Ä¢¹½´«Ã½<\/a>, who is one of this year\u2019s recipients for the Goergen Award for\u00a0Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. \u201cA decree, a quote, a petition from long ago\u2014how we interpret the primary source will always change depending on who is interpreting it, and when.\u201d<\/p>\nSierra Silva\u2019s research centers on the experiences of Africans and their descendants in colonial Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic during the 16th through 18th centuries. His immersive teaching style allows students to put themselves in the time and place of the people they\u2019re studying.<\/p>\n
\u201cI make them active participants in a given historical moment,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In one example, his class was reading a petition from Spanish nobles to their monarch, requesting privileges and rights they wanted recognized. \u201cI asked my class to consider this petition from both sides, but to also imagine the parts that weren\u2019t drafted, the letter that wasn\u2019t sent,\u201d Sierra Silva says. \u201cWhen you start to imagine these possibilities, then history really becomes immersive.\u201d<\/p>\n
And occasionally even uncomfortable. \u201cTrying to make sense of how a slave trader 500 years ago could justify selling a family, that\u2019s really difficult for students to step into that role,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I tell them, \u2018No, think of this in terms of a witness in the room when this bill of sale is being written. Be in the moment. The intent is not to recreate the trauma suffered by enslaved people of African, Asian, or Native descent in Mexico, but to have students understand how and why colonizers dehumanized members of their own societies. The next step is to understand how oppressed people overcame or resisted their enslavement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, there\u2019s more than one way to bring the past into the present. For Sierra Silva\u2019s seminar course, The Other Atlantic, students learned how to prepare an indigenous Mayan drink made with cacao.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The history professor leads his class back in time to analyze events that shaped today\u2019s world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":672,"featured_media":538402,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[486,21422,19242,36892,16072],"class_list":["post-538322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-community","tag-awards","tag-department-of-history","tag-global-engagement","tag-research","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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