Piper Lasater
Eric Denby is a new instructor in History and Social Sciences with a focus on U.S. history. Denby serves as a house counselor in Bartlet House and likes to use more experimental teaching techniques in his classroom. Denby recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, focusing on the organization of queer youth.
“Right out of high school, I got into the music business, and I was an in-house talent buyer for about ten years. That meant that I would book the artist into live music venues, but I always wanted to be a teacher. So, at age 29, I went back to college. I’ve been in college ever since pursuing this, so teaching has always been on my radar. What drew me to [Andover] was that I wanted to be immersed in teaching; I wanted to get to know my students. At one point, I had planned on becoming a professor, but higher [education] does not allow you to get to know your students just [because of] the way it’s set up. I wanted to be more connected and build relationships, and [Andover] offers that as well as the progressive sort of education that I’m used to.”
“I’m a big fan of active learning. I like to have my students draw abstract drawings, and then we discuss them. I like to do simulations and role-playing games within my courses in which students embody a historical character and have to give a speech or a debate to really try to understand the issues that I’m trying to teach. I think it’s important that we realize that teaching is a full-contact sport in that no longer can we just vocalize and have students learn it. No one wants to just sit there and hear someone talk for an hour, so it’s got to be engaging. [There’s] got to be movement. It’s got to be discussion. It’s got to be collaborative.”
“I don’t know if there is such a thing as free time as a boarding school teacher, but I have been known to crochet baby blankets and dog sweaters. Now that I’m on this campus [where] everybody either has a baby or a dog, I think I’ll be a little busy.”
“Although it sounds a bit cliché, failure is the best teaching tool, and being a little hungry, knowing that you could have done better, is a fantastic motivator for doing better. I think I would tell myself to not only hear that and believe that but to not beat myself up so much when I fail because it really has led me to where I’m at now, a place that I really enjoy being at.”
“So I am a gay man, and when I became a scholar and started focusing on the Ph.D., I found myself wanting to know more about this history as a modern U.S. historian. You’re almost an activist in some ways, especially my type of history, in which I’m trying to uncover those stories that aren’t told normally, and I’m trying to make sure they get told in education. So, it’s that personal connection and personal interest, but also in an effort to sort of unsilence those voices that haven’t been written about typically in our history textbooks or in K to 12 education settings.”
“My dissertation looks at the 1970s and 1980s, and the basic question I asked was: what was there before? Gay Straight Alliance clubs, which came about in 1988 in Massachusetts, were the first two of them. So, what occurred before that? In the ’70s and ’80s, there were active queer youth groups with no adult oversight and no funding that formed to be both social and political organizations but also to offer peer support for kids coming out or for kids living on the street to offer some emotional support.”
“Entirely. So, if you look at any major movement in the United States [of America] and throughout the world, kids have always been at the forefront of social protest movements. People between the ages of 14 and 20 were as integral to the anti-Vietnam movement as those kids who were in college, same with gay rights. They talk about Stonewall, and they talk about these watersheds in gay and lesbian history, but they often forget to mention that many of those kids on the forefront were 15 and 16 years old, typically not able to live at home, so they were on the streets, they were trying to survive. They were there at these big moments that sort of opened up the activism that we see today. So I think youth is extremely important to any type of movement because history has shown that they’re not only active in these movements, but they are integral to the success of those movements.”
“Probably to Ancient Rome. Although I’m a modern U.S. scholar and I’ve spent the last ten years studying U.S. history, the first love of history that I got as a middle school kid was Ancient
Rome and Ancient Greek mythology. I would have to be part of the political sphere. I don’t think I’d be really good at being a street beggar in Rome, but if I could see sort of the backroom dealings of Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius and all these historical figures, I think that would be interesting. Either that or Tudor England during Henry the Eighth.”
“I would say that one person that I admire is Bayard Rustin. He was really like the architect of the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and he was a mentor to Martin Luther King. Yet he was also a gay man. Because of a solicitation charge that he had 20 years or ten years earlier, he was pushed aside from the March for fear that his sexuality would take away from the overall March’s goals, so he helped create it. He helped get it off the ground and organize it, but as it came closer to the monumental event, others pushed him aside and sort of fired him from the March because of fear of his sexuality. I think that’s an important lesson, and right now, there’s a resurgence. They’re coming out with a movie soon based on his life, [and] I think he’s a good role model.”
“It’s all about consistency. It’s all about showing up, and it’s all about not getting turned away or turned off when you don’t see immediate change occurring. It takes years and years of activism. It took the people who did the sit-in campaigns at the beginning of the 1960s for the civil rights movement. It took those youths to lay the founding framework and the foundation for the later wins in the civil rights movement that came six or seven or eight years later. So I think it’s all about being engaged, not giving up, keeping hold of that idealism that you have and that all of us should have when fighting for a cause that we believe in.”
