Don’t Know Much About History
Yes, the title is a nod to an innocuous pop song (circa 1960) for you pop history buffs or is that “trivia collectors?”
Dr. Brenda Schoolfield, historian, disputes the characterization of history as advanced Trivial Pursuit. Rather, she contends, history is a way of thinking about the past.
What follows is an approximate transcript of the podcast interview in which she traces her pedagogical journey to the creation of the innovative entry level course, The Making of the Modern World.
[00:03] Mike Gray: Welcome to this, the 7th season of the Deep and Durable Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Gray. I have 45 years of teaching experience in higher education. I've taught over 10,000 students. Many of my students would say that I taught them how to think. I've also been involved in faculty development for over 30 years, and many of those faculty participants would say that my approach to teaching was personally and professionally transformational. This season will be a series of interviews with faculty whose teaching has been transformed. My guests will come from a variety of academic disciplines, but they're all applying the principles of transformational teaching.
[01:02] Mike Gray: All right. I am joined today by Brenda Schoolfield, who is a historian. Glad that she has made a spot in her schedule for us to chat about her journey in pedagogy. What's your area of expertise? I know you have some interest in anthropology. What's that look like? What are your passions?
[01:27] Brenda Schoolfield: Well, I would say that my passion is understanding people and stories. I think it's that interest that pushed me into history. I flirted with the idea of being a journalist. Journalism and historical work are different, and I think I ended up not necessarily consciously, but I ended up in the history field because it's more deliberate. There's more deliberation than the immediate, “We’ve got to get a story out” as a journalist, and that's necessary, but that's not me.
So, my historical fields are early America and early modern Europe. I'm very comfortable in the 16th or 18th centuries. 19th century starts becoming current events to me. And I got pulled into anthropology because of the research I was doing at the doctoral level. And my advisor kept pulling me towards anthropology as a cognate field. So, we had to have our history fields for our PhD work, but they were pushing us to have, instead of three or four history concentrations, pull in something that's related. And she kept pushing me towards anthropology, and I kept saying, well, what about religion or what about literature? What about even politics? And she said, no, you're going to need anthropology. And she was exactly right. She was a good counselor in that way because anthropology is the study of what it means to be human. So, it fit in with the kind of history that I was doing for my doctoral research into the poor and measures to take care of the poor in the 18th century Charlestown, South Carolina. I do have about halfway to a master's in anthropology, but I'm not going to do a whole master's in anthropology.
[03:38] Mike Gray: So, your PhD. Is from where?
[03:41] Brenda Schoolfield: The University of South Carolina. When I went through there, like I said, you have your major. My PhD is listed as history, but then I also had the cognate field of anthropology alongside of it, and I went back and did a little bit more work in anthropology. The professors I met there were very helpful to me, and the classes that I took after I finished my PhD helped me with my teaching here at the university. I teach just two classes in anthropology that rotate. It's good to have a firm foundation.
[04:21] Mike Gray: Yeah. Interestingly. I took as an elective when I was a student, Cultural Anthropology.
[04:27] Brenda Schoolfield: Yes. We still offer that class.
[04:30] Mike Gray: So how long have you been a faculty member here?
[04:33] Brenda Schoolfield: I have been an appointed faculty member since 1992. I was a graduate assistant before then, and I worked for about 18 months at the University Press. But in 1992, I returned to the classroom, and I've been appointed faculty since then. Had the rank of professor in 2012 when the university instituted rankings. And I've been Chair of the Division of History, Government and Social Science since 2018.
I also taught for two semesters as a teaching assistant at the University of South Carolina, and that was good for my pedagogical development as well. I learned a good bit from the professors I taught for, and I still think back to some of the things that they did, both positive and negative, that have helped shape what I do in class. Not just content, but in terms of interacting with students and getting students engaged with the subject.
[05:35] Mike Gray: So, what courses do you teach?
