Dr. Samantha Cutrara:       Andrea, thank you so much for talking with me today. It’s such a pleasure to talk with someone with so many different experience in this field. And so I am really excited to hear your perspectives on teaching in these pandemic times. So, Thank you!

Andrea Eidinger:        Hi, thank you for having me.

SC:        I’ve been asking everyone three questions. One is if your current thoughts about history have changed. The other one is about whether you think we’ll change teaching history after this. And the third is about imagining a new ‘we’ and things about, imagination and this notion of ‘we’ in Canada. So let’s just get right into it, shall we?

I have been saying that because of COVID my perspective of history has changed, or rather confirmed the things I think about history, like we need to think about emotion [JOHN CONNECT TO HISTORCAL EMPATHY VIDEO], we need to think about connection. Has this moment, this pandemic moment, changed the way you think about history?

AE:        I think that there are a lot of potential avenues that we could take teaching. And in terms of changes that were arising from the pandemic situation, I think that there is probably going to be a lot of changes in terms of what’s offered online. And I think there’s definitely room for an interesting discussion about how we are all adapting to these particular situations.

I find that my particular approach hasn’t really changed because I’ve already spent a really long time trying to figure out how to teach in a way that made me personally feel comfortable. And it’s designed in a way that works with what’s going on in the world as it stands right now. I am technically trained as a social historian, and that’s what I love the most.

When I took the survey classes as an undergrad and in high school, I slept through them. I thought that they were really boring because they were essentially the history of dead white men, And I didn’t find that I was able to connect with it on an emotional level or have any kind of interest in it at. But as I moved through my education, I was able to do more of the kind of history that interested me, which was the history of ordinary people.

So when I became a professor, most of us start out teaching the survey courses, and that’s what I taught the most. I went into it with the intention of creating the Canadian history survey in a way that I would have liked it to look. So rather than doing it in a very traditional style, I was going to do it in a style that I found interesting and that meshed with my training. So I focus very much on the social history of people and this idea that all people’s stories have equal value and that we need to understand many different aspects of the past as opposed to just focusing on this one straight narrative that we are always encountering.

In my courses, I’ve talked about pandemics because I think that we do a disservice if we talk about World War I and we don’t talk about the Spanish flu pandemic. This focus on social history, this focus on the experiences of individuals, this idea that people in the past are a lot like people today in that they have hopes, dreams, fears, has stuck with me as I create my courses. I also think this perspective is very appropriate for this particular time that we’re going through because I see a lot on social media and news media that ‘we’re all in this together’ and there are a lot of stories of individuals that I find the most compelling.

So my perspective hasn’t really changed so much as it just confirmed that I’m comfortable doing the kind of history that I’m doing and I think that it’s appropriate to equip my students with the tools that they need to understand what’s going on.

SC:        I love that. I think that this notion of social history as a way for us to think through this moment, which then allows us to be grounded in this moment; because we all are social actors and we can think about the social and the cultural part of right now because the political part is, well, I think is the thing that we learn in hindsight more when we see a cohesive political plan or what we read back as being a cohesive political plan. But I think that like really the idea of demonstrating or appreciating a commitment to social history helped us think through this.

Do you think that this will shift our teaching of history after this? Do you think maybe more people will be bringing up social history? Or do you think that this will shift teaching after this history teaching?

AE:        I hope it does. I don’t know if it will, but I hope that it is sort of the wake-up call about the extent to which inequalities in our society are embedded in the very fabric of everyday life and can be the difference between life and death for a lot of people. And I think that those kinds of dynamics, those kinds of experiences are essential to history. So I would like to see that happen. I don’t know because Canadian history — history in general, is a field that I think evolves very slowly.

And I don’t know if we’ll really see any significant changes for quite some time. I do hope that one of the things that we really do focus on is having a much more compassionate and kind approach to teaching. There’s been a lot of discussion about how we need to account for the fact that students are going through a lot right now. They’re dealing with family members being sick, friends being sick, maybe they’re sick. Having to deal with having lost jobs. So the goal for many professors right now is to focus on providing students with the support that they need to get through this the rest of the semester, but in a way that is kind and understanding of how students are really struggling. And I hope that that emphasis or kindness and compassion is something that follows through.

I have something that I decided to do last year [2019], which has worked really well is actually getting rid of due dates completely. And no, that has not resulted in me getting a whole wave of stuff at the end of this semester, but I recognize that students have a lot on their plates even under normal circumstances and that school might not necessarily be their top priority and that they have to shuffle home responsibilities, work responsibilities along with school. So I try to be as flexible as possible and accommodate that. I provide students with suggested due dates or I give students the ability to feel free to submit later if they feel that they will produce a better paper, as opposed to sitting and worrying about certain arbitrary dates.

Because like I said, life is complicated. School is not the be all and end all as much as we might like it to be. And I think that the end result is that students learn a lot more when they’re given that kind of space to just be in that kind of accommodation. So I would like to see, maybe not everybody get rid of due dates, because I know that’s not what everybody would love to do, but just to be kinder to students.

