{"id":1671,"date":"2024-10-18T19:33:16","date_gmt":"2024-10-18T19:33:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.worcester.edu\/magazine\/?p=1671"},"modified":"2024-10-23T20:00:28","modified_gmt":"2024-10-23T20:00:28","slug":"erika-briesacher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worcester.edu\/magazine\/2024\/10\/18\/erika-briesacher\/","title":{"rendered":"Erika Briesacher: Engaging in a conversation about history"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1664 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.worcester.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/71\/2024\/10\/4.-Erika-Briesacher-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.worcester.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/71\/2024\/10\/4.-Erika-Briesacher-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.worcester.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/71\/2024\/10\/4.-Erika-Briesacher-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.worcester.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/71\/2024\/10\/4.-Erika-Briesacher.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><strong>Professor of History, 2022 Alden Award Winner<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Erika Briesacher, professor of history, hands back corrected papers, she asks students to look beyond the grade. \u201cI write all over them, and when they get it back and see that at first, they\u2019re like, \u2018I\u2019ve failed,\u2019 and then they flip to the grade and think, \u2018Wait a second.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Briesacher tells them, \u201cThe grade is actually kind of pointless. Look at the comments because that\u2019s where I\u2019m having a conversation with you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It\u2019s a conversation that Briesacher hopes will lead students beyond memorization of names of battles, dates, and other historical facts.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cIf I had to boil my teaching philosophy down, it used to be organized around source material and letting the sources speak and balancing that through context and interpretation,\u201d she said. \u201cNow, my philosophy is giving students space to exercise the curiosity muscle that we don\u2019t often get to do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The point, she said, is not to focus on facts long enough to pass a test and then move on, but to seek valuable insights into the past that allow us to more fully understand different time periods, events, and societies.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cYou can memorize a date; it\u2019s a parlor trick. You can go on <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jeopardy!<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> with that one. Maybe you can recite back to me for a hot minute when World War II was, and then you\u2019ll promptly not care about that for the rest of your life. But, later, it\u2019s more important to remember things like how it started in different places at different times and what do we think about that now?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Briesacher said she hopes that, by the end of the semester, she has helped each student discover their authentic voice and acquire the courage to use it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cSuccess as a teacher for me is when a student sits back and goes, \u2018I didn\u2019t think of it that way,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cAnd sometimes they discover that they came up with something that nobody else thought about in exactly the same way, and they understand that they can and do contribute daily to the world around them, to the people in their classes, their professors, their colleagues, to people they don\u2019t know on the street, to the body of knowledge and the life of the mind. Grades have nothing to do with that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Professor of History, 2022 Alden Award Winner When Erika Briesacher, professor of history, hands back corrected papers, she asks students to look beyond the grade. \u201cI write all over them, and when they get it back and see that at first, they\u2019re like, \u2018I\u2019ve failed,\u2019 and then they flip to the grade and think, \u2018Wait [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":239,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-worcester-state-magazine-150th-anniversary"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - 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