Department of History 108 Kauke Hall College of Wooster Wooster, Ohio 44691 330-263-2451 ktaylor@acs.wooster.edu
To grasp the meaning of a complex sequence of human events is not the same thing as being able to explain why or even how the particular events that the sequence comprises occurred.
Hayden White
Greetings from the College of Wooster. If you're here because you're interested in what Wooster has to offer in the way of history, the first thing you should know is that as far as I'm concerned, history is everything. What I mean by that is that everything has a history, from the cup or pencil sitting there on the desk next to you, to President Bush's latest tangle with the press. I became a historian because I wondered why people in the 1970s suddenly developed a love of houseplants. It's true. Actually, the history of people's fascination with plants goes a long way back (and that's a story for another time), but it's true that this is why I became a historian. What I'm interested in is why people feel and act the way they do.
The courses I teach reflect that interest. Because I think that the key to understanding people and their history is understanding their identities, my primary focuses are gender and sexuality. I teach about gender and sexuality in a variety of courses.
My approach to education is best summed up by the term "problem posing," as described in the following passage:
In the problem posing mode, teachers and students are no longer in opposition to one another and both become "teacher-students." This does not mean that teachers and students are equal in the sense that everyone is the same. The teacher retains formal authority, but this authority is based on knowledge rather than institutional credentials. The goal of problem posing education is to empower students, to structure a course that invites creative input on the part of students and that fosters dialogue among participants. ... In problem posing education men and women develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process - in transformation. And by definition, a reality in process is one in which the student-teacher can act.
P.H. Collins, "The Emerging Theory and Pedagogy of Black Women's Studies"
One of my pedagogical goals, then, is to help students recognize their own ability to thoughtfully examine and understand ideas and actions, and the assumptions behind them. Though we may share many common experiences we are basically distinct individuals with unique perspective/voices filtered through our own histories. Historians, like everbody else, are products of their ages and environment, and as such, subject to the same filtering. Historians deal with "facts" only in the sense that they collect and interpret what other people have written down or remembered. Those people wrote or remembered what they did through their own set of cultural filters - thus what they saved for posterity is only their version of the "facts." The best history is therefore only a second-hand reconstruction and interpretation of what "really" happened. In my classes I attempt to create an atmosphere in which students and I can reassemble some of those filters, and thereby understand our past in some of the ways people of the past themselves understood it.
Last updated: January 14, 2003 © 1999 Karen J. Taylor