and there were several single-term
presidentswas history.
There was a time when I started teaching ten years ago when not knowing the answer to
such a question would have caused me great consternation, but as my teaching has
evolved, I have found that creating space for uncertainty and questions helps my
students better develop their sense of what is important and what is not. I want them to
leave my US history survey with an understanding of the broad trends of history
supported by evidence and examples, rather than a haphazard assortment of facts. I ask
more questions, give the class more opportunities to chime in with their own knowledge,
and ask them to brainstorm about what they know. I have found that the more control I
relinquish, the more engaged my students become, and that engagement makes for more
interesting classes for both parties.
While a survey course can be structurally limiting, this fall I had the opportunity to teach
Introduction to Cross Cultural Experiences, a foundation course for the Global Studies
program. The course has a much more flexible set of expectations, and I accepted it on
short notice and decided to treat the course as an experiment. I wanted participation to
be a key element, since I only had eighteen students, and I asked them each to write
goals for participation down at the beginning of the semester. They kept them, and at
midterms pulled them out and wrote self-evaluations for their participation grades. I also
asked them to give me feedback on what I could do to help them improve their
participation, and I have applied that feedback to subsequent classes with great success.
They will revisit those goals again at the end of term. I openly talk to them about my
plans and the techniques I am trying, treating them less as students and more
stakeholders in this process. I have found that the same processes I use to work with
communities in my public history projects work with my students.
My goals in teaching, above and beyond content, are for my students to grow their critical
thinking skills and develop a sense of responsibility for their own education. For
undergraduates, this means completing projects that build their skills in using primary
sources, learning how to do research, and expanding their written communication skills
so that they can contribute to scholarly conversations. For graduate students, this means
engaging critically with the literature, improving their written communication skills, and
developing the interpersonal skills and techniques they need to work as a team on a
variety of public history projects with colleagues and communities. It also means
exposing graduate students whenever possible to real-world scenarios, like working as a
team to complete a National Register nomination or attending a community meeting.
This also means giving them space to fail in a setting where failure is not a catastrophe
so that they learn how to recover. I want my students to leave my classroom with the
preparation and confidence to face whatever challenges await them.