By Cassandra Hendry, TLS staff writer
As David Dean watches, a student leaps across his classroom, dancing a story with a flourish. Another student sets up their documentary film to play, while another prepares for their one-person play.
If you guessed that Dean is a performing arts professor, you wouldn’t be far off the mark, though in an unexpected way. Dean teaches history at Carleton, focusing on public history and historical representation in performing arts and museums. In his classroom, history comes alive.
“We embody the past in various ways. Students get up off their feet and are encouraged to animate texts and think of bringing history off the page, rather than writing traditional essays,” says Dean, one of two Provost’s Fellowship in Teaching Award winners this year.
“[I try to] empower students in the classroom and give them some exciting and alternative ways of thinking about how you do history.”
Dean, who has had a long relationship with the performing arts, encourages his students to express themselves and their identities in their assignments through projects such as documentary films, podcasts, dance, plays and visual art.
Recently, he brought in one of his graduate students to discuss her thesis, which took the form of a graphic novel, with his fourth-year seminar on witchcraft in early modern England. Dean says while it’s a very different approach than most traditional theses, this student was able to learn about historical meaning in a unique way.
“[In a graphic novel] you have to think through character and movement. It’s like shooting a film, you have to think about what angles to use, how people relate to each other, and what gestures they’re using [in a historical context],” Dean says.
He admits that grading these types of creative assignments can be challenging, due to their subjective nature. But early on, Dean reached out to colleagues in other departments and universities to learn about grading criteria for different performing media and was able to base his judgments off this.
So far, Dean says his students have reacted “very positively” to his style of teaching.
“These types of assignments are challenging and different, but very liberating. These are things students have wanted to do but never been able to in university,” he says.
As a newly minted Carleton teaching fellow, Dean says he will be using his knowledge to mentor new faculty on student engagement, focusing on creating and maintaining connections to the community to facilitate learning.