Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        Hi, Mary.

Dr. Mary Chaktsiris:        Hello!

SC:        How are you? How is social isolation going on your end?

MC:        It’s feeling pretty socially connected virtually because I’m running three online courses. So my day is filled with Zoom meetings and it’s all good. Virtual marketing, all that kind of stuff.

SC:        Even though like this isn’t the main thing we’re going to talk about, how have your students been doing with the quick move to online?

MC:        I think there’s been a range of responses. Like overall, students are really patient, responsive, adaptive. They’re all dealing with different circumstances depending on whether they’re international students, where they live, what their family responsibilities are, what the work responsibilities are. So I’ve taken it upon myself to think about my role as providing students with lots of choice with how to engage in my courses, but not necessarily a lot of requirements to do so. Students are invited to engage as much as they’d like or as little as they’d like as they kind of cope with the changing circumstances around us.

SC:      Yeah, it’s interesting because I think that this blend of both stability, like they’re still going to be a class, but flexibility is important as we kind of navigate this.

So to start the formal part of our conversation, in my video I posted last week, I questioned how we would move forward in teaching history from here. Even just thinking about history for me has really changed. So, from your perspective of being a history professor, has the idea of teaching history, or even the notion of history itself, changed at all during this weird time?

MC:        You know, there’s that saying when you’re in the weeds, you can’t really see past them. And I think that’s what the experience feels like right now, in the rush of getting everything online, in the rush of coping with all the changes around us. I’m not sure how much more reflection I’ve actually like had to do, if that makes any sense.

SC:        Yeah, of course. Yeah.

MC:       But I think part of the feeling right now, even in teaching history more generally, is that sometimes we feel so crushed for time because of the approaches that we use.

It’s like the tyranny of content: being so tied to the amount of content that you feel like you have to share with students. So part of this is the ways in which you might share that responsibility with students: To what extent have you positioned yourself as the only person whose view matters and to what extent have you been sharing that platform with students?

And I think that when you’ve been sharing that platform with students, and what I mean by that is inviting them to reach their own conclusions and present their own ideas of what’s meaningful to talk about within your course, then transitioning or flexibility is easier, right?

But when you’re tied to this idea of ‘I need to be lecturing to you two or three times a week. And if I don’t, then you’re not going to learn what you need to learn,’ then that is harder.

So I don’t know if COVID has changed the way that I teach history, but it’s reminded me that we are all historical actors in our contemporary periods and that we can’t expect that to be any different. So just because you’re in a history course, you’re still a person living in the present and that those two things are always connected, right?

SC:        Yeah. I really love this notion of thinking about that content because I think, especially for history teachers and history professors, sometimes we have an implicit, or explicit, expectation that we know everything and that we are there to bestow content. And while there is a big movement in K-12 to move away from that, and there’s some discussions among professors around that as well, I think that there still is this big idea that we need to impart the content to students, and so this COVID  moment is where we can think more about our learning outcomes.

You kind of talked about this a little bit already, but maybe we could just pull out a couple ideas: How do you think, starting in September or in the summer, but let’s say September when at least things have cooled down in terms of our anxiety even if we’re still socially isolated, which seems terrifying, how do you think you would approach teaching a course? Would it be the same? Would it be different after this moment?

MC:        In my courses already, what I’ve tried to think about is how we can acknowledge and value the thinking and learning that students bring into our classroom. It is this idea of like, I’m not the only person who knows anything about Canadian history in this room. So how can we design our courses and design our assessments so that students are actually invited to develop and create their own sense of meaning and perhaps like their own sense of self as a result, depending on what kinds of histories you’re teaching.

So this is kind of where like I’ve been so inspired by your thinking, like methodologically and theoretically —

SC:        Oh, thanks, Mary.

MC:       No problem! I’m plugging you. And I don’t even mean to, but it’s true — I’ve been inspired by your thinking about this idea of “who is in the ‘we?”, the national ‘we’ that we talk about when we’re teaching nationally minded courses.

I think when you start to break that down, it’s like, how do you share the content creation of your course with students? How are you inviting them to engage and create narratives that complement a more central narrative in the course? Or, that may critique the essential narrative in the course or bring attention to silences or absences in the stories that you’re telling?

I think that that approach to teaching history makes more sense in this period in time that we’re living through right now. We could do a better job of trying to encourage students in our classrooms to view themselves as historical actors in the present. So what is the historical context that you, as a student, are living through? What is the archive that you’re keeping? Sometimes I say to students, ‘what is in your archives?’ Like your Facebook photos, are they an archive? Is your Instagram account an archive? What social media accounts are part of an archive?

And I think bridging those relationships between past and present more clearly might be helpful. But part of that involves teachers and professors being willing to share the spotlight. Not to shine that spotlight directly on them as the educator, but to be at once the ‘guide on the side’ and the ‘sage on the stage,’ you know? Can you be a coach to your students while also being a leader? – Because students do look to their educators for guidance and clarification. How can you develop your role so that if you can’t be in lecture with students for three weeks, for example, does that really impact their learning all that much?

I think if you’re designing your course through like a more layered pedagogy that shares that spotlight with your students, you’ll find that the lectures disappear. You’ll find that not having lectures may not actually impact the learning outcomes as much as you think.

