by Anna Lindner. (Excerpt from the Service-Learning at Calvin College blog.) The history department, by virtue of its nature, could and, I believe, should have a close relationship with the Service-Learning Center. History is not merely the study of the past; it is also an investigation of humans, the way they perceive and then try …
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by Jonathan Hielkema. No. When you talk about plants, or an ecological system or forest, things are very easy if you decide that bad people ruined it. But that's not what humans have been doing. It's not bad people who are destroying forests. –Hayao Miyazaki Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke follows a young native Japanese (Emishi) …
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by Bob Schoone-Jongen. This address was written for and presented at the Calvin College Teacher Commissioning Ceremony on May 22, 2015. You can watch the ceremony online; Bob Schoone-Jongen's address begins at about 40:30. At the risk of jumping the gun a bit, let me address you as “fellow teachers.” Consider this: Students tend to …
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by Will Katerberg Prior to this class, history courses annoyed me because I always thought, ‘History is history, it happened and it’s over with, that’s that.’ This is true: history is in the past and you can’t change the past. But depending on how you approach history or what method you use to approach it, …
Continue reading What My Students (and I) Learned This Semester
by Will Katerberg Every year I teach a section of the history department's capstone course on historiography. The most basic questions in the course are: What is the nature of historical knowledge? Is objectivity possible? Is it necessarily desirable? How does historical thinking work? What is the purpose of historical study? To understand the world? To …
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by Coryn Mulder. This entry comes from Coryn Mulder, a senior nursing student in Professor Karin Maag’s spring online History 151 class, responding to a final exam question about the value of taking a core history class. Her response is featured here with her permission. History 151 covers human history from the Paleolithic era up …
Continue reading Student voices: Why take a history survey class?
Historical Horizons 