Name: Adam Bisno
Year: Second Year PhD Student
Department: History
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My name is Adam Bisno, and I’m a Teaching Assistant for an introductory history class called “Occidental Civilization, 1789–present.” I really enjoy teaching my subject area, which is modern Europe with a focus on German cultural history. (I’m a PhD student in the Department of History.) My responsibilities include grading exams and papers and leading weekly discussion sections of 10-20 undergraduates. I’m here not only as their instructor, though, but as a fellow student and historian-in-training, too.
Lecturing is one of the skills I’m still developing, so the course professor let me give this term’s talk on fascism. My preparation was guided by two questions: What is the vision of interwar and fascist Europe I want students to have, and what are the ways I hope that students might find to question the perspective I offer? In the end, I opted for an explanation of fascism that took the ideology seriously, that located its cultural appeal to contemporaries, and that highlighted the continuities and discontinuities in modern European political culture up to 1945. This is only one way of looking at fascism. In choosing it, I didn’t hope to persuade students that culture and ideologies are the stuff from which we must build our understanding of fascism; rather, I tried to give them a concrete approach with which to engage, against which to push, and from which they might form their own ideas about the origins, meanings, and legacies of interwar fascism.
The way I teach is really the way I learn: through problem-oriented, question-driven discussion. I always try to bring the conversation back to the historian we’re reading: Why did she choose the evidence she chose? How is she using it? What is her argument? Do we agree? Why not? For Hopkins undergrads, dates and facts are just as easily memorized at home; class is where they should learn to read for argument, question evidence, and think through problems.
I also meet with a fair number of my students outside class. It’s always a pleasure when somebody comes to ask about a finer point or broader theme in the course, and it’s fun for me to help students to historical definitions of concepts and categories we otherwise take for granted–like citizenship, the individual, and rights. Most of my students won’t even major in history, but I’m pretty sure they’ll take with them the discipline’s unique approach to the past, an approach I hope to have helped them discover.
At my sections on Friday afternoons, I don’t spend much time imparting information. I try very hard not to do that. Better to provoke, sit back, and gently guide a discussion toward some useful, possibly mind-expanding conclusion. Of course, conclusions aren’t always forthcoming, not in history and not in any discipline. Sometimes it’s just as satisfying to end class on a question with no solution and then send everybody off to their weekends.
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