Dr. Samantha Cutrara:      Hi, Nathan. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. I know that you are busy with your consulting work and your teaching work, and it’s been such a struggle for so many of us to figure out timing in this new world. So thank you so much for making time to talk with me today.

Dr. Nathan Smith:        Happy to be here.

SC:        So I have been thinking of history differently because of what we’re going through now. It’s really made me think of things like affect and emotion, and how our historical record is really imperfect in capturing that. Have you thought of history any differently at this moment? So many people I spoke to, especially history professors, have said not necessarily, because they are too busy – have you thought of history any differently because of this moment?

NS:        I guess I haven’t overall. I haven’t thought of history as something different, but what you just said about thinking about different themes, thinking about emotion, thinking about affect, I think the times that you live in do make you emphasize aspects of the past or make you think about topics or approaches to thinking about the past in different ways. So it certainly has made me think about other times in the past where there has been a lot of anxiety in society, a lot of the commentary you read in the news, reporting, journalism and whatnot are things like the flu epidemic in 1919, the influenza, and also crises in the past.

A lot of the articles I’ve been looking at from Toronto media have been talking about the world wars and how government should be approaching the management of this crisis. So it does make me think about those sorts of things as a way of emphasizing themes about the past, but it hasn’t made me think about history as something different or imagining history in a different way.

SC:        I want to pick up something that you said at the beginning and I want to know if I am hearing what you said right. And if I’m not, maybe you’ll still agree with me, but like, are you thinking about how our current moment really shapes the way we think of the past, which then makes me think of like how so much of our history is really a reflection of the present because we’re pulling from the past to help us understand this moment. Did I get that right?

NS:        Yeah, I think so. I think definitely, the topics that we choose to write about I think, as historians and teachers, we often choose to emphasize what is often influenced by the present. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think we want to explain the present and talk about why the past is relevant for it. I know that I definitely do it in teaching Canadian history.

A couple years ago, the prime minister issued an official apology for the rejection of the St. Louis, the ship carrying out Jewish refugees from Europe to Canada and into other countries in 1939 which was turned away, and I saw that as a great opportunity to talk about something that happened in the past in the way that it’s relevant for the present. And it was in a Canadian Studies class in which the issues of immigration, multiculturalism were really big themes. So that’s one example of the way that the present I think can shape the way that we teach history.

SC:        Yeah, I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. I think that it’s important in this moment, and maybe I guess that’s what I mean when I’ve been thinking of history differently because of this. Maybe it is how subjective our history is. So rather than get closer to objectivity, we can really understand that subjectivity of the moment that we’re in and how that shapes what and how we teach.

NS:        You know, one thing I think COVID has done is forced a much larger proportion of society to think about how society is structured, to think about the role of government, and to think about relations between individuals and society, which we wouldn’t normally think about. So to that extent, I think that really is different.

I mean, you and I are accustomed to thinking about it because we teach histories of Canadian society or maybe some other courses that are similar to that, and often our research I think is related to those questions too. So I’m used to it and I find it a challenge in classrooms to get students to think about, not only their own perspectives or some sort of mainstream way of seeing things, but try to think about society overall. The connections between individuals, the different ways that we can organize society, and to also think about the role of the government plays in society. I think it definitely makes us think about that a lot more right now.

SC:        You know, this really reminds me of the conversation I had with Dr. Sean Carleton last week about, he said that these moments of crisis really show you how the structures work.

And he was saying in particular, this is really showing how a nation-to-nation relationship between the Canadian government and different indigenous peoples fail to hold the weight that it should. And so I appreciate you also saying that about we understand our structures differently because we are seeing how they operate or how they fail to operate as effectively as we might want them to in these times.

NS:        Even more fundamentally, we’re just more aware of them, you know? So I totally agree with that view that you just expressed. Disaster or crisis reveals fault lines in society. Reveals tensions that exist in society. So I think we’re definitely seeing that. Like if you’re just to take a class perspective on the effects of dealing with the Coronavirus, it’s clearly something that falls more heavily on people who are frontline workers and people with lower incomes that don’t have as many options about self-isolating and things like that.

So it very quickly — it doesn’t take very long, does it? Before we start seeing those realities and things like that. They were already there, but we just notice them.

SC:        When I was talking to Chris Sanagan, who’s an archivist and comic book creator, he was talking about archiving and questioned what is this going to mean for the archives community? I want brought in postmodern theory, and said that Foucault says that we should really strive for a ‘messy history’ because that is more aligned with how society functions.

