Janet Polasky

Excellence in Teaching, 2017

History

Janet Polasky has a philosophy that guides her teaching that goes like this: in training students to be historians —no matter if they are engineers, pre-vet or business majors – they are really learning to be global citizens. And that, Polasky says, helps them to challenge not just the beliefs of others, but their own.

“History takes students into a different time, much as studying abroad takes them to a different place,” says Polasky, UNH’s Presidential Professor of History. “By coming to understand another culture as an outsider, by getting inside another mindset or consciousness, they come to understand their own.”

The goal she sets for her students is to inspire them to think critically, to listen attentively and to read thoughtfully so they can speak and write fluently. Her hands-on learning style has had students in a freshman seminar staging a production of Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 play “Mother Courage and Her Children”; skyping with scholars in Scotland, Australia and California; and traveling via train to work in the rare books section of the Boston Library.

In a Modern France course, students reenacted the student-worker revolt of May-June 1968, each group taking on the identity of Trotskyite student activists, trade union leaders or the CRS (national guard) as well as writing pamphlets, op eds and newspaper stories that they posted online, all of which exemplifies the lengths to which Polasky goes to engage her students and to create an inclusive learning environment.