Teaching History at a Distance

The most crucial element of a history course provided ‘at a distance’ is that it must be lively and provocative. Issues raised should, as much as possible, be related to present controversies or present concerns. What one wishes to convey to students is how dramatically frames of reference around issues change and why. How the teaching of history at Athabasca University utilizes these approaches is the focus of this article.

Some find delight in tracking down an elusive source, in finding, often accidentally, a clue to some obscure problem, others in trying to infer the meaning of an event, the spirit of an age, the causes of a crisis.

Many of these pleasures the historian communicates, or should communicate, to his reader. For both of them the study of the past should be a liberating experience, one which tears them away from the parochialism of time and enlivens the imagination. Macaulay was right in comparing history to foreign travel, Trevelyan that ‘it should breed enthusiasm’. History records the vast possibilities of the past and suggests to the observer that the same range of possibilities must still prevail, that in some sense history must truly be the story of liberty. Is it not because history can arouse this impulse to liberty and dissent that, as Orwell noted, totalitarian regimes must extinguish it? (Stern, 1956:31).     

THE JEWISH FAMILY IN SOCIOEDUCATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

In considering the Jewish family from a socioeducational perspective — more particularly from a Jewish socioeducational viewpoint — we must focus on two interrelated challenges.