Tom Isern, NDSU

Video of the NDSU Hutmacher expedition now posted at YouTube. Go to Heritage Video, posted by the Center for Heritage Renewal.

Congratulations are due our great friend and collaborator, Michael Miller, Director of the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, NDSU Libraries. The North Dakota Library Association has named Michael its 2008 Librarian of the Year. An active member of the NDLA for forty-two years, he not only has built a world-renowned research collection on the Germans from Russia but also has developed innovative research and outreach initiatives, such as the Dakota Memories Oral History Project and Michael's many collaborative productions with Prairie Public broadcasting. Well done, Michael.

New photos from the past weekend's work at the Hutmacher farmstead, Dunn County - students from HIST 103 & HIST 431 on a service learning expedition, restoring the earth-&-stone Hutmacher farmhouse. Hosted by Preservation North Dakota, sponsored by the Center for Heritage Renewal.

This posting begins an extended essay, a series of reflections on the philosophy and practice of teaching. They will have particular bearing on the teaching of History as a discipline and on doing it in the arena of the land grant university. The postings along these lines will be intermittent, interspersed with my usual good-news items about students and occasional rants about the need for NDSU to build a library worthy of a great research university.

Something that is going on, though, that I feel a need to write about. Writing about it will help me work through the process and, perhaps, encourage others to think about it with me. Not to puff this up too much, but I think, too, what I am working through, or working on, will turn out to have been worth chronicling.

Have no fear, I'm not talking about yet another mid-life crisis; I've had those since I was nineteen or so, but think I'm done with them. I'm talking rather about an opportunity precipitated by two circumstances, the first one being, I am old.

Not quite old as dirt, but I have been teaching for a full generation now, have been a full professor for most of that time, and now hold a distinguished professorship. This means two things for sure. First, I recognize old professors get set in their ways and lose their edge, and I have resolved that is not going to happen to me. At some point change is good just for its own sake. Second, I am on a long leash. I can take risks that junior people cannot, both because my administrators indulge me and also because I have classroom cred. Students mostly think I know what I'm doing and go along with it.

Being older implies a third thing that is not so sure, but appears to be operative in this case--the onset of maturity. I don't just make changes in how I do things; I make deliberate and calculated changes. More and more, too, they articulate with one another. Systems and philosophies are taking shape.

The paragraph above begins to invoke a larger theme, that of adaptation and how it happens, but I'm not ready to go there yet. Instead I'll describe the other circumstance under which I am working and writing. This is, I'm doing a heck of a lot of stuff. It's gotten out of hand. Over the past decade NDSU has traveled a long way toward becoming a notable research and graduate institution. I'm in the middle of that, especially as to graduate education, and love it.

At the same time, I hold a commitment to and continually elaborate upon that older land grant ideal of public engagement and outreach. This isn't just a matter of public relations. Public engagement is an energizing force. It makes us better at everything we do. It also takes large amounts of gas and time.

And here's the factor that surprises everyone: as NDSU has made the transition to research university, I find myself teaching more undergraduate classes and more undergraduate students than ever before in my life. That's partly because of our amazing enrollment increases, partly because it has seemed necessary in order to keep the fundamentals of the department in order, and partly, this is true, because I like it.

Sleep deprivation has become an issue. In addition, I get behind and make mistakes and feel bad about it, all because things are out of hand. Or have been. I think things are improving, partly by adaptation, a term I use advisedly, and partly by deliberate adjustment.

When things get out of hand, when people feel like they need to get control of their lives, the common solution is to simplify. They withdraw from those responsibilities they consider less significant. Sometimes they make radical moves, they move to Green Acres, they try to live the simple life and chill out. If I even thought that was an option, I wouldn't do it. I like all the things I'm doing and think they are important.

There is, however, another option, which is complexity. By this I mean the articulation of elements with one another so that they resonate with one another, strengthen one another, rather than depleting one another.

Like a lot of historians--Jared Diamond for one, Bill Cronon for another--I've been absorbing a fair amount of chaos and complexity theory. I know just enough about these things to be dangerous. I know, for instance, that complexity theory is greatly concerned with the process of adaptation, which is a process that just happens, you don't force it. I know, too, that there are people who get savvy to what is happening, go with it, and are energized and propelled by it.

So--the mess that I call my professional life is, I think, an opportunity. There are so many elements in it that however inept or unconscious I may be, some of them start to articulate. If, then, I can become conscious of the incipient adaptations, I can feed them. I can make sense of my professional life through complexity rather than simplicity.

At the center of this is teaching. I have classes and students. Some people call this their "teaching load," a phrase I always have despised. What if we were to consider teaching an opportunity, rather than a load? What if it could come to articulate with research and teaching and life, maybe even power those other things?

Can't be done, you're thinking. Those are separate worlds, keep them in their boxes. Sorry, too late--I've already mixed them up, and I'm going to continue down that road. Watch me.

In postings to come I'm going to talk about some of the things I've been doing in the classroom in recent years and right now. From there I'll go on to describe where I think I'm headed. Here's a preview, though. In the end I'm going to argue that there are certain principles percolating up from the process of adaptation. The principles, three of them, are

1. Teach from your personal values, your best ones

2. Teach for life, not just your discipline

3. Teach from your institutional values, the best ones

Thanks. I'll keep you posted.