Collegiality in History and Global Studies

My department is small, and all of the faculty except for myself are tenured and have been here for a decade or more.  This has given me the tremendous opportunity to work with colleagues whose wealth of experience and advice is available to me whenever I ask.  In particular, Dr. Tracy Shilcutt has mentored me throughout my first years here–never in an overbearing or unsolicited way, but always supporting me as an equal.  She has counseled me over the phone and via email–sometimes from across the Atlantic; she has had me into her home for tea and taken me out to dinner; she has constantly encouraged me.  It was instructive and inspiring to watch her get her historical monograph on World War II Army Medics published in 2013, and I was honored to have the chance to help edit her book proposal before it went to the publisher.  I’ve also picked up some new pedagogical ideas from Tracy; her notes and syllabi were invaluable to me as I prepared my own versions of our majors courses, Historical Methods and the Historiography Capstone.  I particularly valued the Service Learning component she included in Methods.  Like her, I had my students complete fifteen service hours in Milliken Special Collections, and had wonderful feedback from the students on how that activity supported the other material in the course and prepared them for internships and later work.  Tracy’s letter in support of my application for tenure and promotion is available here:  Recommendation Letter_Shilcutt.

Likewise, Professors Ron Morgan, Vernon Williams, Mark Cullum, and Allan Yarema have been wonderfully supportive, always explaining things or offering advice when asked, and generally doing everything they can to include and encourage me.  Vernon taught me how to use a recorder to make a podcast and shared his knowledge of online teaching.  He also kindly volunteered to stand in for me on the CASAC while I was away on maternity leave and made posters to drum up interest in one of my new courses.  Mark and I share a bit of Luddism and enjoy collaborating on department chapel and Phi Alpha Theta work, and we keep each other updated of conferences that might be relevant to our respective scholarly interests.  I enjoyed attending and talking with him about his presentation on hymnody at the Christian Scholars Conference in 2010–he and I share a love of Christian music written prior to 1800.  Allan was interim chair during my second year here and has encouraged me at every turn; I help him with his TaskStream responsibilities by volunteering to gather and report data on Student Learning Outcomes in my courses every semester.

Ron returned from running the Oxford program in 2013 and has now spent a couple of years as our excellent department chair.  I am filled with respect for his enthusiastic, make-it-happen attitude.  He’s always positive and energetic even when things look a little bleak.  I enjoy talking with him about how to make our courses and department activities more hospitable and attractive to students.  I’m also grateful for the work he does to try to give me more opportunities to focus on my scholarship, and I’ve appreciated getting to observe his own scholarly work, such as his excellent panel at the 2014 Conference on Faith and History.

Everyone in my department has also been so kind to my family as we welcomed our son, being flexible about teaching schedules and meeting times, and inquiring after him and telling me parenting stories.  In short, the history department is an environment that I am glad to come back to every morning.  I know that with any of my colleagues, our students are in the hands of teachers who genuinely care about them and who are dedicated to scholarship and faith.  It is a pleasure to work with these wonderful people.

I think one of the most important ways I’ve contributed in History and Global Studies has been through picking up classes and ensuring curriculum coverage so that colleagues could teach or research elsewhere.  When I was hired in 2010, another historian who focuses on early modern Europe was hired with me.  Unfortunately, she ended up leaving ACU after just a year, and so in my second year I began picking up her upper-level European courses.  I also began helping to meet my Department’s Core obligations beginning in the spring of ’11 and have taught at least one Core class per academic year, with the exception of my maternity leave semester.  In the 2013-2014 academic year, I picked up our two majors courses, Historical Methods and the Historiography Capstone, freeing up Tracy Shilcutt to work for Honors and teach at CitySquare.  As I’ve said elsewhere, even though this teaching load has been significant, it has definitely made me better, and it’s nice to be able to help out my colleagues.  Tracy also helped me enormously by asking if I would take on the advising for all of our history BA students and arranging for me to have one course release per academic year for taking that role.

