I teach at Our Lady of the Lake University, a Hispanic-Serving Institution in San Antonio whose mission frames education as a liberating process. That phrase describes what I am trying to do every time I walk into a classroom. Many of my students are first-generation college students navigating what university asks of them while managing jobs, families, and the very real question of whether higher education is meant for people like them. Meeting students where they are — not where a syllabus assumes they should be — is the starting point for everything I do.
My philosophical approach follows from that commitment. I do not see my role as the gatekeeper of authoritative knowledge but as a facilitator of inquiry. History is not a body of content to be transmitted and tested; it is a set of questions to be asked together: How do we know what we know about the past? Whose stories get told, and whose get left out? Why does the historical record keep changing? Students who arrive thinking they “aren’t history people” — because they associate the discipline with memorizing dates — consistently discover that they have been thinking like historians all along. My job is to create the conditions for that discovery.
The practical question is how to design a course that actually delivers on those commitments for the students in front of me. I use the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework to make the purpose, task, and criteria of every assignment explicit from the outset — a practice that research shows disproportionately benefits first-generation and historically underserved students. I design assessment ladders that go beyond the traditional essay, so that students still developing academic writing can demonstrate genuine analytical rigor through other modes: source analysis, visual argument, reflective writing. I reduce lecture time in favor of structured work with primary sources and competing interpretations, including archival material from my own research, so students can see how history is actually practiced rather than simply receive its conclusions.
This approach runs across a deliberately varied course portfolio. My world history surveys (HIST 1355 and 1356) are built as coherent pedagogical packages — not coverage-driven but question-driven, using carefully selected texts and a consistent “Then and Now” bridge structure that connects historical analysis to issues students recognize in the present. Sports and Social Activism in History (HIST 1360) was designed specifically for students who will never take another history course: by using sport — material students already know and care about — as the entry point, the course teaches critical and historical thinking skills in a context that feels immediately relevant rather than remote. In U.S. History since 1865 (HIST 1302), ensuring that students see themselves and their communities in the historical record is a central design principle, not an afterthought — particularly important at an institution whose student body has historically been underrepresented in the standard U.S. history narrative.
Designing individual courses well is necessary but not sufficient. I have been centrally involved in OLLU’s general education redesign — co-chairing the General Education Committee, coordinating the General Education Assessment Institute, and helping design University College, the academic unit that now houses both the General Education Program and the Honors Program, where I currently serve as Interim Director. That structural work is a direct extension of my teaching philosophy: an effort to ensure that the habits of mind I try to cultivate in my own courses are embedded coherently across the curriculum, and that students who move through general education encounter a program that was designed with them — not despite them — in mind.
Christopher S Rose 