Dr. John Belshaw is a history professor with a master’s degree in history from UBC and a PhD in social and economic history from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He’s taught in the U.K. and at several institutions across Western Canada as well as authored and co-authored numerous books, including open-source textbooks for the B.C. open textbook collection. On top of teaching pre- and post-Confederation classes at UFV for the current winter semester, he’s also developed a special topics course on pandemics and populations.
Over the years, how has your teaching style changed?
A lot. I thought I had a pretty good system going for many years. But then my daughter graduated from high school, and that September I had all these students in my class who I knew. Some of them had had dinner at our house. I knew them that well. I’d had conversations with them, and I had a much clearer sense of what their baseline was — what they knew and didn’t know. I knew what they cared about and what they didn’t care about in a way that I hadn’t in every other class I’d ever taught. That was a real seismic change for me … I just assumed that certain ideas were common currency and they weren’t.
I remember going back to my office and putting a line through everything I was going to do the next term. Let’s take it apart. Let’s dismantle it, break it down, reassemble it. That was a really good exercise. It didn’t make everything absolutely perfect afterward, but it allowed me to recognize that you have to go where the students are rather than make them come to you … You become a much better listener. A lot of people think that teaching is all about projecting when it’s about receiving and understanding how people understand things then pushing that back out to them. It’s a different physical process than what I thought it was.
As students we don’t always get to see behind-the-scenes for teachers. How has your transition been to online-only learning?
It’s been challenging in some respects. I found students really struggling in a lot of interesting ways. There probably aren’t more students struggling, there are just more students struggling in certain ways. You know, the whole business of “My grandfather is in a long-term care facility. I can’t see him. He’s dying. This makes my mom crazy because she can’t go see him, and we’ve had to make these arrangements to make things work better.”
You see people struggling but also trying to strategize. That takes a lot of energy. I like to think we’re producing a cohort of undergraduates who will always be resourceful and won’t have to turn to somebody else for help. They’ll find a way to strategize, even if that means “I know who I’ll call.” I think they’ll be a more empathetic cohort because they’ll have stepped out of themselves for an extended period of time and thought about how others are getting along.
[As for your interest] in open pedagogy, why do you think this work is so important?
Having open educational resources like open textbooks — that clears away a big financial barrier for students … That’s a big part of the open pedagogy. The other part is getting students to create stuff as opposed to the disposable essay, the disposable assignment. You write an essay for me, I mark it, I give it back to you. It was very, very good. You got a B+ on it or whatever. Then you go, B+? Okay, [trash] bin. Because you’re never going to use that paper ever again. That’s a disposable essay.
I think the more interesting assignment is where the students go out and identify an invasive species — something that Europeans or Asians brought to North America at some point. Find one. Look around you. An obvious one is cows. You see them out standing in their fields. You don’t have to do a whole lot of work. “Well, what are the implications of that?” “Oh, I hadn’t really thought about that. Well, they pasture, so I guess that’s land that people can’t use for other stuff.” “Exactly.” Okay, end of exercise. It’s something that’s not disposable. The person starts asking similar questions about other elements of history. It opens it up. Instead of taking place in a textbook or a classroom, it’s taking place around you.
Now, for your special topics course. Can you give a wider scope of what the course covers?
We’re going to spend a fair bit of time on cholera in the 19th century and the plague, Black Death — that’s a global phenomenon … We’re going to look at the Indigenous world in the Americas and the impact of smallpox. That’s really important locally … Smallpox covers most of British Columbia, and the kind of settler society that emerges is made possible by the way in which smallpox clears the landscape of other human beings. Pandemics in the 1500s in Italy — that seems pretty remote. This is right here. You can drive through neighbourhoods where there are mass burial grounds.
I want to spend time focusing on AIDS, SARS, and Ebola. I want to bring up something that’s a little bit more current. I think what one takes away from AIDS in particular is the way in which it was other-ized. It’s a gay plague. Gay people have got that. Heroin addicts have got that. If we keep focusing on other-izing them — they’re inherently less healthy, their lifestyle is unhealthy — if we characterize it that way, the rest of us will be safe. But of course it doesn’t stay in any one community. It becomes more widespread. Suddenly it’s a crisis because the mainstream society is facing AIDS. We saw how racialized COVID-19 was to begin with. It’s not as racialized now, but for East Asian people living in Vancouver the first few months of lockdown were pretty tough. That’s a pattern.
What are you hoping that students get out of the course?
Well, maybe they’ll feel like “We haven’t got it so bad afterall.” But no, a certain amount of historic empathy. The trick to doing history, I’ve always said, is not memorizing names or dates but you have to look at people in the past as actors. They’re doing things. They’re like you and me. They’re making choices. They never make a choice for the past, they don’t even make a choice for the present; they make a choice for the future. We’re always making choices for the future.
Every choice we make is about a future condition in which we want to live. When we look at people in the past making choices during pandemics, whether they’re physicians or plague doctors or individual citizens or people who are trying to stop medical officers from blocking their access to water which they believe is clean but everyone else is saying, “No, that’s causing you cholera.” Those people are making choices. If we sneak around behind them and look through their eyes at what they see as the future, then that’s a good intellectual exercise for anyone to engage in. That will make whatever we’re going to head into a little bit easier for people.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Dr. John Belshaw
Chandy is a biology major/chemistry minor who's been a staff writer, Arts editor, and Managing Editor at The Cascade. She began writing in elementary school when she produced Tamagotchi fanfiction to show her peers at school -- she now lives in fear that this may have been her creative peak.