[05:37] Brenda Schoolfield: Well, I teach The Making of the Modern World, which is the BJU core history class that all the students in the university take if they're getting a bachelor's degree. I also teach what I call the professional courses for history majors: Introduction to Historical Studies, Historiography and Historical Research and Writing, which is the capstone. I supervise the capstone course. That is something that's a little flexible. I can also pull in other faculty to help the students with their research projects and mentor them, which I will do if I end up with a big group of them again. I also teach the two classes in anthropology that rotate and some upper-level history that rotates in and out. As I have room in my schedule and as the schedule requires us to offer the classes for the students, I would say I'm far more teaching than administration.
[06:41] Mike Gray: So, my emphasis on this podcast is on durable learning, and it's my contention that learning is durable to the extent that it's based on understanding. What does understanding history mean to you?
[07:00] Brenda Schoolfield: I think understanding history starts with knowing the difference between the past and history. The past is everything that happened before now. But history is the account that we put together of the evidence of what happened before now. So, everything that happened before now—we don't know it all. We don't know everything that happened. We can't know everything that happened. Our knowledge of what happened before now is incomplete, and thus it's unclear. And the narratives that we put together to explain what happened in the past based on the evidence that's been left of what happened in the past is also incomplete and at times quite unclear, or sometimes it seems clearer. Then we find new evidence, and now it doesn't look so clear anymore. My colleagues who work in ancient history are plagued by this all the time. Somebody comes up with a new archaeological find that throws their king list into confusion. And now what we thought was the authoritative list of the pharaohs of the New Kingdom of Egypt suddenly, oh, wait a minute, there's somebody else that belongs in there, or somebody that doesn't belong in there, or these are overlapping or something like that.
But we see it even in more contemporary history when governments in the modern age have put barriers to access to records. But as those records become available for historians, historians learn, wait a minute. We thought this was what was happening, but now we have evidence there's something else going on too. So that narrative is the production of it's, a human production about what's happened, what humans have done. A narrative that changes. It has to be refreshed, revised, as we learn more about what happened, and we see the ongoing consequences of what happened.
So, when you come to the end of the Cold War, which I lived through, I started teaching at the end of the Cold War, I wouldn't have said when I was a graduate assistant that I knew that the Cold War was going to end. But I was teaching in 1989. I got married in 1989, which was that year that we now call that year of surprises. When the Berlin Wall came down in, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe fell. And now, 30 plus years later, historians have access to records about Eastern Europe that were never available before because of the Iron Curtain, because of language barriers, because governments had closed off access to those records. Now they're more open, even records in the United States about Eastern Europe. And so, we're learning that what the narrative that we thought applied. I think it's a narrative as an explanation. The explanation we thought applied doesn't apply.
So, to go back to what you asked me, what is understanding history? It's understanding its limitations and understanding that difference between the past and the narrative about the past. That's the beginning of understanding in history. And although I've had friends, colleagues, others say, that sounds a bit iffy, I said yes, but that's more interesting, isn't it? The idea that, oh, it happened in the past and that's it. There's nothing these people will say to me, why do you need to change history textbooks? The past hasn't changed, but our story about the past has changed because we've learned more or we understand better, we have more evidence. Yeah. Do you want me to still use an American history textbook that was written in 1900? First of all, it wouldn't include anything of the 20th century, and secondly, would have a very different interpretation of slavery than we have now. Thanks to our ability to look into plantation owners’ records and slave narratives, post slavery and all kinds of things, a historian has job security because we are interpreting the evidence of what happened in the past, and that is an incomplete record. So, there's always room for improvement.
[12:13] Mike Gray: What's your goal for those students who maybe that's their last contact with the study of history?
[12:23] Brenda Schoolfield: So that's an interesting comment, that it would be their last contact with.
[12:30] Mike Gray: They think.
