{"id":545,"date":"2021-02-04T16:37:18","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T16:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/?p=545"},"modified":"2024-08-31T17:05:52","modified_gmt":"2024-08-31T16:05:52","slug":"teaching-in-an-age-of-covid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/2021\/02\/04\/teaching-in-an-age-of-covid\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching in an Age of COVID"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Professor Neil Gregor<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Avenue Campus, where single and dual honours History students once congregated en masse.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This year has brought its challenges for tutors and students\nalike.  But the need to rethink how we\ndeliver our teaching has also brought its advantages. These are not only\npractical \u2013 they have also been intellectual. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, this has been particularly the case at final year\nundergraduate level.  Here the inherited\nmodel of the Special Subject \u2013 beloved of \u2018old\u2019 university History curricula\nfor over a hundred years, and an institution that reform-minded colleagues or\nadministrators have always challenged at their peril \u2013 has also had to give way\nto something new.  Obliged by\ncircumstance to remodel our curriculum for this year, for example, one\nadjustment has been to replace all single-taught modules with courses taught by\nmore than one member of staff.  In my\ncase, that has meant joining my expertise on modern German history to that of\nmy colleague Dr Joan Tumblety, who specializes in modern France.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the past twenty-five or so years I have taught a year-long\nSpecial Subject on Nazi Germany. Over two semesters we have focused, as one\nmight expect, on: the rise of National Socialism, the nature of the regime, the\neconomic, social and cultural history of its period of rule, the outbreak of\nwar, and the events of the Holocaust, closing with a consideration of\nresistance and the collapse of the regime. The module has been popular, as\nmodules on Nazi Germany tend to be.  It\nhas been updated periodically, and certainly the conversations in recent\nseminars bear little relation to those we had in the 1990s.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dr Joan Tumblety in reflective action.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Yet however much one tries to revise a module, it always\nsomehow retains the DNA of its original conception. After twenty-five years of\nteaching I was becoming more and more conscious of trying to force a twenty-first\ncentury teaching conversation into a twentieth-century structure.  It has been a blessing in disguise,\ntherefore, to have been obliged to join forces with Dr Tumblety (who has taught\na similar Special Subject, on Vichy France, for a similar length of time) and\nto come up with something new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The easy thing to do would have been to bolt our two Special\nSubjects together, taking the most relevant halves of each to create a course\non the German Occupation of France during the Second World War.  Yet we both felt that joining forces was an\nopportunity to create something that was more than the sum of its parts, and\nthat we should take the chance to teach together something that we would not be\nable to deliver as individuals. We both also take the notion of research-led teaching\nvery seriously indeed.  Mindful of the\nprofound turn away from historical frames that privilege the \u2018national\u2019 at the\nlevel of scholarly research, we wanted to do something that took our students\nmore firmly outside of the conventions of \u2018French\u2019 and \u2018German\u2019 history, and\nintegrated the recent scholarly conversations on transnational history,\ncomparative history and \u2018entangled history\u2019 \u2013 a rough approximation of the histoires crois<\/em>\u00e9es<\/em>,\nor Verflechtungsgeschichte<\/em>, that our\nFrancophone and Germanophone colleagues pursue too.  Such approaches have long since become\nnaturalized in the work of many (though not all!) scholars, but at\nundergraduate level the conventional national frame remains far more the norm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Professor Neil Gregor standing beside Professor Edgar Edgar Joseph Feuchtwanger (OBE). Courtesy of Neil Gregor.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

As a result, we are spending the year co-teaching new\nmaterial on \u2018Entangled Histories: France and Germany in the Mid-Twentieth\nCentury\u2019. Using both French and German sources we explore episodes ranging from\nthe French Occupation of the Ruhr through the German Invasion of France in 1940\nto the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 from the perspectives of a variety\nof actors on each side.  With topics such\nas War Memory, the Jazz Age or Postwar Reconstruction we examine French and\nGerman history on a comparative basis. Focusing on borderland histories and \u2018in\nbetween\u2019 spaces such as those of Alsace-Lorraine and the Rhineland, we consider\nregional stories that are not so easily subsumed into a national narrative.  