And with what you’re saying, and what Sean was saying, I also think of Derrida’s notion of deconstruction. That it’s not just pulling things apart, but rather deconstruction is watching the fault lines that are already there. What is going to come out from those fault lines.

We don’t need to go into a big poststructural discussion, but this is coming a lot. This notion of messiness, this notion of structures crumbling, this notion of seeing a different world because of this fault line, because of this crisis. So I’m just throwing out a little postmodern history there.

Do you think that teaching of history will shift after this in big ways? Do you think that this revealing of fault lines will be present in the classroom? Do you think that it should?

NS:        I mean, just based on the people I know who teach history at the college and university level, I think they would choose to use this, for example, in the classroom, that it would be a touchstone that they can use with students to make comparisons with things that happened in the past or realities from the past. Certainly anybody teaching sociology or social science, which are topics I’ve taught at college, it’s a great way of reflecting on social structure and social relations. So I think that’s true for history classrooms also.

In terms of what teachers choose to teach about the past, I don’t know if it will change, but I think it’s a subject matter and a shared experience that teachers can draw on and use that to teach other things that they’re interested in. I mean, we don’t really know where this is going in the next few months, but I guess my sense is is that it won’t lead to a transformative sort of approach to what teachers choose to teach in history classrooms.

On the other hand, it might change a lot about how teachers choose to teach because so much of teaching and the immediate future is now online, there is a possibility that there will be more of that in the future. And I don’t have any predictions to make about that, but that’s always been of interest. To education institutions, that there’s always been an interest in providing online instruction. There’s a great hope that it’s a technique that can be more cost-effective, but also a way to reach students. I’m a lot more skeptical about that. I think it’s extremely useful, but I don’t see it as any kind of a replacement for face-to-face teaching. I’ve done online teaching too and there’s things I really like about it.

So I see that question that you’re asking in two ways. I see the ‘what’ of what teachers choose to teach and the ‘how’ of how they choose to teach it. I’m not sure the ‘what’ is going to change, although obviously this is a collective experience that we all have that we can draw on and make use of. But the ‘how’ of how teaching happens in the near future has completely changed.

SC:        Whether we wanted to or not.

NS:        Yeah, exactly.

SC:        I mean, I would like to maybe challenge you a little bit that the content won’t change because also you’re saying that there might be more opportunities to bring in these current events. And I think that if you’re bringing that in, wouldn’t that then shift how you’re demonstrating particular elements of history? Or you don’t necessarily see those two things happening hand-in-hand?

NS:        I guess I think about if, say, I’m teaching about social inequality in the past, there’s lots of different topics that reveal that in Canadian history, and you could draw on this experience that we’re having in 2020 that demonstrates social inequality in our own society. For my own teaching, that’s not a new topic. But drawing on that shared experience, drawing on examples or themes that students will be more familiar with because they live through it, I think would be a really good technique to make use of to engage students.

But the topic itself for the kind of teaching I do, and I imagine for a lot of teachers too, not so much.

SC:        So one of the first conversations I had is with Dr. Mary Chaktsiris, who I know that you know very well. And she was saying that because the mode of teaching history is going to change, that then for her at least, it changes some of the structure of her teaching and then invited more of the co-creation of the content. Do you want to comment a little bit on those types of changes as someone whose teaching has changed because it’s moved online?

NS:        Yeah. I think that’s a good point. And I think that probably does overlap with the question of how teaching changes. You can’t translate face-to-face teaching exactly to online. There’s all kinds of parallels. Almost any issue in the classroom exists in an online environment, but it gets dealt with in different ways.

So I think one reality of an online class is it you have a very large class. It would be extremely difficult to get interaction in that type of class. It would be difficult to get teacher-to-student and student-to-student interaction in a class like that. So ideally, you don’t want that kind of class online. Very large groups would produce a sort of a learning experience where basically its content on the screen that students have to interpret and then report on in assignments and get graded. We don’t want that. We want to be able to engage with students.

It can take a great deal of time to create interesting experiences that students can access online and have some discussion between themselves and some to the teacher. So I think Mary  is right, that it will cause us, if we continue with this online approach, it will cause us to craft our way of introducing topics and getting students to think about topics.

