Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        Hey, Sean. Thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me. It seemed like forever though that we connected about this and it’s so great that we’re able to connect now. Thank you so much. I know how busy you are.

Sean Kheraj:        Thanks for the invitation to speak to your audience, Samantha. It’s a real pleasure. And just to introduce myself to everyone, my name Sean Kheraj, and I’m a Canadian historian in the Department of History at York University. I also teach environmental history and I teach digital history.

SC:        Yeah, I was saying in my little introduction before we came together that a lot of people are talking more about the environment and wanting to connect with nature, but also being consumed by digital technologies in ways that we weren’t anticipating. So I’m looking forward to you coming to this conversation as a historian and educator of both of those fields.

SK:        Yeah, me too. Looking forward to getting to think a little bit about what this moment is doing to history and teaching.

SC:        I am too. I think about that all the time. It will be really interesting how — really interesting what happens after this. And that’s why I find these conversations so great because they’re a little bit of a time capsule. So let’s get right into it.

The first question is have you thought about history any difference because of this moment? And as I’ve said in other interviews, my ideas about history have shaped — have been shaped by my own perspectives as being a critical educator, but at this moment I’ve been really re-evaluating the things I hold dear in history. It hasn’t changed at all for you.

SK:        Yes. I mean, I think at a kind of base level, my thinking about the relevance of history as a discipline for addressing contemporary crisis or issues is still the same as it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, but where it’s changed is how we can apply it in the moment during a pretty unprecedented crisis.

So for me, as an academic, I’ve never lived through a global crisis like that. And the closest moment like this would have been maybe the great recession about a decade ago or the start of it, but that wasn’t quite as singular a moment. It was a long and prolonged experience that only in retrospect I think we can look back on and identify as a distinct period of time. Whereas this is really the first that I’ve lived through probably in my lifetime outside of September 11th in fall of the Berlin Wall I guess when I was a kid, where there is a kind of global crisis.

And so I still think I have the confidence that the context that history education provides to thinking about crises and problems is still relevant. It’s just I’m a little bit shaky on how you deploy that in a moment like this. So I think teaching about past pandemics, teaching about past experience of national crises can be useful and can be instructive. And in my own work as an administrator at the university, it’s been somewhat useful. Maybe I can give a little example of this.

SC:        Sure. Of course.

SK:        So I also work as an associate dean for academic programs at York in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, and so I’m involved in some of the contingency planning and emergency planning around COVID-19 for a faculty. And in March, we had been having conversations about how this might affect the university, how this might affect our enrolments, how this might affect our classes. And one of the issues that I had brought up early on was the fear that students and their parents will have about returning to classroom spaces. And the case that I relied upon was the 1918 pandemic, because I knew as a Canadian historian, when I teach the First World War and the pandemic, one of the points that emerges is how long it took people to feel comfortable being in public spaces again after the pandemic? And it was well into the 1920s, there were still people who continued to wear masks in public years after the Spanish influenza pandemic and there were still people who had these kind of lingering psychological scars of that just as survivors of the Great Depression, had continued psychological scars that led them to hoard canned goods in their basement and stuff like that.

And so we are now starting to confront that as we look toward the future and ask when we return to the classroom, how comfortable are students going to be sitting in a 500-student lecture? I know for myself when I think about getting on the subway here in Toronto or I think about going to a movie theater, I think about going to a restaurant, definitely right now, May 2020, I don’t feel comfortable with that at all and I don’t know what month I’ll feel comfortable with that.

SC:        Yeah. I mean, I know you didn’t put in your bio that you’re an associate dean, but of course, I knew that. So I’m glad that you —

SK:        My secret job.

SC:        Yeah, it’s your secret job, but I’m glad that you brought that up because, I mean, that was one of the things I too was thinking of when I was thinking of how — like, about history as a discipline after this because I’m also working in administration and I’m like, “Well, what’s going to happen to histories and humanities when there was already this idea that they were like navel-gazing.

Like at this moment, are people going to think of them more as like these leisure non-career ready topics? Or are people going to recognize the importance of having these historical perspectives, having the critical thinking, having the skills to be able to tie together these different ideas? And that’s one of the reasons why I was like, what does history look like during this moment?”