[12:30] Brenda Schoolfield: Think they think it might be their last ever contact with history. But we consume history every day. Advertisers use it to sell things to us. Politicians use it as argument. The whole—you don't have to travel very far into popular culture to find historical claims. So, my goal in The Making of the Modern World is to expose students, to give them a taste, an example of what it is to think like a historian, to be able to evaluate historical claims. So that means the emphasis needs to be a little bit more on how do you think like a historian? Rather than do I know 35 pages of terms, name dates, events? Because you can know a whole heap of names, dates, and events and not think historically, not be able to come even close to those compelling questions.
You talk a lot about compelling questions. I think one of the most compelling questions that we ask as a human being is why? Why did this happen? It's the question that we ask when we come across an accident or an argument or anything almost. But when we're little kids, the grownups in our lives tell us, stop asking why. Stop asking why. Just go. Just do. And I want to reinvigorate their curiosity about why. And then to think historically, think like a historian about the past. And I've got an even longer trajectory here, and that is, I believe and I'm not the only one that believes this that the discipline of history cultivates the characteristics of humility and empathy. And I'm teaching Christian young people who are part of the body of Christ, who need to be doing kingdom work. Those are vital character qualities that they need to cultivate humility and empathy.
And so, listening to the past, the evidence of the past, and listening to people who have interpreted the evidence of the past requires a posture of humility. I don't know at all. And I'm interested in learning more. And empathy. What is it like to see it, to see life from another perspective, another point of view? History is a cross cultural experience going into the past and trying to make sense of it, because the past is that foreign country. I'm not the one who made that up. Somebody else did. Past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. Even if they spoke English, they use English differently than how we use English today. So, my short version is I want them to gain experience thinking like a historian in order to cultivate the qualities of humility and empathy. Note that that does not include that I want them to be able to recite a long list of dates and names and events. Students need to rediscover their curiosity of why and how and then have some tools for figuring out the answers to the why and the how questions.
[16:24] Mike Gray: So, what are some barriers, then, to that happening—to deep learning in history, besides maybe the stereotype that's been experienced coming in? And so, there's an expectation that's going to have to be turned on its head.
[16:43] Brenda Schoolfield: Yes. The prior experience. I've lost count of the number of times that students come to me and say, I really hated history because Mr. So and So, Miss So and So made us learn all these things. History is just dates and names. And that's a barrier. Their prior experience is a barrier. Their prior knowledge is sometimes a barrier. I try to leverage their prior knowledge to make them curious, even though it's probably names, dates, even though it's named. So, they'll say, oh, yeah, Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt. Yes. When did he do it? Well, he did it back in Bible times. I go, do you know that there's a debate about when that happened? Well, surely, we know when it happened, right? Yeah, because somebody minted a coin that says 1446 BC. You can't get that. And so, I introduced them to some of these debates. We're curious about controversy, right. And we start going, OOH, what's the dish on this? And so sometimes it's through showing them that what they think is fixed isn't as fixed as they think it is.
I don't intend for them to doubt truth. Truth is clear in the Bible, but our evidence is fragmentary. And so, continue with the example of the Exodus. Moses writes about the Exodus, but he never tells us the name of the Pharaoh. Moses never names a pharaoh. Was that because Moses didn't know the name of the Pharaoh? Of course not. He grew up with them. He grew up with the Pharaohs of that day, the one who was in charge when he was growing up, the one who became Pharaoh when he committed murder, the one who became Pharaoh—the one to whom he appealed. Let my people go. He knew all their names. He probably knew all their nicknames.
So how do we go about trying to build a timeline that will tell us when this happened? Why are there two different dates? Why do even biblical scholars, people who believe that the word of God is true, why do they disagree on when that happened? So, it teaches them something about the nature of historical evidence, and I hope it teaches them to be a little bit more humble about their claims, because I tell them, I say, you can take a side. I have a side in this, what I think is the correct date. But I have to acknowledge that the other argument has some valid points. So, I'm not trying to make them doubt facts as much as I am to get them to question the narratives. Why are the narratives put together the way they are? Because as human beings, we have a reason for doing that. And if they accept the narrative as if it's fact, we've got a problem.
