Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Statement of Teaching Philosophy Seth Offenbach As a historian, I hope to impart to my students an appreciation for history and an understanding of how the past influences contemporary society. As an educator, I seek to provide my students with practical analytical skills, which they can apply throughout their university and professional careers. For this reason, I design history courses with a strong emphasis on writing and document analysis. I encourage students to use our class time to reach their highest potential and experiment with a variety of means to help them achieve this goal. I design my courses with an emphasis on helping students think more critically about the past and helping them communicate their analysis more clearly. I devote several class sessions toward discussing primary source documents in order to provide students with hands-on experience analyzing documents. In past courses, I have used Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Seneca Falls Address on women’s rights (1848), the South Carolina Declaration of Secession (1860), and stories from Dust Bowl survivors (1930s). These rich and complex documents present different portraits of U.S. history and tell the story of the nation’s development from the perspective of leaders of social movements, political parties, and through the struggles of average Americans. These documents also reinforce information learned during lectures, for example Stanton’s Seneca Falls address helps students understand the troubles of the youth American democracy. Discussing documents in the classroom also helps the students make connections between various periods like the rhetoric surrounding the Filipino-American War and the rhetoric about racial purity during the 1920s. Analyzing documents continues with the take-home essays on book-length primary sources which I frequently assign. In the past, I have required students to read The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. By reading these works the students gain a more in-depth perspective of U.S. culture, such as African American struggles for rights in the 1960s or the negative effects of suburbanization in 1950s. My assignments require the students to think deeply about the works and to formulate their own opinion while improving the fluency, accuracy, and elegance of their writing. I ask probing, open-ended essay questions that require students to “play” with the material. I make sure that there are multiple ways to answer any of my essay questions and often discuss some of the potential answers with my class to ensure that they view the question from various angles. While discussing the assignments with students, I emphasize that they need to find a unique argument and present their thesis clearly. In addition to thought-provoking assignments, I work to ensure that my lectures are engaging. As students take a greater interest in my lectures, they also begin to understand the material more clearly. My faculty reviews and student evaluations are often extremely positive, but they also indicated that I needed to improve my in-class enthusiasm. With experience, my teaching style has evolved and I am now a more dynamic lecturer. For example, two years ago I incorporated technology into my lectures, enriching classes with pictures of people and of famous events, along with music from the different eras. Students respond to these audio and visual stimuli and they remain more focused on the course material. This change also helps students relate to society of decades and centuries past. Pictures help students relate to the destruction wrought by World War II, while audio of William Jennings Bryan allows them to hear the power of the Progressive movement. Meanwhile, magazine advertisements bring students into the world of the Roaring Twenties and television commercials demonstrate the allure of suburbia on 1950s Offenbach 2 nuclear families. Renditions of the French-Indian War help students understand American feelings toward Native Americans, while posters about the Fugitive Slave Law give students an appreciation of the disgust among abolitionists toward slavery. Additionally, musical lyrics provide unique interpretations of eras. Students can look through a window into the world of groups as varied as poor African Americans in the 1980s (Fight the Power) and white Southerners during Reconstruction (I’m a Good Ol’ Rebel). The pictures and music help students identify with these eras while also opening the classroom to frequent discussions and debates where students provide the bulk of analysis. Through my experience as an educator, I have learned to appreciate that in order to help students succeed, it is important to learn more about their different social and ethnic background. I have experience teaching international students who have a poor grasp of English (and U.S. culture), wealthy suburbanites who expect to succeed, and students who are the first in their family to attend college. In order to help everyone achieve their highest potential I must adjust my methods based on the classroom, this is often a challenge which requires constant attention. As an example, at CCNY many of my students work 40 hours per week (while attending school full time) and many others are busy raising a child. During my first semester teaching at CCNY I did not recognize this reality and their grades demonstrated that there was a problem. I am currently teaching my fifth class at CCNY and I now work to provide the maximum level of assistance outside of the classroom to help them complete their work in a timely manner. This means that I often require students to set up office hour appointments where I discuss their papers with them and often offer advice on time management. Comparatively, I find that some suburban students focus more attention to the outcome (grades) than to the process (content and analysis). This requires me to deemphasize grades by shifting how I present the assignments and by spending more class time explaining the assignment’s pedagogy. Each undergraduate body is unique and it can be a challenge to recognize how to adjust my material for different groups. My goal as an educator is to help my students grow, to prepare them for life outside of academia, and to help them become well rounded citizens. Through encouragement and an animated teaching style, I keep my classes interesting while forcing my students to think about the past as a unique place, one that is constantly shaping the contemporary society. I work to make my assignments difficult and yet meaningful. Though I have room to grow as an undergraduate professor, I look forward to the challenge of constantly updating my lectures, style, and technique to help my students for many decades to come. 

