Spotlight On: Brian Bixby

Your first class at CCAE which you offered 10 years ago was Pirates!, followed by a class on Vikings. Why pirates and why Vikings?

I knew something about both pirates and Vikings, but knew there was a lot more I could learn. They are also colorful people of whom many interesting stories can be told. Finally, they are mischaracterized in contemporary culture, which has a romanticized view of the early 18th century Caribbean pirates. So they seemed like worthwhile educational topics for both my students and me, and entertaining to boot.

You outlined your decade at CCAE with specific historical moments throughout centuries, starting from 282 BC to 1992. How did you choose these moments?

I wanted events that people would find surprising and intriguing, or, failing that, well-known. Would hearing about this event make the reader more interested in taking the course? For example, who wants to take a course on The Hundred Years’ War? Who cares about it? But when you read that the King of France actually disinherited his son in favor of a rival monarch, you might well wonder what’s going on, and take the course.

What is your favorite century and why?

The next one? Who doesn’t want to know what the future will bring? But in history, I suppose the 19th. People were grappling with industrialization, urbanization, and globalization with values and institutions devised for a much different world. They had to change, experiment, adapt. It’s easier to see and understand a society’s values when they are being questioned and altered. For example, my recent course on 19th Century Mind Control shows Americans around 1840 trying to use science to deal with their changing world while not fully understanding that world or the science involved.

If you had to choose a moment in CCAE’s history in the past 10 years, what would it be (and why)?

March 10, 2020: Remember what I just said about seeing how people adapt to major changes in their world? Every aspect of CCAE’s operations were upended by COVID-19. We had to figure out new ways to reach out to students, new ways to teach, new ways to manage a drastically altered budget, and so on. Every part of CCAE, from students to board members, had to work together to survive this challenge. That we did tells you a lot about what values drive CCAE’s culture.

What do you enjoy most about teaching at CCAE?

Do my students get to an “aha” moment? “I didn’t know that before.” “Wow, it all fits together!” “I want to know more about that.” Sometimes it happens in class, sometimes I see it in the student feedback, other times I learn from them how class inspired them to do something of their own. These are the moments I want to pound on the table and say, “Yes, yes, yes!”