SC:        That’s really interesting. And I know that you’re talking from the perspective of a history professor, who is teaching in an undergrad setting. I’m thinking about K-12 teachers and how much in their bachelor of education, for example, they’re introduced to so many different types of assessment methods. And I know a lot of them are introduced to having students make a choice about the type of assessments that they do, like in a choices board.

So to bring some of the things that you were saying to a K-12 audience, I think that this is a good opportunity, for professors as well, to explore different assessments and to be able to explore history and assessment with their students and, to just be honest with them. Like, we’re all trying to figure this out and what does this mean for us as individuals and as a collective community? Because we all know that when something ends, it never really ends, and so we’re going to be dealing with this after COVID is done. 

This idea about kindness, and compassion, and also inequity, which work so importantly together, to have kindness and compassion for the fact that people don’t have experiences like you and that you might not even recognize them. I think is really interesting to bring to this discussion – thank you for that.

AE:        I think it comes down to the reality is that five years from now, none of my students are going to know my name. They’re not going to remember what course did they took. But if they can come out of courses that I give them with the ability to think critically and compassionately and have that sort of flexibility, then I’m happy with that. And that’s not so much about needing particular targets, and deliverables, and due dates so much. It’s just the learning experience. And I think that that’s something that’s really gotten lost over the past few years. It’s been less of a focus on just learning and growing and seeing education at all levels as an opportunity to do that. And there’s been less of a focus on that and more of a focus on sort of standardized testing and getting good grades.

Like my students are so anxious about the grades that they get. And I keep telling them like, yes, they’re important, but when you’re finished school, no one’s going to care if you’ve got an A or C. They just want to know that you went through the experience and have the skills that you need or that you would get from completing an undergraduate education. So I would like to see or it would be great if more people will be focusing on that unless in terms of like, can my student appropriately format a footnote? Which of course, I hope that they can.

SC:        Well, I love this notion about thinking about history critically and compassionately, because to me, that really brings up the emotion and the affect of both the past and the present, and to learn meaningfully about the past. To learn history meaningfully involves compassion, involves that emotion, as well as this notion of critically exploring how and what we remember. thank you for that. Yeah, I really like that. Compassionately and critically.

Speaking of like compassion and criticality my work is about imagining a new ‘we’ and ensuring that when we think about Canada, we are think of these increasing circles of inclusion of what it means to be Canadian and what a Canadian experience is – What it means to teach and learn history. And in this series I’ve been really interested in people’s responses about whether or not that COVID will change this ‘we’? Whether this will change how we ‘imagine’ through history? Do you have any thoughts about that?

AE:        I have hopes. So the way you’re talking about questioning the idea about what it means to be Canadians, is something that I do as well.

In fact, the first lecture of every Canadian history course I give is starts with the question: what does it mean to be a Canadian and who counts? And how the histories that we tell ourselves that we learn in school are very much an important part of shaping what it means to be Canadian. And for a really long time, that story was very much focused on the history of white men almost exclusively. And it created this perception or was paired with this perception that a Canadian person is a white person and everybody else is kind of something else. Is Canadian and something else.

And personally speaking, I’m Jewish. And as a Jewish girl growing up in Montreal, I didn’t really see myself, my history reflected in what I learned in school. So when I am trying to teach Canadian history, my goal is to teach the truth of our history, which is that Canada has always been diverse both in terms of Canada as the entity that we know today, but also the space that we call Canada prior to the arrival of Europeans. Canada has always been a place of many different people, many different cultures, languages. And sometimes we get along, sometimes we don’t. That we’re all complicated, but we’re all enmeshed together in this kind of web that makes up this country, but that also connects us to the past, the present, and the future.

So when I’m teaching Canadian history, what I’d like to focus on is that, the stories that we tell ourselves about the past matter. They shape who we see ourselves as and how we relate to the rest of the world. And also, that the future of our country is in our hands and we can shape it however we want to shape it. And we can look to the past to learn what happened. Did it work? Did it not work? But we can change what happened and make a better future. That doesn’t sound too corny.

SC:        Oh, it sounds like 100% corny, but in a really good way, an inspiring way, because I think that’s what we all want from our teaching and learning in history.  But it seems like sometimes we can get into these, like, these roles of just teaching the old white dudes and forgetting the fact that we can keep writing and rewriting these stories. When I talk about history, and I talk about this in the book and I haven’t done a video on it yet, but I say like, I think that we should think of history more as a magnetic poetry kit than —

AE:        Ooh, I like that.

SC:        — than like a book, because with a magnetic poetry kit, we still have all of the words and the ideas, but we can rework them to identify particular ideas that we want to explore.

And so I think that you leaving on this corny note provides a lot of hope for what a critical and compassionate history might look like. So thank you for sharing that with us today.

AE:        Oh, my pleasure. I think that when we’re going through this tough or times like this, hope is really important.

SC:        Yeah, and that’s come up in the other videos as well, and like this notion of connection. And it’s been great to be able to do these to connect together. So thank you so much for making the time to talk and for connecting and sharing this sense of hope with us.

AE:        Okay, my pleasure. Thank you.

SC:        Yeah, you’re welcome. See you later. Bye.