Statement of Teaching Philosophy Seth Offenbach As a historian, I hope to impart to my students an appreciation for history and an understanding of how the past influences contemporary society. As an educator, I seek to provide my students with practical analytical skills, which they can apply throughout their university and professional careers. For this reason, I design history courses with a strong emphasis on writing and document analysis. I encourage students to use our class time to reach their highest potential and experiment with a variety of means to help them achieve this goal. I design my courses with an emphasis on helping students think more critically about the past and helping them communicate their analysis more clearly. I devote several class sessions toward discussing primary source documents in order to provide students with hands-on experience analyzing documents. In past courses, I have used Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Seneca Falls Address on women’s rights (1848), the South Carolina Declaration of Secession (1860), and stories from Dust Bowl survivors (1930s). These rich and complex documents present different portraits of U.S. history and tell the story of the nation’s development from the perspective of leaders of social movements, political parties, and through the struggles of average Americans. These documents also reinforce information learned during lectures, for example Stanton’s Seneca Falls address helps students understand the troubles of the youth American democracy. Discussing documents in the classroom also helps the students make connections between various periods like the rhetoric surrounding the Filipino-American War and the rhetoric about racial purity during the 1920s. Analyzing documents continues with the take-home essays on book-length primary sources which I frequently assign. In the past, I have required students to read The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. By reading these works the students gain a more in-depth perspective of U.S. culture, such as African American struggles for rights in the 1960s or the negative effects of suburbanization in 1950s. My assignments require the students to think deeply about the works and to formulate their own opinion while improving the fluency, accuracy, and elegance of their writing. I ask probing, open-ended essay questions that require students to “play” with the material. I make sure that there are multiple ways to answer any of my essay questions and often discuss some of the potential answers with my class to ensure that they view the question from various angles. While discussing the assignments with students, I emphasize that they need to find a unique argument and present their thesis clearly. In addition to thought-provoking assignments, I work to ensure that my lectures are engaging. As students take a greater interest in my lectures, they also begin to understand the material more clearly. My faculty reviews and student evaluations are often extremely positive, but they also indicated that I needed to improve my in-class enthusiasm. With experience, my teaching style has evolved and I am now a more dynamic lecturer. For example, three years ago I incorporated technology into my lectures, enriching classes with pictures of people and of famous events, along with music from the different eras. Students respond to these audio and visual stimuli and they remain more focused on the course material. This change also helps students relate to society of decades and centuries past. Pictures help students relate to the destruction wrought by World War II, while audio of William Jennings Bryan allows them to hear the power of the Progressive movement. Meanwhile, magazine advertisements bring students into the world of the Roaring Twenties and television commercials demonstrate the allure of suburbia on 1950s Offenbach nuclear families. Renditions of the French-Indian War allow students to see how colonists viewed Native Americans, while posters about the Fugitive Slave Law give students an appreciation of the disgust among abolitionists toward slavery. Additionally, musical lyrics provide unique interpretations of eras. Students can look through a window into the world of groups as varied as poor African Americans in the 1980s (Fight the Power) and working class whites (Born in the USA). The pictures and music help students identify with these eras while also opening the classroom to frequent discussions and debates where students provide the bulk of analysis. 2 Through my experience as an educator, I have learned to appreciate that in order to help students succeed, it is important to learn more about their different social and ethnic background. I have experience teaching first-semester freshmen who are overwhelmed by college life, advanced students who have gone on to earn their PhDs in history, and students who are the first in their family to attend college. In order to help everyone achieve their highest potential I must adjust my methods based on the classroom, this is often a challenge which requires constant attention. As an example, at CCNY, where I served as a full time adjunct from January 2010 until August 2011, many of my students worked 40 hours per week (while attending school full time) and many others were busy raising a child. During my first semester teaching at CCNY I did not recognize this reality and their grades demonstrated that there was a problem. In the middle of my first semester I learned to provide the maximum level of assistance outside of the classroom to help them complete their work in a timely manner. This means that I often require students to set up office hour appointments where I discuss their papers with them and often offer advice on time management. Comparatively, I find that some suburban students focus more attention to the outcome (grades) than to the process (content and analysis). This requires me to deemphasize grades by shifting how I present the assignments and by spending more class time explaining the assignment’s pedagogy. Each undergraduate body is unique and it can be a challenge to recognize how to adjust my material for different groups. My goal as an educator is to help my students grow, to prepare them for life outside of academia, and to help them become well rounded citizens. Through encouragement and an animated teaching style, I keep my classes interesting while forcing my students to think about the past as a unique place, one that is constantly shaping the contemporary society. I work to make my assignments difficult and yet meaningful. Though I have room to grow as an undergraduate professor, I look forward to the challenge of constantly updating my lectures, style, and technique to help my students for many decades to come.