SC:        There are so many things that you said there that were really great. But just to pick up on that last point about like sharing the stage with students: And, I know that this perspective may be new or a challenge to a lot of people in higher education; Whereas, the K-12 teachers that I talked to, this wouldn’t be new to them necessarily. So when I talk about connection, complexity, and care, this is what I mean by “care.” Because even though a K-12 teacher may already see themselves as a coach or a facilitator, I think that sometimes we can care about our students in ways that don’t allow students to share the stage. Even when we know that we should be coaching and facilitating them, we might care in ways where we’re still like, ‘we need to make sure that they get that content.’

And so a question that I always ask, which might resonate with you as a history professor working with other professors is: What does it look like in our classroom to care about the content? What does it look like in our classroom to care about the profession? And what does it look like in our classrooms to care about the student? Because if we care about the content and the profession, then we are teaching. But if we are focusing on the student, then we can focus more on learning.

MC:       So I try to focus on like all those things at one time, because why not multitask?

The thing I continue to learn, and it’s a constant challenge that I still grapple with, is this idea of less is more. It’s always less, less, less. I always find myself grappling with trying to do too much. And so it’s always about removing and refining rather than adding, is I what I find.

What I’ve started to challenge myself to do is think: ‘okay, so for every course, what is one central idea that I want students to walk away from knowing more about?’ And then with this idea, I try to thread all of my content around it. That approach can more clearly allow you to see what to drop and what to keep.

For example, in my Canadian history modern survey courses, the course idea that I designed that course around is that I want students to walk away knowing more about the idea that Canada is now and was always built out of conflict rather than consensus. It’s in all of our national symbols, all of the governance structures that we take for granted, they were born out of conflict rather than consensus. So that’s a story that I tell throughout this course. Every single class answers that question to a certain extent in a different way.

So, to me, I care about students because I’m making a decision as the leader of that course, the person who’s developing it, what I think they need to learn in order to be successful in the other courses they’re going to take? How it contributes to the curriculum of the department more generally.

I care about my profession because I want students to know the most up-to-date thinking on these different periods that we’re talking about and how they can also enter into conversation with those thinkers through the assessments. It’s not just about consuming this knowledge and thinking, ‘oh, well, the prof told me so. I read about it in the reading, so it must be true or it must be right.’

MC:        So through the content, I try to show care to students and to my discipline. That’s how I weave together the three.

SC:       Right, right. That’s really awesome.

One last question: This video series, ‘imagining a new we’ is about teaching history in ways that are more meaningful, transformative, and inclusive for their students. Last week, when we went into quarantine, I recorded a video saying that not only are our notions of transformative, and meaningful, and inclusive going to look different now, but so does the notion of imagining, and so does the notion of we. Could you maybe comment on that? And, no pressure to have this amazingly solid answer because we’re so new to this, but do you have any thoughts on what this new ‘we’ looks like or this notion of ‘imagining’ might be like, when we’re interacting with the world so differently these days?

MC:        So I think if I can build up this idea of ‘imagining,’ I think that one of the things that we can really learn from history, in embracing all of its complications and difficult stories, and maybe even especially in from those difficult stories, is this idea of resilience, perseverance, and hope. And also the amazing capacity of historical actors to make meaningful change in the spaces that they’re in.

So some of us have a big platform. Sometimes we talk about prime ministers and government officials, and people who we think are significant historical actors, but what history also tells us, is that there are important historical actors in everybody’s home. In your family. And remembering that that reminds us that we are also actors in our present moment. So maybe we can’t go out and change everything, but there’s something that we can do today that might be able to enact meaningful change in the spheres where we have influence.

I think that thinking about systems, stories, complexities, can help with this imagining, and reminding us that like, yes, we need to learn from history, but one of the things we can learn is hope, and the importance of building relationships and of coming together and finding a way through very different points of view – which is pretty much what I think the study of history is in a nutshell.

There is a great possibility that will come out of this period with a better understanding of our interconnectivity. That is the hope that I see when I’m trying to find a way to cope with our current world. And so I wonder if the ‘new we’ will, in some ways, be us all. And by ‘us all,’ I mean everybody who’s in your classroom.

COVID may result in entering into the future with more willingness to accept the uncertainty that defines not just our present, but also the past. I’ve been telling students: ‘think about how you’re feeling. Think about the uncertainty that surrounds us right now. We don’t know what this is going to look like. We don’t know what’s going to happen, when it’s going to happen, exactly how things will unfold, but yet people are making decisions that have impacts.’

It’s the same thinking that applies to the past. When you look at the past and you say, ‘well, they should’ve known better.’ It’s like, really? How could they have known better? Should they have known better?

How can we learn from the present and also apply it to our understanding of the past?

SC:        Mary, that’s so wonderful and that’s such a wonderful way to end. Thank you so much. I love this notion of really focusing on imagining by remembering our connectedness. Remembering the ‘we’ and that notion of resilience and hope, and the things we can all do, because we are all historical actors in framing what this story is going to be about.

Thank you so much. This was really great.

MC:        My pleasure. Thank you for having me.