SK:        Yeah. Well, I mean on my hopeful side, I think that it may be that a traditional liberal arts, humanities, or social science education might be more relevant than ever in this moment. Because I think before this, it was clear from surveys of students who are in traditional liberal arts programs that there’s a versatility to that education that students get in terms of career outcome.

So we know for history graduates, when they graduate, there isn’t a single career path that they follow. Many go into teaching, but many go into business management, many go into journalism, many go into law and that’s kind of been the story about liberal arts education for a long time is the versatility. A kind of training in critical thinking that educates rather than trains for a particular job outcome. And I do wonder, and this is 100% speculation, right? But as we start to look into the future past this moment of economic uncertainty, it may not be clear that programs that are more singularly focused on career outcomes may be the places where students are going. It may be programs that offer students more adaptability because of how unpredictable job markets might be when they come out.

So my hopeful side as a historian is that history as a traditional liberal arts discipline may be a place that a lot of students end up going in this time of uncertainty.

SC:        Well, it’s interesting that you say that, and of course, I agree with you. And because I’ve been seeing teachers on Twitter, for example, talk about how their students are asking them these questions that seem like a ‘wild goose chase’, but are not. They are questions that young people have about the world and that this moment has facilitated this opportunity for them to ask those questions and engage in different ways because there isn’t this kind of monolithic curriculum dictating how those interactions are supposed to go. And so I do hope that this demonstrates the importance of liberal arts and history education.

Do you think the teaching of history will change after this moment?

SK:        Yeah, I think there’s a possibility. So in addition to the possibility that we might see some degree of an increase of interest in history as a discipline because it can maybe start to answer some questions that students have about the current moment of crisis and uncertainty. I think the modes of the delivery of teaching may have some changes. So right now we are very rapidly turning into an online university.

I think I tweeted at some point, at the end of the winter term, that we were the largest online arts faculty in the country, which is a bit of a joke because like we’re the largest arts faculty in the country so we’re now offering online courses. So largest online arts faculty.

SC:        Congratulations.

SK:        Yes, yes. So, I don’t want people to mistake the moment right now with online teaching as being a strategy to move towards E-learning. Like online teaching right now at universities is a response to a public health emergency for the health and safety of students, staff, and faculty. But it is introducing history educators to a range of tools for teaching that have been available, but that we haven’t really used all that much or all that well.

One of my own I guess frustrations or disappointments is that I think that we were initially unprepared for this moment. That at least in the academy among humanities and social science disciplines, skepticism about the use of technology in teaching in a kind of technophobia is priced as a kind of virtue signal among academic communities. And one of the consequences of that has been a deficit in our skills in using technology for teaching. And so we very quickly had to learn how to use video conferencing software like Zoom, a tool that has existed for five years, and that at our university, we had access to three years ago.

And so we had a long period of time where we could have been learning this tool and we didn’t. And I think in terms of kind of retrospect on this moment, it’s worth asking why that was. And I do think that an academic culture that issues technology is part of the reason that we were left unprepared. And I think we see this at multiple levels all the way from K to post-secondary that skepticism and panic about technology left us unprepared for the moment when we needed it the most.

The other consequence for this is that it’s kind of harm to the potential market for the development of better technology, so we’re unsatisfied with some of the teaching technologies that are available to us. Skype is really bad and the audio isn’t great, but if educators kept turning their backs towards technology expressing more fear about the effects of screentime, then why would there ever be a market to develop better technologies? And so there’s this kind of two-fold problem that we entered into the crisis with one, was a deficit of skills among educators that we’ve had very rapidly try to close as we’re now in emergency, and two is a kind of deficit of tools available because there wasn’t a sufficient market to support those tools in part because they were being rejected by educators.

This is a blanket statement that’s not fair to educators who did embrace those tools, but it is pretty clear that when we switched to online teaching, we had to create websites, more than 300 websites for our courses because they had absolutely no learning management system set up for them before we went into the crisis, which is astonishing. It’s a huge effort that our E-services office had to engage with, but had we been engaging with learning technologies before the crisis? We would have been better prepared.