When talking about the collegiality of my History and Global Studies Department, I think it’s relevant to mention the unusual circumstances in which we have found ourselves in the last several years.  My first year at ACU was also the first year of the Core curriculum–and, by extension–the first year no history courses were required in General Education at ACU.  I actually didn’t realize that the Core had replaced a history survey requirement (along with courses in the arts) until I had been here for a few months.  The advent of the Core curriculum affected enrollments in our courses significantly.  Our survey courses did not fill up, and we had to drop some of them.  Many of our upper level classes also seemed to be shrinking, and we had to close some just before the semester began because of low enrollment.  When one faculty member left and another retired in 2011, we weren’t given lines to replace either of them.  At the same time, the administration’s focus seemed to be largely on the iPhone initiative and other technology-based learning, an emphasis that many of us felt was out of step with our discipline’s content-oriented teaching (though many of us did and do teach online, use podcasts, and generally incorporate technology when we find it to be an effective teaching tool.)

In sum, my initial impression as a new member of the ACU faculty was that my chosen discipline, and the department to which I had come, was not particularly popular or well-respected by ACU’s administration or the broader faculty.  After all, the faculty had voted in support of the Core.  This scenario created a feeling of camaraderie-in-adversity within our department.  Over the 2011-12 winter break, we all worked together to draft a White Paper (whitepaper11jan2012_final2 (1)) stressing the importance of content-driven learning and calling for the reinclusion of history in the General Education requirements at ACU.   In January of 2012, I attended multiple Adams Center Core conversations to speak for History and our White Paper.  Ultimately, the Core realignment of that year did not reinclude history, and the White Paper went into filing cabinets and trash cans.  Even though it did not have the effect we hoped, the effort that we all put in really brought us together, and made me, at least, feel like more of a contributor and equal partner in the department than before.  And of course, these conversations about the General Education curriculum are not over yet.  I imagine we’ll be cooperating this year to help define the proposed historical literacy requirement in General Education and explore the possibilities for our department’s role within that.

Over time, I have come to see that the situation with History and Core is more complex than I originally thought.  I teach Core myself, of course, and I see much value in the team-teaching and cross-disciplinary aspects of it, and in the more standardized general education experience it creates for students.  I still do not believe that Core adequately replaces the historical knowledge students gain in Civilization or World History courses, but our department is adjusting.  The enrollment dip we experienced seems to have leveled out some, and many of us have found that we actually have better survey classes than we did before, because all of the students chose to be there.  We have also been able to have some very helpful conversations amongst ourselves about curriculum, including the need to cut or combine some classes.  I appreciate the leadership Tracy and Ron have both shown in facilitating those discussions and the humility and deference to each other all of my colleagues have exercised as we’ve made some difficult decisions.  I hope that my role in streamlining and updating our European history offerings has been an important part of this process.

When I talk to other faculty outside my department about history’s absence from General Education, everyone seems to support us.  In fact, people are usually adamant that history is and should be foundational to a liberal arts education.  So I do not feel that the History Department is truly isolated within the university; rather, our role and our place is just not entirely clear.  One thing we can do as curriculum conversations continue is to make sure that history courses are counted in General Education wherever possible.  To this end, I spent a significant amount of time in 2012 writing up documentation (syllabi for cultural competency) of Civilizations I and II (taught by Mark Cullum and myself) as meeting the Social Science and Cultural Awareness requirements in General Education, and I shepherded both of those courses through the UGEC and UUAC to make sure that our courses would count for those requirements. This was a good way for me to contribute, and also helped me better understand how the councils system works.

Our department’s participation in the national history honors society, Phi Alpha Theta, often requires a lot of collaboration and colleague support; when Tracy was sponsor in 2010-11, I assisted her so that I could learn about the role before taking it over the following year. In this capacity, I helped Tracy plan, execute, and clean up after the PAT regional conference that we hosted that spring.  Note_Tracy1_Elliott.  Once I became sponsor, I was often the one asking for help, and I really appreciate all of my departmental colleagues.  Each one of them has shown up for Grad School application workshops and paper presentation workshops, Mark has helped host movie nights, and Vernon and Ron helped me with the logistics involved in taking students to a conference on multiple occasions.