So, it's not so much a question authority for the sake of questioning authority, but let's question the narrative so that we understand better, so that when it comes our time to put together a narrative and this is where I can appeal to a lot of different majors. I say you're going to be in law enforcement. Do you ever think you're going to have to construct a narrative from evidence? That's going to be your life. You're going to be an accountant, and maybe you go into forensic accounting. You're going to have to put together a narrative for why the books look the way they look. You're going to be a nurse. You're going to go into healthcare. You're going to have to put together a narrative of a patient's past in order to figure out, well, how do I work then, to help this patient gain better health, to overcome a disease or to fight a disease so that that person will leave hospital, so that the person will have proper nutrition? No matter. I always tell the students, I defy you to name a discipline or a course, a job or something where you don't need to be able to put together a narrative to examine evidence and put together an account. That's what historians do. And so when you hear a historical claim by a politician, by a policymaker, by anybody, you should be able to follow that logic. What are they basing that claim on? Is that a good claim? Is it bad claim? Why are they making the claim? If there isn't enough evidence to support that claim, then why are they making that claim? Because we tend to see history as we tend to see the narrative as fixed. Well, that's what happened, and we've always seen it that way. And because we've always said that it's that way. That's the way it is. That kind of very circular, chasing your tail kind of reason. And I want them to see that in this class.
So, the compelling question here that I have is how do we get to now, I have to give some credit to Steven Johnson, who came up with the book title, and he's got kind of a documentary series about that. I've enjoyed those too. It's really great, and I've even thought about using that. We talk about the cognitive work that you go into putting together. What kind of experiences do I need my students to engage with to get to where they need to go. What books do I use? Do I use Steven Johnson? Do I use something else anyway, but I have to give credit to Steven Johnson for the how. How did we get to now? How do we get to now? Because that is really the theme of what I'm doing. I would like to say that we came up with that idea at the same time because I don't remember reading that before. I was doing much with that before. I came up with a logic for why this class needs to be the way it is.
So, what makes the modern world? What are the influences? So how have religions influenced this world that we live in? How have empires influenced this world that we live in? Revolutions. From technological revolutions to political revolutions, how have ideas and technology influenced? How has that changed over time? Because technology, religion, technology, empire, revolution, these are things that have changed over time and have their consequences so they've caused the consequence that changed over time. This is what I want them to see. They don't have to see everything that ever happened in the past because A, we can't see it all and B, we don't care about everything.
Do we care what George Washington ate for breakfast every day? I don't, but I doubt that we could find out. So that's a piece of the past that's lost to us, but we can take some I wouldn't call them case studies so much, but that's kind of how I got to put together the units that I use. So, we talk about religion, we talk about ideas and technology, revolutions, empires and modern wars. The modern wars of the Great War, World War II, the Cold War and the Middle East conflicts. Those aren't all the wars that have ever been fought since 1900. There's lots more revolutions. I always use the American Revolution, the French Revolution, but I have used the Russian Revolution and I've also changed it up and used the Chinese Revolution as my third revolution in that unit. Does that mean they don't get anything about the Russian Revolution? Well, it's a side piece to the Great War, but I could stick a different revolution in there, like the Haitian Revolution or revolutions that have taken place in Sub-Saharan Africa as another example of these revolutions that have shaped the way we are now. Course material is designed to prod the questions in the context of how did we get to now? So, what has influenced this and what has contributed to the making of the world that we live in today?
[25:29] Mike Gray: So, speaking of how we got to now, I don't think you've always viewed history quite the way you're articulating it. Now, you may have experienced some of the stereotypical presentation of history that most of the listeners here will remember. Did you ever teach history as a collection of who, what, where, when or has it always been a why to you?
[26:08] Brenda Schoolfield: I think that I have always had the kind of pea under the mattress that disturbs the sleeping princess or the bird even.
[26:20] Brenda Schoolfield: That wasn't the way the course was oriented.
