This author and worldwide research historian loves teaching best.
If you’re not a student in a Heather Streets class, you’ll want to be after talking with this associate professor of history . Her enthusiasm for world history and working with students at all levels is that contagious.
“I love teaching here…with freshmen, the first year is not just learning about ‘stuff,’ but also learning how to survive while you’re in college, so we talk about things like that.” Teaching seniors is much different, she says, because they’re adjusted and they bring a variety of backgrounds. As for teaching graduate students, “I adore it. They’re training for a profession, for what they’re going to do.”
Streets also directs the Washington State University world history Ph.D. program, the only one now functioning in the United States, and offering the only available Ph.D. in world history.
Learning far and wide
Streets travels abroad frequently to research her books, and her students are big beneficiaries. Recently she taught a summer-school class shortly after getting back from Vietnam and interviewing General Vo Nguyen Giap, architect of the battle of Dien Bien Phu in the 1950s, and who later fought against Americans. “When we did case studies for French Indo-China, I had lots to say about it from my experience there.”
Lectures are only part of her classes, or not there at all
In even her largest general education courses, discussion and interaction are her favorite teaching methods. She lectures on her techniques around the country. For example, in an undergraduate class that takes place on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she gives structure in the first class, then the second is discussion and students interacting with each other. She uses films and art as well as lecture.
It’s not dates and places
Historians do what they do because they’re interested in the past in terms of the present, Streets says. “Where have we been, how can we explain who we are? It’s NOT all about memorizing facts and dates (which I actually have a hard time doing). It’s about concepts, it’s about thinking, about how we’ve become what we are.”
For her, the study of history is the study of the connections between the past and what’s happening now—in undergraduate courses she presents why she thinks a topic matters and why they might care.
World history in book and Web form
During the spring and summer of 2007, Professor Streets went on sabbatical to Malaysia and Vietnam, researching imperialism as a global system. It’s the first book of its kind that looks at empires not as national phenomena, but about how they were all connected. She figures it will take about eight years to research and write.
Her published texts are Martial Races, 2004, and a world history textbook for the undergraduate level, Traditions and Encounters, 2006. She is currently co-authoring yet a third text with a colleague at another university.
In addition, Streets edits World History Connected, an e-journal focused on learning and teaching. It is the official journal of the World History Association, and has about 170,000 sustained readers.
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