Teaching in focus: Jason Ellis

Name:

Jason Ellis

Title:

Associate professor

Faculty/Department/Unit:

Education/Educational Studies

Location:

Vancouver

Year I started working at UBC:

2013

What first motivated you to become an educator?

I wanted to help people understand the past and why it matters to them in the present. It matters because people in the past are exactly like us, except that they are totally different. I tell my students this all the time. We can understand ourselves better when we learn about people in the past and why they acted the way they did. They were human, like us. But they often had radically different beliefs, ethics, and values than we do, that made them the product of their times, just as these things make us the product of ours. Our humanity and our particular circumstances in time make us who we are. History teaches that so well and I wanted to share that with people.

Tell us more about your work.

I’m a historian by training, but I teach in a faculty of education, so I have to be adaptable. This means finding many different ways to teach about the past to people who may not have a background in history, but who are nevertheless very interested in how education has changed (or not!) over time. This is what I do; I teach and research about change over time, its causes and effects.

What inspired your particular approach to teaching?

For a long time, I have observed a need for history in education disciplines and in teacher education. Educational researchers and future teachers appeal to the past all the time. Yet they seldom do this well. (Think “back-to basics” curriculum, for example. But back to when!?) This has inspired me to find different ways to give people the historical thinking skills they need to understand the past and to understand how people use historical arguments to sway others in the present. That is something that happens all the time in education discussions and in life generally.

What have you learned while teaching that has surprised you the most?

I have learned that it is possible to make history just as intelligible and useful to people who have had less exposure to the discipline than students who major in it or do graduate work in it, people who may not have even taken a history course since high school!

What impact do you hope to have on your students?

I hope they will come out of my classes having gained from me a better sense of the past. But I also hope they will come out having built their own historical thinking abilities. This way they can continue to make sense of the past for themselves, long after they leave my classroom behind.