So I’m a little bit hopeful that afterward, I don’t think that we’re talking about moving to 100% E-learning afterward, but I’m hoping that we’ll maybe be able to see some of the benefits of this. One example at the university level is video office hours. Our university is a commuter campus where many students have to commute more than an hour. Some of them commute for two hours to get to campus.

So if the only option was to meet your professor face-to-face during a one-hour block during the week and you don’t have classes and you don’t need to be on campus that day, you are not going to get onto a Go Bus and travel to York University and meet face-to-face with your professor. You might pick up the phone and call them at their office, which I suppose you could have done before, but now we’re doing video office hours that don’t require the student or the professor to have to do that long commute. Maybe they’ll have a little bit more FaceTime. It might be over something like Zoom or FaceTime I guess, but I think I would take more face-to-face hours virtually over fewer face-to-face hours in person with students. So these are some of the things that could potentially change as we go forward.

Another might be the type of resources that we use as history educators. So we’re trying to find more E-books, more open educational resources to be able to use in online courses during the present crisis. Many of those resources are great resources to use at any time. So more colleagues are making use of scan documents that are available in digital archives, on archive.org, the world’s largest digital archive. And maybe and I’m hopeful that we’re maybe discovering that there’s actually a lot more out there than we imagine.

So one of the concerns that we have right now is access to our physical collections of our library, but the digital collection of our library and the digital collection of the Internet’s library is thousands of times larger than our physical collection. And so if you’re just looking at it by volume of books, there’s a larger digital library available to our students than there is a physical library, but we’re currently concerned about access to the physical library. And I’m hoping we’re starting to take a peek into what’s actually out there in the digital archive, in the digital library that we can use in our teaching.

SC:        Well, there’s a few follow-up points I want to make to that, but I want to pick up on what you said about the digital office hours in particular because I think that for many educators and students, that this has brought about this equalization of humanity in a way that’s like, “Okay, fine, let’s just see in each other’s like rooms and just have these conversations and like recognize that we’re all anxious and we’re all figuring this out.” Because I think that like destigmatization of like professor and student or teacher and student can allow for greater humanity to have more learning back and forth.

And so when you said that, we haven’t talked about that a lot on this series, but I think that brings up a really important point about how we are seeing that we have to connect with our students in different ways and that we can see the ways our students appreciate them or need that or what other things that they need. So thanks for bringing that up.

SK:        Yeah, I think that I’ve heard sort of anecdotally from some colleagues that this is one of the side benefits that they’re seeing to this. That even though you’re using a digital medium to interact with students that it ends up feeling more personal. I know for myself when I first did an online lecture, a video lecture when I teach the Canadian history survey course, there’s like 120, 130 students in this class and it’s in a lecture theatre most of the students I don’t have like a close face-to-face interaction with in that course.

When I started doing online sessions for that class, even just through a chat room, I was engaging with many more students than when I was speaking to the group in person in the classroom. And then on Zoom, we’ve had colleagues doing these big grid meetings on Zoom and they’re even closer to their students face-to-face on Zoom than they were with the student —

SK:        — who sits in the back of the lecture theatre. So there is some hope there. And then in terms of kind of demystifying the professor, humanizing the relationship between the professor and the student through these kind of virtual engagements I think is one potential plus or one potential benefit that we get out of this. And again, like I recognize that we’re losing a lot right now. The face-to-face experience is hugely valuable, and I don’t think there are many educators who would say that we want to get rid of that altogether. But I do like to remember that there are some benefits that were getting from this transition to online learning that might be worth holding on to.

SC:        Well, and two, that we can make an inventory of things that we want to see happen when we get back to our classrooms and an inventory of things that we want to change because we have been forced to these new methods and these new media, and so we can now say, “These are the things I wanted to keep.”

And before we move on to the last question though, I want to ask you is because you have done a digital history work, you already were aware of a lot of digital resources and a lot of digital technologies. Anecdotally, is it frustrating that people are discovering some of these for the first time when you were like, yes, digital archives have been a thing for a long time, so have digital humanities?

SK:        I mean, I think this is great. Like, I’m excited that more history teachers are discovering some of these resources and will be using these resources now. They’ve been sitting out there for years and they are astonishing. Like, I think — I sometimes like to think like what do I have access to now as a history educator, that if I could travel back in time 15 years and show to myself what’s now, it would blow my mind?

