Erika Briesacher: Engaging in a conversation about history
Professor of History, 2022 Alden Award Winner
When Erika Briesacher, professor of history, hands back corrected papers, she asks students to look beyond the grade. “I write all over them, and when they get it back and see that at first, they’re like, ‘I’ve failed,’ and then they flip to the grade and think, ‘Wait a second.’”
Briesacher tells them, “The grade is actually kind of pointless. Look at the comments because that’s where I’m having a conversation with you.”
It’s a conversation that Briesacher hopes will lead students beyond memorization of names of battles, dates, and other historical facts.
“If I had to boil my teaching philosophy down, it used to be organized around source material and letting the sources speak and balancing that through context and interpretation,” she said. “Now, my philosophy is giving students space to exercise the curiosity muscle that we don’t often get to do.”
The point, she said, is not to focus on facts long enough to pass a test and then move on, but to seek valuable insights into the past that allow us to more fully understand different time periods, events, and societies.
“You can memorize a date; it’s a parlor trick. You can go on Jeopardy! with that one. Maybe you can recite back to me for a hot minute when World War II was, and then you’ll promptly not care about that for the rest of your life. But, later, it’s more important to remember things like how it started in different places at different times and what do we think about that now?”
Briesacher said she hopes that, by the end of the semester, she has helped each student discover their authentic voice and acquire the courage to use it.
“Success as a teacher for me is when a student sits back and goes, ‘I didn’t think of it that way,’” she said. “And sometimes they discover that they came up with something that nobody else thought about in exactly the same way, and they understand that they can and do contribute daily to the world around them, to the people in their classes, their professors, their colleagues, to people they don’t know on the street, to the body of knowledge and the life of the mind. Grades have nothing to do with that.”
