Interview with Dr Donald Spaeth
Don Spaeth
"I am honoured to receive a Teaching Excellence Award. These awards are important because they recognise the central place which teaching and student learning hold in the life of the University. The award citation highlights the innovative approach I take to teaching and the positive impact this has on students. This includes teaching students to use computers, so that they can study historical sources and answer historical questions for themselves, an approach which Glasgow was already pioneering when I arrived.
"But innovation is about much more than using technology. It is about finding new ways to help students learn better, and about constantly re-examining one's teaching to see how it can be improved. Both require time. Teaching with computers has often meant investigating subjects far outside my comfort zone, from landholding in Norman England to the assimilation of migrants from Ireland in nineteenth-century Britain. And, after sixteenth years, I have yet to learn that it is not necessary to re-write lectures every year!
"In a course evaluation a few years ago, a student complained that a course appeared to be about how to write history and not what actually happened. This is true. I want students to understand how history is written, both by critiquing the interpretations of different historians and by engaging with primary sources, and I want them to learn how to write history themselves, whether they are studying British society or popular religion after the Reformation. Most important, I want students to learn to think for themselves.
"I owe this philosophy to my undergraduate studies at Reed College, one of the premier liberal arts colleges in the US, where my grandfather, Rex Arragon, was professor of history for over fifty years. Once, when asked how history was written, he said 'You have to invent it'. When students discuss this statement in seminars, it makes them uncomfortable, yet they begin to realise that the history of the past is not fixed; it has been debated and rewritten since the events they are studying, a process that continues today.
"Most of all, I believe good teaching is about putting students first. After a period as Head of Department and then of research leave, I have enjoyed returning to full-time teaching enormously. Teaching has many aspects: figuring out how to explain and illustrate a complex subject in a fifty minute lecture; trying to develop a sense of mutual trust and self-confidence among members of a seminar group, and sometimes allowing long silences when it would be easy just to talk; looking over students' shoulders in a computer lab as they struggle with a query; hours of marking, brightened by an excellent essay; trying to give constructive feedback and not just criticism; and talking one-to-one with students about their studies, problems and plans. I was heartened by the student who commented that my approach to teaching is 'very unique and individual'. But I am fortunate to work in a Subject with a very strong ethos of teaching, and this award is a tribute to my colleagues as much as it is to me."