So again, in my Canadian history course, a colleague here on College at Western, Tom Peace and I put together an online textbook in Canadian history, and we used almost entirely scanned primary source documents that are available in archive.org. So it’s 24 chapters. Almost all of them are archived data or documents. All of those have been there for over a decade for some of them for free for students to download and use for assignments. And it’s the kind of stuff that we used to send students to I guess look up on microfilm or to maybe get a physical copy of a reprint in the library that they can access from home. And so there is this kind of like magic to be accessing these sources that if I had access to these 15 years ago, I wouldn’t even know what to say, right? I wouldn’t believe you that the stuff is available. So it’s a little bit more exciting to see more history educators using this because I think that there will be a lot of stuff that will stick.

I don’t think that the majority of the courses will continue to be taught online, though maybe more will. But I think certainly in terms of access to digitized primary sources, why would you stop using that after you started?

SC:        You know, also like the people involved with this community are very friendly open people too, right? Like there’s this idea about you start engaging in a new community like digital humanities, community — it might seem intimidating, but from my experience, like the people that have been working on these different websites, the OER that you and Tom created, like these are people that are doing this stuff because of a desire for collaboration and community and access, and that to draw on those expertise as well as the resources and technology. So I’ll put a link to that textbook below for people who are interested, as well as any other archives that you want to share with people.

So I’m going to segue to my last question, which is about imagining a new ‘we’. So when I developed the education and exhibition program at the Archives of Ontario and I started working more with archival material and bringing those to Ontario teachers, one of the things I talked about over and over and over again is that when we were using primary sources, you can narrate a history that is way more diverse than a secondary source often can be because it can show you that they were there or that we were there and that we can recognize a much more fulsome understanding of history. Which is why I think that we should move towards “Imagining a New ‘we’”, which is the name of the video series and my book in how we teach and learn Canadian history. Do you have any ideas after this moment about how we could imagine a new ‘we’ differently during and after this moment? Do a lot of people have said like the ‘we’ needs to be challenged, which it certainly does, but also the possibilities for imagining, which is really exciting? Any thoughts about that?

SK:        Yeah. So I think I fall into the camp of the deconstructing the ‘we’, which, you know —

SC:        Let’s do it!

SK:        — doesn’t make me unique I suppose. But from my own research field in environmental history, this is an issue that we are confronting when we teach about the Anthropocene. So the idea that we’re living in a new geological or even biosphere epoch that’s predominantly influenced by people.

And so environmental historians are trying, I think, to deconstruct what we mean by the Anthropocene. Who are the humans who are responsible for the changes? And once we start to think about that, we can see the ways in which social class, race, ethnicity, et cetera start to break down what we mean by ‘we’ and the Anthropocene. So if we’re thinking about historical changes that humans have brought to the earth over time that have changed it in such a way that we can now describe the planet as being influenced profoundly by human activity, who are the humans? Who were the humans?

So if we take global warming as an example, we know that the contribution of CO2 gases in the last century into the atmosphere of the earth wasn’t equivalently distributed across the planet, but that Western industrialized countries are the predominant emitters of CO2s. And that is one of the ways we kind of break this down.

If you think about it in the current context of COVID-19 pandemic, I think you can start to ask similar questions around that question of who is ‘we’? And you could use — I guess as a history educator, if you’re reflecting on this moment later, you might take some of those signs that you maybe see neighborhoods that say, “We’re all in this together,” and then kind of take a part that ‘we’, well who’s the ‘we’ that’s in this, right?

So we know that exposure to the disease isn’t equivalent among social classes in Canadian society as an example. We’re seeing data in the United States that the infections in mortality is affecting African-American communities at a disproportionate rate. And we can start to think about who are the people who actually work on the front line? So we’re all in this together, but the people who work at the grocery store in my neighborhood are far more in this than I am as they’re taking many more risks than I do.

And so I think that kind of deconstructing the ‘we’ is a useful pedagogical exercise. One that historians pre and post-COVID can use to think about how history proceeds, which is at a level that is not necessarily individualized, but specific. So I think the strengths of history is the discipline and the skills it provides are about thinking about contingency and context.