I think it’ll push us to try to create those sorts of discussions, assignments, and learning activity assignments that then lead to their own written assignments and reading that they do rather than say talking. In a kind of a lecture and engagement and discussion fashion, which I do now pretty informally. But in an online environment, you got to formalize that and craft something online that can produce that. That would feel different to me creating something like that. That’s hard work, and you can certainly do it and do a good job of it, but it is different.

SC:        Well, I think for me, that’s one of the reasons why I was so confused about this notion of imagining a new ‘we’ during this time because I see classroom-based connection so important to hearing and exploring stories. And I guess part of my panic was like, what does that look like if we are all in our homes, because it is siloed thinking.

Can you comment if you think that this notion of imagining a new ‘we’, or even just the ‘we,’ or even just this notion of imagination, could shift and change because of this moment?

NS:        Yeah. Like I said earlier, I have done online teaching in the past, and I think there is a greater recognition from colleges and universities that designing an online classes requires a lot of people in order to produce something that’s good. All of your class design, your assignment design, your content design, learning activity, stuff like that, it’s all front-end loaded. It’s a huge amount of time. You will spend more time doing that then you will in front of students. And if a good actual online class is produced, it’s going to require the assistance of web designers and other content creators to create brief videos of yourself to introduce topics.

And that is more of a team effort than I think what we’re familiar with in standard classroom teaching.

SC:        And yet those teams aren’t really available to all of us across the board, right? Online teaching does not look the same for everyone because of notions of access. And I think that developing a course always takes a lot of time. But the thing is when we are imagining developing a course, we imagine it in a traditional class setting often. For so many of us that work of developing a course and then also learning the technology and what would work best for our students, is such a mammoth task.

And I was talking to a student who was saying that one of their online classes interrupted by ‘Zoombombing’ of people coming on in masks and yelling racist words —

NS:        Oh, you’re kidding me.

SC:        Yeah, yeah, it’s crazy! And I’ve mentioned it to other people and people either don’t know about it at all or say that it happens a lot.

And so the point I’m trying to make is, that we can do all these frontloading things, but we are never going to know how students are going to react to it or how the work is going to land. And in the formal classroom, we can often read the room and know how to shift are practices, but it will be harder online. So, I think will be interesting to see if we can build a class community in an online space.

NS:        One thing that I think is also true in an online experience, is that maybe there’s more acknowledgment from a student’s perspective that they need to commit to actually being in the classroom. I’m not saying that that will lead to more commitment necessarily, but if people or students are there, they might be more present while you are teaching. It will be their choice if they want to login and so it might assist them in being more focused on course material rather than on traditional classroom where it’s at 2 o’clock on a Wednesday or whatever, and they can sort of tune out. “I’m here. I made it. So this is the commitment I’ve made.”

SC:        That’s a good point. When you’re self-directing learning, you can self-direct it at your own speed.

NS:        I think you’re also very right about reading the room. We don’t have that ability online. I think in all those respects, those are big differences in terms of teaching, and they apply to any subject. Not just history.

SC:        Yeah, so it will be interesting as the summer progresses, What or if the ways we’re thinking about history does shift because of the delivery. Like, “the medium is the message,” and so I am interested in coming back to some of these conversations to reflect on how or if this has changed because of digital teaching.

NS:        Here’s one thing I thought of when I saw these questions from you is that online it is possible to teach in a traditional sort of lecture-based way university and colleges, and do a good job that still allow for classroom engagement because what you’re doing is you’re sort of delivering your narrative, or at least your narrative shapes the direction of the class.

I think producing narratives is more difficult in an online environment. If you did that, it would require a fair bit of text. Your own text or recorded lectures or something like that. That’s not very engaging. If you got to read five web pages of text before you get to learning activity, before you get to the discussion, and then there’s still readings you have to do for the week and report on, that’s not great.

So I think it might reduce the presence of your narrative and maybe online does encourage a different approach in which students are exposed and encouraged to engage with some issues in a few different ways, and then you see what they bring to it. That’s possible

SC:        Yeah. And I think that that’s something that Mary had talked about too. I think that watching these two videos together is really helpful in thinking about these different ways of translating the type of cheating that we want to do into a media that we didn’t necessarily choose.

Thank you so much for sharing these perspectives. I think it’s really useful and really thought-provoking. And again, it’s so nice to do so many of these because the conversation just builds on each other. And yeah, that’s fantastic.

NS:        Well, thanks, Samantha. I enjoyed the conversation too.