Myrona Ivonne Fuentes Wallace: A Philosophy of Teaching

When I step in front of a classroom for the first time, I try to emulate. I'm trying to emulate my undergraduate history professor who made the distant history of the Maya so enthralling that he convinced me, a junior, to switch from studying immunology to studying Latin American history. I'm trying to emulate the Duke history professor who stumped me as a graduate student with a simple question: "What is history?" Baffled that I had no simple answer, I was amazed at the elegance of what he suggested: history is the study of change over time. These epiphanies stand out for me as moments when I discovered different and fascinating territories of knowledge and shocked myself into new ways of thinking. On the first day of class, I try to emulate what exemplary teachers taught me teaching could be: I strive to create opportunities for my students to stumble into their own epiphanies.

My experience teaching at Duke has convinced me that students have an intense interest in learning history -- an interest echoed in a broader culture where historical novels top bestseller lists and historical content proliferates in film and television. But I have found that many students come to my class, as I came to graduate school, without a clear sense of what makes history an academic discipline -- for them, history is a transparent telling of what happened. I want my students to learn instead that studying history means learning particular methodologies and critically approaching historical texts, historiography, and our own historical writing.

In my courses, I have two broad sets of teaching goals. First, I want to cultivate a passion in my students for Latin American geographical, temporal, and cultural contexts. I try to capture my students' interest by including a wide variety of material in the syllabus, and I work hard at making my lectures as engaging as possible; for instance, by incorporating new media.

When covering the South American military dictatorships of the late 1970's and early 1980's, I had students listen to Argentine popular music. I presented the lyrics in Spanish and in English translation while they listened to the familiar sounding pop music, destabilizing their easy familiarity with evocative images of torture and disappearance which they reflected on in their writing.

Second, I aim to teach my students how to be historians: how to read, write, and communicate about the critical study of change over time. To do this, I try to design courses with student goals stressing collaborative learning, critical reading and writing, and effectively communicating what they have learned to both academic and general audiences.

Collaborative learning allows the class to cover more material, engages students as co-participants in their own learning, and allows them to develop as leaders and to practice communicating. In my classes, groups break out for ten to fifteen minutes to work on a task, and then report back to the larger group. In-class "breakout" groups work well for integrating historical content: for example, having three groups in my Spring 2004 survey course, Modern Latin American History, generate theme specific timelines on the nineteenth century. I have also found such group work useful for having students learn from each other and practice methodologies and skills, such as writing, revising, and taking notes.

A second student goal is learning how to read and write as historians. I teach my classes to read not just for content, but also to determine an author's interpretation and to evaluate the argument themselves. I first tried to teach this on an ad-hoc basis with individual reading assignments throughout the semester in my Spring 2004 survey course, but found that some students felt lost and untrained in what I expected them to do. For my next course, a Junior-Senior seminar on "Students and Politics in Latin America," I structured the syllabus around thematic multi-week units and designed the first unit to teach students how to read and evaluate a historical argument by introducing the historical method and conventions of academic argumentation while stressing discussions and short in-class writing assignments.

Throughout the next units that semester, students relied on the skills they had honed in the first unit to evaluate and contextually place the historiography they read. They also began to work on their research papers, learning how to research and craft their own historical arguments. To stress how important revising is to writing, I included an opportunity for them to turn in multiple drafts. My work as a Writing Studio Tutor has convinced me that writing is thinking. I have learned from my tutees what they find most stressful and daunting about the writing process and have tried to translatewhat I learned to the classroom, tailoring three separate classroom sessions in my Fall 2004 seminar around the writing issues that my tutees complained were the most troublesome for them. Before they began their daunting 20 page research project, I provided my students with resources and models for effective writing and revising. We defused many of their fears by demystifying the process of writing. As a bonus, the drafts that my students generated were far superior to other student drafts I had seen before.

Finally, students learn in my class how to communicate their new knowledge effectively to others. Reaching out beyond the university is important to me, and something I have stressed in my own scholarly career by participating in community outreach efforts aimed at teachers and the general public. For the seminar "The Challenge of Latin American Liberalism, 1850-2001," which I will teach in Spring 2006 as a Gerst Pre-Doctoral Fellow, I have designed an assignment to help students reach out to their communities: a Curriculum Portfolio. This assignment gives students practice writing to a novice audience as experts in a subject field, a style of writing that much more closely resembles the writing they will engage in after graduation. Students design and assemble a multi-media Curriculum Portfolio that area high school teachers can use to teach both Latin American history content and the process of critical reasoning. Each Portfolio includes at least three elements, such as timelines, images, or analysis of primary texts. I tested this assignment in my Fall 2004 Seminar, and was pleased to learn from four of my students that they plan on taking their assignments with them as they pursue teaching related fields after Duke, in such programs as Teach for America.

For me, teaching is an opportunity to recapture my own interest in Latin America with every new syllabus and every new group of students arriving with their own interests and questions. But I also see it as a constant challenge to improve my own ability to transmit that excitement, enthusiasm, and knowledge as effectively as possible. To improve my own skills, I have taken several opportunities to learn about teaching and pedagogy. I was awarded a 2004 Center for Teaching, Learning, and Writing Mini Grant to design and coordinate a workshop series on teaching in the Duke History Department.

I also organized a panel on teaching for the American Historical Association's

2004 Annual Meeting, which was published in the October 2004 issue of the AHA Perspectives as "Graduate Students' Forum: Into the Classroom! Tips and

Tricks to Succeed as a Teacher." I know from my own experience as a student that the most valuable learning is student-centered; I am now learning how much skill, energy, and time it takes to lay the groundwork for students to stumble into their own epiphanies.