And so it’s difficult — as a historian, I try to dissuade my students from making any broad statements because a broad statement could be dismantled very easily. And it’s also not true to the experiences of an individual, of a lived experience. And so I try to encourage my students to reflect upon their own lives and how complicated they understand — how much they understand the complexities of their own lives.

And so one of the exercises we do is ask them to say whether or not they’re a good person or a bad person, right? And I don’t think anybody — first of all, I think very few people would describe themselves as a bad person. But I don’t think anybody would say, “I’ve never done a bad thing.” And so if we can extrapolate from what we understand about our own lives and how complicated they are and what leads us to make bad decisions, maybe immoral decisions, and what leads us to make good decisions and moral decisions? If we can extrapolate that to be thinking about people in the past, then I think that leads to more complex thinking, right? So why would we be less generous to someone who lived in the 1930s and had to make a range of decisions about policy related to unemployment insurance or something like that then we would see the way we understand our own lives and the complexity about the decisions that we make?

And so I think that’s important to really think about that ‘we’. Who are all the people within that ‘we’? And to remember that just as people in the present try to make the best decisions for themselves, their families and their communities, people in the past did this as well. And there are very few people in the past, I think, that we can find who made a decision for the purposes of doing something harmful or that they thought was a decision that was stupid. That most decisions that people make in the past, they make because they think it’s the best decision to make.

SC:        So thank you for that. I really appreciate you bringing up the the idea of complexities and to get students to reflect on their own complexities, because one of the things I talk about in the series is we have to strive for more meaningful learning, which is a combination of connection, complexity, and care. And often, like, teachers can do connection really well. Teachers normally say that they care for their students, but the complexity piece is so important for challenging our ideas about society, ideas about individuality or ideas about the structures that guide our lives and I think that foregrounding that complexity.

And I think the way that you’re doing it is in a way that is really like a table for an average teacher and an average student to be able to think through, to be able to foreground that complexity so that we are thinking — it’s dangerous to say something about we in this answer because [inaudible 0:29:14.3*you just want to play in circles.]

SK:        Sure.

SC:        — that we can really foreground what that complexity looks like in deconstructing what a ‘we’ looks like right now and how it can be really problematic for a lot of different reasons. And the ways that it will be complex and difficult and make us really challenge a lot of things that we know about ourselves and the structures around us that we can often take for granted to build a better world. And so, thank you for that. That was really great. It was a really wonderful weekend.

SK:        Yeah, I think the last question is really good too though, because I think inviting people to imagine new wes kind of invites them to try to be empathetic and thinking about other people and where they fit within communities. And so when we think about the past, I think that kind of empathy is really important for interpreting the past.

And I just did an interview with a historian who published a book about American and Inuit interactions in the 19th century, and the book is largely driven about empathetic thinking both on the part of the scholar who wrote the book, who did everything in her capacity to try to understand the actions of these people in the past on the terms that those people would have come to those decisions. And at the same time, one of the problems she identifies is that these two groups of Americans and Inuit in the 19th century, especially for the American whalers that she looks at didn’t exercise empathy.

And so when they went into Arctic environments, they ask questions like how could anybody live here? And this can’t be a home because you would die, so why would you ever live here? Without ever thinking — without ever trying to think through the eyes of the Inuit who live in those environments, who have lived there for generations and for whom these are homes.

And so I think reimagining what a ‘we’ is reimagining a community might [inaudible 0:31:17*have gendered] that kind of empathetic thinking in our historical thinking.

SC:        Well, and also for me, that empathy can lead to action. And I think that’s really important. Dr. Funke Aladejebi was saying that like hope or imagination or that action is nothing. And Dr. Kristina Llewellyn was saying in our conversation about oral histories that the more that you’re listening and the more you have empathy towards different stories, it can lay the foundation for your political commitments and hopefully your activism.

So anyway, that’s a great way to end. Thank you so much.

SK:        Thank you, Samantha.

SC:        This was really great. And all the links that you talked about will be below. And I was saying to a few people, like it’ll be really interesting to follow up once we get back to something normal, whenever that will be, to see how and in what ways these ideas have manifested or not. So anyway, stay tuned.

SK:        Yeah. I will.

SC:        Okay, thanks. Bye.

SK:        Thanks, Samantha.