Fellowship promotes collegiality!  I got to be a part of this in our department last spring when Jeremy and I hosted a departmental barbecue and senior blessing at our house.  All available faculty and nearly fifty students attended for games (let it be known that, of the History Faculty, I am most likely to be able to spot the difference between Lamentations and Taylor Swift lyrics), worship, hiking, and excellent food.  We plan for this to be an annual event and look forward to having an even larger gathering next year.  Here’s the beautiful invitation Shannon Smith made for the barbecue:  History Department Barbecue.

Collaboration and Community beyond the Department

Team Teaching

One of the primary ways I’ve collaborated with colleagues outside of History and Global Studies is team-teaching.  My first experience teaching Core was a sort of baptism by fire into collaborative interdisciplinary teaching.  With Susan Lewis and Greg Straughn as co-teachers in 2011, I worked alongside a JMC professor who specializes in media (this at a time when I had no iDevice, no Facebook, and no internet at my house) and an administrator-cum-musicologist who could bring his cello to class and play Bach.  Working with them was so much fun–it would have been more so if our teaching had gone better, but it was the first Core year–and so encouraging to a new professor like me.  Co-teaching with them, I learned how to gracefully model prayer and engagement with Scripture in an academic classroom.  I hadn’t really seen this done before outside of a Bible course, and I certainly hadn’t seen it done by a female professor.  They also showed me that conversation and debate between professors while teaching could be a valuable way to show the students how to appropriately engage in civil discourse.   I also learned how to incorporate a variety of media and angles to approach one idea in a way that would reach students of varying skill levels and learning styles.  This was particularly good for me, as I have a tendency towards perfecting one teaching style and sticking with it.  I’ve used ideas I got from them in other courses since.  Marshall McLuhan, one of the theorists Susan studies, now shows up in my discussion of the print revolution in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, and Beatles music helps illustrate postmodernism in my Core 210, thanks to Greg.  Greg and Susan also fielded my questions and concerns about tenure, about publishing, and about curriculum.  They were so kind and supportive.  Even though I only taught with them once, I am still good friends with both of them and hope to work with them again in other settings in the future.  The fact that I can look back fondly on my collaboration with them speaks volumes about how pleasant our collaboration was–because the actual experience of teaching that Core class was rarely even close to pleasant (see the Teaching section for more details.)  Note_Core_Elliott

I am now teaching a Core class with Lauren Lemley for the fifth time–we’ve taught Core 120 twice, and now we are teaching Core 210, round 3.  For me, this collaboration has been one of the best experiences I have had at ACU.  Lauren is such a creative teacher and an absolutely dependable person to work with.  As a co-teacher, she pulls her own weight and then some.  I have to sit around with my email window open to make sure that she doesn’t respond to every single student email before I even see it.  Working with her makes me sharper–I have to stretch to keep up in terms of energy and dedication and pedagogical creativity.  It is so challenging, in a good way, to work with someone who is as good as Lauren is.  Here are a few of the teaching strategies I’ve picked up from working with her:

1) using a popular, easily accessible novel as an access point into course themes.  We’ve used Hunger Games and Divergent with enormous success.

2) Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook following.  Lauren does a fantastic job of incorporating new media into class in a meaningful and effective way.  I’m not an intuitive technology user by any stretch, so it has been helpful for me to learn from watching her use them.  What I most admire about Lauren’s pedagogy here is that she never uses technology or social media just to use it–it’s always purposeful and effective and serves the course material, not the other way around.  For example, when we were talking about Christian understandings of human nature, Lauren came up with the idea of having students create a Tumblr in class to illustrate the fruits of the spirit, and they went out on campus, conducted interviews, took photos, and identified clips to create wonderful media hodgepodges that were very thought-provoking.  And they all loved the activity and talked about it for weeks afterwards.  It would never have occurred to me to do something like this.