[26:22] Brenda Schoolfield: You wanted to I wanted to know that. And when I started teaching in the history of civ program, I continually pushed with my students, if you want to understand this, you're never going to be able to cram every little fact in your head and keep it straight if you don't understand how it fits together. The who, what, why, where, when, how questions aren't bad if they lead you to a narrative. If all you're stuck on is, I have to memorize these facts, you're going to get only so far in not just the grade in the class, but in understanding history.
We crave those narratives. We really do. Because if you look at book sales, history books sell (not the academic tomes, sure), but biography, hugely popular. Go into a Barnes and Noble and look at what's out for people. People will gravitate toward the history section, and they'll look for, oh, I want to know more about this. I want to know more about that. And they're consuming history not with an end to memorizing each date of all the battles of the Civil War, but to understand why the Civil War was fought, how this battle was, how these generals won this battle. Seeing the past in terms of pieces of data is not thinking historically. And before I even had the vocabulary to articulate that clearly to my students, I was trying to emphasize with them ask, why glorious revolution? Why is it glorious? Because it's also the bloodless revolution. Okay, so why isn't it?
I was always pushing my students to ask the why, but the structure of the course, that was, for me, a barrier. How could I get them to be successful in saying, oh, yeah, I understand how that fits together now. That makes sense. When they've got all of this to do, and they've getting while I know this part of it now, do they have to know all the rest of it to be successful at thinking historically? No. Because now, even way more so than when we were students, all the facts are at your fingertips. Why learn history when it's already on my phone? If you know 1776, but you don't know what the Declaration of Independence is about, you don't know history. But if you know what the Declaration of Independence is about, but you go, I can't remember. Is it 76, or is that 1779? Or is that 1780? You know what? If you can just tell me, sweetie, that it happened before the French Revolution, I'm happy, because that thinking changes over time. That's thinking historically. Cause and consequence. There's your flow. The date. You can look the date up. You can look the date up. You forgot Jefferson’s first name. You can look up Jefferson's first name. You forgot Jefferson's name. A guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence. You can look that up.
History is a narrative that accounts for the evidence. And I have probably my whole life been dissatisfied with the idea that history is that knowing history is being good at Trivial Pursuit. This ability to wrestle with information, to put together a coherent narrative is an important skill. It's a problem-solving skill, and it helps us answer those compelling questions of why and how. So, I want my students to get there, and I think I do get good feedback from students about I didn't like history before, but I see it as a story. I see the flow. I understand now more about asking why. When I get feedback like that from students, I'm thrilled. I'm way more thrilled than they might say. I'll never forget that the Battle of Tours was in 732, fought by Charles Martel.
[31:17] Mike Gray: Since you're talking about narratives, let's talk about the narrative of how you moved your course, which you inherited, and there were a lot of people involved, how you moved your course to be something quite different. What's the flow of that? How much of that was cognitive wrestling? How much of it was logistical? Can you give a summary narrative of that process?
[31:50] Brenda Schoolfield: There's a great deal of cognitive wrestling that's gone on that I have had that I've engaged in learning about backwards design. Backward design, of a course where I want to know, this is what I want the student to walk away with. So how do I get the student there? That, to me, meant that I needed to go back to the drawing board with this course. But some of the structural limitations were that that course, though it was mine, it became mine. I had other people teaching in it and the way it was structured with two lecture days and a discussion day. For me to go back to the drawing board would mean bringing all of these other people with me to say, we're going to teach this differently, and it's going to require something different of you in the discussion class that wasn't quite possible until the administration scheduling things come together and suddenly that class is no discussion, only me. At that point, I have 500 students per semester in two sections. But at that point, I didn't have to pull anybody else along with me to teach the course differently.
[33:13] Mike Gray: That's huge.
[33:14] Brenda Schoolfield: I just needed to start thinking about where do I want them to be? Does it take two semesters to get them there? No, because I don't want to have to teach two semesters. Actually, teaching the same thing every semester is its own challenge. When I can say, we just need one semester to do this, I can cut my sections into sections of 100 rather than sections of 250 plus. And the dynamic in the room changes.
