Teaching is decolonization

For teaching, the power of visual texts based on solid archival research is that they offer my students the opportunity to engage with content from multiple directions and on different sensory and intellectual registers. In my classroom, I use my own paintings about the history I am teaching as both secondary and primary-source texts. They illustrate the stories I am imparting, but they also represent my own subjective engagement with the history. Students can share my emotional and sensory responses to the history, or they can reject it. The painting becomes a meeting place for a discussion of history with less constraints than argument-oriented texts. They also give students permission to feel a range of emotions about the history they are studying. This is not art connoisseurship. Rather, it is using a painting as the means to learn about history, guided by and augmented with a solid archival and analytical basis.

Recent Presentations

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Phoenix, Arizona, September 15, 2018 “The Other Constitution” (Drop me an email for the text of this talk)

Here’s a typical classroom lecture, given at Monash University in 2016