Reflection on the Nature of Self-Reporting and Achievement

I have to begin this portfolio as I begin many of my professional endeavors:  with a caveat.

Perhaps it is just the nature of academe to always desire an alternative point of view, some way of complicating the narrative.  But every semester in my Civilization survey courses, I feel compelled to open the class with a question:  what is “Western civilization,” anyway?  We converse about the Western label and interrogate its different meanings depending on when and where one is living in history.  In 1950, Western meant the United States and Europe on this side of the Iron Curtain.  Today, post-9/11, it usually means the secular, democratic, developed world.  In both times, “Western” means “us,” and “Eastern” means “them.”  What, I ask, might be the possible intellectual dangers of labels that can seem monolithic and immutable when, in fact, they often change with time and place?

It’s important to me to begin the class with this discussion, because it sets an open and serious tone, establishing at once the fluidity and the consequence of ideas and ways of thinking and learning.  I also want the students to understand from the beginning that I enjoy teaching Western Civ and will do all I can to make the class informative and entertaining–but at the same time, I have some reservations about the whole enterprise.  I hope that this caveat runs as a subtext underneath everything else we say in the course; indeed, I try to achieve a careful balance between knowledge and questions, narrative and uncertainty in all of my teaching.

I feel a similar ambivalence about this business of building a portfolio lauding my own accomplishments and qualities.  On one hand, I value the opportunity to reflect on the last several years, and I certainly understand that the university must have some means of determining whether the faculty are qualified and committed to their work.  On the other hand, I find such an endeavor quite out of step with Christian humility and countercultural life.  I have struggled similarly with the necessity of billboards and slogans that advertise ACU’s involvement with Apple and boast of being the “number one up-and-coming university in the West,” etc.  These self-advertisements are important for keeping enrollment up, but I cannot help thinking that Jesus and Mother Teresa seem to have been uninterested in this kind of achievement.

At ACU, the university community exists within a strange tension between the culture of academic and financial success, and the culture of serving and becoming like the least of these.  I personally am tempted to dwell far too often in the former, and I feel that tension more sharply as I engage in this exercise.

The Nature of Historical Scholarship and Teaching

I think it would be helpful for you, the committee, to understand up front the goals that preoccupy me on a daily basis.  As a historian and teacher of history, I want to envision historic ways of living and thinking, forming governments and societies, and worshipping in vibrant, pulsing color, and I want to communicate that vision to students, so that history can live and breathe for the students, or for people who read or hear my research, as it does for me.  Each day as I do my work here, I seek to imaginatively bring the past to life, and to highlight the immediacy and relevance of history.  The image I have chosen as the cover image for the portfolio reflects this.  It’s a photograph I took in London of a car parked on the side of the road.  The car bears a slogan, “Come On, England” that repurposed a historic song as a football (soccer) mantra during England’s run at the European Championships in 2004.  It’s a wonderful marrying of past and present in the ordinariness of a car’s windscreen.  I took the photo while living in London to research my dissertation.  Images like this, and my ability to convey some of my experiences of research and travel to students, help me to make other times and places more real to the students I teach.

I further believe that, as I share my imagining of the past, I also have a tremendous opportunity to shape the way that students understand themselves and their own ways of looking at the world.  Through discussion, debate, lecture, and encounters with primary texts and artifacts in my classes, students should find their assumptions challenged and their horizons broadened.  I hope, for example, that students who take Renaissance and Reformation Europe with me emerge with a new understanding of Catholic and Protestant views of the Church.  Ideally, students who have always assumed that the Reformation was a necessary correction to Catholic abuses and a positive step for Christianity are challenged to consider, also, the consequences of division and the loss of heritage.  Students in Civilizations I learn about the close relationship between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and discover that contemporary emphasis on the “clash of civilizations” between Muslim East and Christian West does not necessarily reflect historic relationships between these civilizations.  In Core 210, students consider how Eastern religious worldviews might inform and even convict some aspects of Western Christianity.  Conversations like this not only promote greater understanding of the human past; they also encourage more compassionate and open-minded thinking about people and ideas that are different from our own right now.

Through academic encounters with challenging texts and engagement in critical discourse, I hope that my students become more informed citizens who think both globally and historically. I hope that, after observing my interactions with them during difficult conversations, they understand more about what it looks like to engage in intelligent and gentle civil discussion.  I hope that they have learned to question and to probe, and to be mindful of history’s power to erase the losers or the Others.  I hope they know how to see history and contemporary culture through eyes influenced by Christ’s teaching about the poor and the marginalized and the Biblical text’s ambivalent relationship with political power and contemporary culture.  As I teach them to imagine the past, I am trying to shape individuals who can marshall a thoughtful Christian faith, matured research and writing skills, and an intrepid sense of scholarly discovery in order to help make a better future.

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