But I was also encountering some other things. Like, there are people who've been thinking about teaching history for longer than I've been alive, of course. And I wasn't the one who came up with the five C's of historical thinking. It's a tool that lots of history teachers, whether they're in the pre-college setting or the university setting, that they have used and thinking about those five C's of historical thinking: change over time, causation, context, complexity, contingency. How do I get my students to see those again? Backward design. How do I get there? What do I need to do to get there?
Well, one of the things I need to do is to cut out a lot of the we don't have to march through every king in French history, and not even just every king since Charles Martel was mayor of the palace. I don't have to talk about every single one because all I'm doing is talking about it. The students are listening just very passive, and maybe they'll perk up because they like the sound of one king or another, but I'm not actually helping them learn. Change over time and complexity and contingency and causation. I participated in the Excellence in Teaching initiative which you built from the Summer Institute in Teaching Science. Some of that Summer Institute in Teaching Science was already filtering out to the rest of the faculty and making some of us, not everybody, but some of us very curious. Okay, how are they revamping their courses? What are they doing that's building a better experience for the student? And this whole idea that learning has to be student centered because it's the student who learns.
[35:50] Mike Gray: What an epiphany!
[35:51] Brenda Schoolfield: What an epiphany. Right? And I would say that when somebody said that I just sat there and went, that is so right. Why didn't I articulate it like that? All the good ideas. Somebody else started saying that before I did. Shucks. That's okay. I'm standing on other people's achievements.
Mike Gray: We all are.
Brenda Schoolfield: Yeah, exactly. But participating in that Excellence in Teaching initiative and if I can tell just one little story:
I had been teaching about 20 years when we first got to that; been in education for about 20 years. And I remember the first day going into that first meeting, and a thought hit me, I'm going to find out that I've been teaching wrong. I've been ruining students for 20 years. This is going to be humiliating. I need this because I need to teach better. I need to do something to reach my students and too I need a more compelling class course experience. And I was I was getting kind nervous, and the Lord was sort of reassuring me. The very night before I taught my first class as a graduate assistant, I really wrestled. I wasn't sure that God knew what he was doing to put me in a teaching position. And the Holy Spirit directed me to think about Moses. And I went back to Exodus. I'm reading his wrestling with God, and God said to him, what do you have in your hand? Give it to me. And I thought, okay, just like 20 years ago, I said, I don't know that you know what you're doing. I'll give you whatever I have, and you can do with it whatever you want, even if it means that I end up falling flat on my face and I've been humiliated. I need to because I'm too proud anyway. But I walked into that classroom where we were meeting in the Alumni Building, and I saw Grace Hargis. And Grace had been teaching almost 50 years at that point. And I thought, Grace Hargis thinks her teaching can be improved. I'm in the right place. I can learn something from this. I know I can learn something from this.
I already had a great deal of respect for Brian and you and Bill, for what you had been talking about in different in-service sessions and things like that about teaching. So going through that EITI experience really twice, because we did a small group with you a couple of years later, reading Esther Lightcap Meek’s book, A Little Manual for Knowing, a good starting point about the brokenness of our epistemology, that we equate knowledge as a pile of information, and that is broken. And we need a better approach to learning. Learning how the brain works, encountering the research on cognitive development and how the brain changes when we learn, attending the Teaching Professor conference, participating in the groups that helped put together CETEL here on campus, all of those things fed my hunger for changing.
So, then I had to come up with a plan to change that course, and then I had to sell it to my colleagues, which wasn't as hard to sell as I thought it would be, maybe because, well, it's all on you anyway, we don't have to deal with it. But I had very supportive colleagues who backed me up, who helped me and came in with me to help me as I was creating, who helped me frame the arguments that I needed to make to the Dean, to the Administration, to the Dean's Council, to Curriculum Committee. And it wasn't as hard as sell as I thought it would be, in part because other people who were participating in that were being exposed to some of the same things that I've been talking about. EITI and the research from cognitive psychologists about learning—the obvious need that we have in this age of lots of information to teach students how to think.