In considering the stories of those who moved\nbetween Germany and France for a variety of reasons we explore how ordinary\nlives do not unfold inside of national silos either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This reframing is, in many respects, hardly radical, but it is surprising how much it changes what students are able to see. Comparing French and German histories in this period has underlined how not everything that happens in a dictatorship is the opposite of what happens in a democracy \u2013 and certainly not where early-twentieth-century European history is concerned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Placing the grand narratives of modern French and German history side by side has also clarified the challenge of pursuing comparative history using literatures that have evolved in response to different problems: the \u2018vanishing points\u2019 of 1933 (the Nazi takeover of power) and 1941 (Auschwitz) have created different problems of explanation to that of 1940 (the defeat of France), with the result that the two national historiographies do not speak so easily to one another.  All in all, the inherent messiness of the many entanglements we are considering have underlined the limitations of narratives that are driven by the conventional political caesuras of 1918, 1940 or 1945, and has allowed other, more submerged stories, to come to the surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it has also brought benefits for us. Asking our students\nto attend to questions of method has forced us to revisit those same questions\nourselves, to articulate our thoughts in response to them, and to rethink\nissues that we thought we understood. \nSharing teaching materials has allowed each of us to read texts and\nsources with which we were unfamiliar. Preparing seminars in a highly\ncollaborative manner, and delivering some of them together, has produced a rich\ndialogue on the intellectual problem at hand. If a mutual intellectual respect\nanchored in the fact that we have broadly similar approaches to our scholarly\nwork \u2013 we are both social and cultural historians \u2013 has been a key precondition\nfor all that, it has been just as stimulating to locate those points on which we\nmight differ slightly too. Having been obliged to read far more French history\nthan I might otherwise do has generated interesting thoughts about my own\nimmediate field of study. More than that, it has provided a powerful antidote\nto the intellectual provincialism into which one can easily slide if one\nremains focused on a single national history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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La Patrie retrouv\u00e9e by L\u00e9on Hornecker, 1918.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One might counter that all of this would have been possible without the pandemic.  There is no gainsaying that yes, in principle, that is true.  But life has a habit of getting in the way. In a world in which there is always too much to do for tomorrow, finding the space for wholesale rethinking never comes as easily as it should. Neither does any of this mitigate the significant challenges that online teaching and learning has brought for staff and students: doubtless, once the pandemic is over, our mode of delivery will evolve (if not revert) again.  On both levels \u2013 the practical and the intellectual \u2013 the capacity of our students to rise to the challenge has been admirable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more pertinent point is, however, a different one.\u00a0 Many less informed voices have discussed the impact of the pandemic on university education on the assumption that it has simply made everything worse. Many in the world of politics have been far too happy to indulge that claim. There is much that has<\/em> been worse, and much that has been far less than ideal. \u00a0In that sense, of course we all look forward to this being over. In my experience, however, there has also been much that has simply been different, and much that has forced us to rethink things for the better. I, for one, have no wish to go back to teaching those conventional histories of Nazi Germany, and hope that when the pandemic is but a fading memory, the pleasures of teaching new materials in new ways will remain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Originally posted at https:\/\/neilgregor.com\/2021\/01\/21\/teaching-in-an-age-of-covid\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor Neil Gregor This year has brought its challenges for tutors and students alike.  But the need to rethink how we deliver our teaching has also brought its advantages. These are not only practical \u2013 they have also been intellectual. For me, this has been particularly the case at final year undergraduate level.  Here the inherited model of the Special …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3768,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[119,115,23,108,120,55,112,118],"class_list":["post-545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment-and-debate","tag-comparative-history","tag-covid","tag-first-world-war","tag-german-history","tag-pedagogy","tag-second-world-war","tag-teaching","tag-transnational-history","column","threecol"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3768"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":555,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions\/555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}