3)  Debate.  I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I’ll say it again here.  Lauren is a communications professor and debate coach.  For our mid-term, she set up a detailed, structured debate with carefully delineated times and roles for every student.  We used a week of class for the students to research and debate two sides of issues related to human identity:  who gets to define the beginning of human life, the end of human life, and human sex/gender.  This was a wonderful week; the students engaged in sophisticated civil discourse, and they all got involved and interacted with one another.  It was absolutely wonderful teaching.  I took this idea and applied it in my Nineteenth-Century Europe course for a more historicized debate based on the views of Burke and Wollstonecraft on the French Revolution and redeployed it in Mongols, Poppies, and Satyagraha in order to set up both historicized and contemporary conversations about the Hindu practice of sati, or the immolation of widows.

These are just a few examples of the teaching methods I’ve picked up from working with Lauren and applied to good effect in other places.  I really hope that we get to continue teaching together.  I know team-teaching is expensive, but my collaboration with Lauren has convinced me that it’s worth it, both in terms of the quality of education and support the students receive, and for the benefits that the faculty enjoy from getting to work so closely together.  Lauren’s letter in support of my application for tenure and promotion is available here (also linked in the Teaching section):  Elliott Tenure Letter.

I also really enjoyed teaching with Dr. Josh Brokaw from the Biology Department in the spring of 2015.  Our Honors Colloquium on Evolution and Society included a group of very bright students from a number of majors, and we spent each of our five weeks reading relevant texts that Josh and I had selected as illuminating the way societies have understood and responded to Darwinian ideas.  We started with a broad discussion of the varieties of evolutionary theory and talked specifically about the three major responses to evolution among Christians.  I was impressed by Josh’s handling of the material–this is clearly a subject matter he has thought about a lot, and it was obviously important to him that we not discredit anyone’s response to evolutionary biology.  Rather, he sought to understand why some Christians feel like they have to hold on to a six-day creation or lose their entire faith.  We had some excellent discussions.  I particularly enjoyed contributing during the week we talked about Darwin’s British and European context and the broader ramifications of his ideas in Europe in terms of German eugenics, social Darwinism, and race theory.  It was fun to talk with Josh about how scientific ideas tend to be perceived by societies and then interpreted by historians–we come at that debate from very different angles, and it was really illuminating for me to hear what he thought.  I also especially enjoyed our final week, where we talked about how the Stone-Campbell movement and then the ACU community have dealt with the idea of evolution.  I had very little idea of the 1980s controversy over the teaching of evolution at ACU, and it was fascinating to learn more about it.  Overall, the experience of collaborating with Josh on this class was very helpful for me since I had not done a colloquium before.  It was good to get a clear sense of what an Honors Colloquium should look like, and I really found it intellectually stimulating to discuss and teach a topic intensely with someone from outside of the humanities.  Josh is also a good friend from church and wonderfully laid back, so teaching with him was always a pleasure.

And finally, I have team-taught with my husband/colleague Jeremy Elliott on several occasions–for our two Spotlight Speeches (see the link to video on the Teaching title page) and for Dan McGregor and Cole Bennet’s Core class.  We came in to do a guest lecture on Vietnam.

Forums for Collaboration:  Adams Center, Library, and the Christian Scholars Conference

The Adams Center is a good venue for collaboration with colleagues beyond the department.  I’ve attended many Adams Center sessions over the last several years.  These meetings provide ample opportunity to meet other faculty outside my department and to learn about scholarship across the university.  The faculty mentor program hosted lunches that I attended regularly during the first year.  My mentor was Dr. Autumn Sutherlin in Chemistry; I enjoyed spending time with her and many of her colleagues in the sciences.  Some of the Adams Center sessions that stand out in my mind as good collaborative moments include Caron Gentry and Mark Hamilton’s report on their White House visit on terrorism and faith, strategic planning conversations about the future of Study Abroad, Core curriculum conversations, discussion about the possible Center for Peace and Social Justice, and Laura Carroll and Susan Lewis’s study about perceptions of gender at the university.  I’m particularly interested in the ongoing debates about gender and gender roles in churches of Christ, so I’ve attended a lot of sessions in the Adams Center, at the Christian Scholars Conference, and informal meetings about this issue.    I was honored to participate in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day march following one of the conversations about the Peace and Social Justice Center and had a great conversation with both ACU faculty (Jim Cooke and Dan Brannan) and local Abilene folks in that context.

