By Harrison Seeling
My name is Harrison Seeling, and I am currently a senior at Loyola University Chicago. Over the past three years that I have been attending this university, Iβve had a front row seat to how teachers interact with students and shape their experiences here at Loyola. While not every teacher or course is the same, there are examples of what you could refer to as βIgnatian,β βanti-racist,β and βstudent-centeredβ pedagogy that I can recall from across the many facets of my experiences here at Loyola.
During my third year at Loyola, I attended the HIST 299 βHistory Methodsβ course. This class was dedicated almost entirely to the evolution of the study of history and how that changed over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Throughout the many discussions we had in this course, I got the impression that not only this specific class, but also academic history as a whole, was much broader in mindset than I had originally thought. Subjects like the Annales school not only allowed but encouraged the study of history from the bottom up, looking at attitudes rather than pure events. Doing so encouraged looking beyond the text and merely what the author themselves wrote. I remember specifically when we discussed Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurieβs seminal work Montaillou, we came to an understanding concerning one part that tackled the subject of same-sex relations in medieval southern France on which Ladurieβs work β although insightful β clearly missed the mark. This kind of discussion, discourse, and growth was a staple of the class, and it had a profound effect on me as a student of history. It reinforced my rapidly developing belief that history is the record of people and their beliefs, worldviews, and experiences, rather than just what they left behind.
Another instance where I saw these ideas being increasingly reflected was in my ENGL 273 βPoetryβ class. In this class, we frequently delved into the works of authors who are from various minorities or traditionally excluded groups. This only further reinforced my ever-growing belief in the importance of acknowledgement. Reading the poems that these people wrote was a way of saying, βI see you. I know that you exist.β While that may not seem like much, for some people, it can be an incredibly powerful sentiment. To know that others are aware of them, and by extension their experience, can make all the difference sometimes. I remember that this was a big theme in Dickinson, the series that offered a much more modern take on the events of Emily Dickinsonβs life.
I am sure that Emily Dickinson never intended to be regarded as a legendary poet whose writings would be studied, interpreted, and re-interpreted almost 150 years after her death, and I am almost certain that the citizens of Montaillou never would have imagined that their thoughts, ideas, and worldviews would be preserved and studied by people hundreds of years in the future in a part of the world that they didnβt even know existed. Yet that is exactly what happened. The progression of time, fate, or whatever you want to call it, is an ever-unpredictable force. There was no reason that those living a thousand years ago would have any reason to think the world a millennium in the future would be any different than the world they knew. Yet here we stand, at a time where we can look back, learn, and acknowledge the transformation of Emily Dickinson, the many escapades of Pierre Maury, the irony of the experiences of Randall Mann, the strategic navigation of Bertrande, and the lives and times of so many more. And by nurturing the framework that we at the FCIP have developed, things like this will continue to be not only possible but encouraged.
References
Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45529.Montaillou
Natalie Davis, The Return of Martin GuerreΒ
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674766914
Dickinson, series on Apple TVΒ
https://tv.apple.com/us/show/dickinson/umc.cmc.1ogyy5s2agasxa5qztabrlykn
Randall Mann, “The Mortician in San Francisco”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55026/the-mortician-in-san-francisco
Pierre Maury (individual in Montaillou)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Maury