We have that saying from the university founder that Jesus taught men how to live, not just how to make a living, but how to live. And that's one of the big takeaways I had even as an undergraduate from here. That what I was getting from my classes was how to live. Not just a bunch of I wasn't being programmed like a monkey to do some fancy tricks. I was being taught how to think, how to think biblically. Well, we know so much more about how to do that now. We need to employ this in our classrooms, in our learning, to build learning experiences, that students will come away and they'll say, I know how to apply this. Now, I might not know anything about the Rwandan genocide, but now I know how to look at evidence and how to evaluate what other people have written about it. And I can learn something about the Rwandan genocide before I become a missionary to that part of Africa in Rwanda and Burundi and Uganda, before I'm living in that area, I don't expect them to say, oh, I learned about that in Making of the Modern World. I don't have time to teach all of that.
The cognitive wrestling is that backward design. Where do I want the students to be? How do I get them there? What methods and assessments will help them get to where they need to be? And what is my role? How much do I show them? How much do I tell them? And how much do I say, “Go figure it out?” Because I could show and tell them everything and they won't necessarily be able to figure it out on their own. Yeah.
My logistical hurdles: the time is the biggest thing. We've got a limited amount of time in the classroom, and so that's a logistical hurdle. The attitudes of your colleagues, the people who are over you in terms of division chairs or deans, curriculum committee and all of that, getting them to go along with my plan for this new course. I'm often asked, are you sad that they took Hi 101 and 102 away from you and that they (the scare quotes), “they” have reduced your class to one semester? And I always just take a bit of delight in saying, oh, no, they didn't do that. I did that with the help of friends. Yes, but I'm the one that proposed this. This was my idea. Not like it was birthed as a new egg ex nihilo.
[43:20] Mike Gray: Exactly. What? You took the initiative. It didn't just happen. No.
[43:27] Brenda Schoolfield: It wasn't done to me.
[43:29] Brenda Schoolfield: Yes.
[43:35] Brenda Schoolfield: I have loved the Hi 101 and 102 course because I love history and I love investigating the past. But that class is not about me. It's about the students and what they take away. So, I need to make that class something that would engage them. I'm already engaged. Yeah, but they need you to get some of them coming along with you because they just like a passionate teacher. They like a teacher who will be excited. But if I can spark it inside of them, even if it's just for the project that they do. Most of them will tell me, I didn't like history until I got to do a project—which I don't think we hear all the time from students. I got to do that project. Yeah, I made you do that project. Right. But no, and I try to frame it that way. I'm giving you the opportunity. You're going to think like a historian. You're going to put together a project that is not an essay. That kind of takes the weight off of it, too. And I get some people who say I'm not that creative. Oh, yes, you are. You are very creative because you're made in the image of God. So, let's put some of that creativity to the test. And they go, I really enjoyed that project. I had a good time. I spent more than 12 hours on it.
[45:19] Mike Gray: Well, I've had a good time, too. And we're not near done. Brenda and I are going to be back in a couple of weeks to talk more about what it means to think like a historian. Beware: there's much more to say, and I think we've already piqued your interest and maybe shattered some of your stereotypes. Maybe you actually do like history! So, we'll see you in a couple of weeks. But thank you, Brenda.
[45:50] Brenda Schoolfield: You're most welcome. I can talk about all of this till the cows come home.
[45:57] Mike Gray: Well, you've got some cows that want to follow you. Thank you.
[46:01] Brenda Schoolfield: You're very welcome.
[46:07] Mike Gray: Join me in two weeks as we follow up with a second episode where we explore in greater detail what it means to think like a historian, which is the goal for students in Dr. Brenda Schoolfield's innovative history course, the Making of the Modern World. Get ready to shed some stereotypes and embrace a bigger and more satisfying view of history. As always, this episode transcript and links to sources and resources is cached at my website, deepandurable.com. You can also contact me with questions and suggestions at that same address. See you soon!