Recently, as I have worked to incorporate more new technology into my teaching as I find it useful, I’ve also been grateful for Adams Center instruction and support.  Lyndell Lee spent hours with me over the summer of 2013 to help me identify and learn to use the best polling technology for a survey I wanted to conduct in Core 210.  And now I know how to use TurningPoint and Responseware, and have employed it very effectively in Core 210.  David Christiansen was also very kind and helpful to me and Tracy Shilcutt as we wrestled with building history courses in OpenClass.  Kyle Dickson has cheerfully fielded all kinds of questions from me via email, about podcasts, OpenClass and even about WordPress as I have worked on this portfolio.

I also want to mention the work I’ve had opportunity to do with some of our research librarians and Special Collections librarians.  The support these individuals provide to academics is considerable, and I greatly value their contributions to my classes.  When I teach HIST 353 Historical Methods, my students complete fifteen hours of Service Learning in the Milliken Special Collections.  Last time I taught the course, the students, under the direction of Dr. Carisse Berryhill, opened up folders of President Don Morris’s personal correspondence, removed staples and paper clips, placed them in acid-free folders, and helped to create a finding aid.  This kind of collaborative, hands-on work is a fantastic opportunity for history students–their faces as they cut the strings off wrapped packages of papers that had not been touched since 1969 were just priceless.  There is no better way to get them excited about the physical sources of history.  Dr. Berryhill and her wonderful staff in Special Collections do a fabulous job of bringing this excitement to the students, and I appreciate so much the work they do to collaborate with me on this course.  I have also worked closely with Karen Hendrick and Megan May, who I am heartbroken to lose to a new job in Washington, on LibGuides for the January short course on Nineteenth Century Europe, Recent Europe, and Historical Methods.  I appreciate Karen and Megan’s willingness to have my students come to the library for hands-on instruction on how to best use library resources, databases, and search terms, as well.  I have never been in another academic community where the librarians and professors work so well and so effectively together.

The Christian Scholars Conference, at which I have presented or chaired a session every year from 2009-2015 with the exception of 2013-14, provides ample opportunity to talk with colleagues both at ACU and at our sister schools.  I’ve enjoyed conversation and collaboration with David Fleer at Lipscomb, Susan Blassingame at Lubbock Christian, who was kind enough to comment on my 2010 session, Richard Goode at Lipscomb, Jerry Gaw at Lipscomb, who commented on the paper I gave in 2009, Stewart Davenport at Pepperdine who provided chairship and commentary on the session I put together in 2011, and Cliff Tierney at Lipscomb, who commented on the session I put together in 2012.

I’ll share a couple of interesting stories about relationships and connections made at the CSC:  at the 2009 conference, I attended a session on missions history (my field), and stayed after to talk sources and methodology with one of the presenters, whose name was Travis Myers.  He was a graduate student in ACU’s Graduate School of Theology at the time.  The next year, I ran into him at the conference again, and told him that I had just been offered a job at ACU.  He congratulated me and told me that we should check out the Minter Lane church.  We visited Minter, now our own dear church family, because I heard Travis give a paper at the CSC, long before I ever imagined moving to Texas.

I met Jamey Gorman at the 2010 Christian Scholars Conference when I introduced myself after hearing his fascinating paper on early Restoration leaders’ views of evolution.  By the time I started at ACU, he and his wife had graduated from the GST and moved on.  But in the fall of 2011, I was giving a presentation at Baylor University, and who should walk in but Jamey Gorman?  (I nearly stopped and exclaimed in the middle of my talk).  He and his wife and baby live elsewhere now, but I recently reconnected with him to ask if he’d ever published that great CSC paper on evolution, because I wanted to reference it in an honors colloquium I was planning.  And Josh Brokaw and I did end up assigning Jamey’s article in our colloquium on Evolution and Society.

So the CSC is a nice hub for collaborative scholarship, and helps extend scholarly conversations between people even when the interlocutors are moving around from city to city and institution to institution.

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