CLEVELAND -- Some of the historical anecdotes and even a few jokes in Kenneth Ledford's classes on German and European history come straight from his notes taken as a undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Posted 6-22-01
CLEVELAND -- Some of the historical anecdotes and even a few jokes in Kenneth Ledford's classes on German and European history come straight from his notes taken as a undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He was so wowed by such undergraduate teachers as Lamar Cecil and David Griffiths, who taught the UNC German and Russian history classes, that Ledford says he felt he was a "kid in a candy store."
Those history lectures turned around a prospective chemistry major, who found out he did not like labs, to history. Not wanting to miss a word said, he developed a note-taking system that captured entire lectures on paper.
The legacy of his undergraduate teachers is that they provided the role models for teaching that Ledford uses in his history classes at CWRU. When he had to teach the first time, he consulted those notes to enliven his classes. The humor from the 1970s still sparks laughs today -- although Ledford says he has added his own bits of contemporary humor.
His teaching efforts have earned him the Carl F. Wittke Award for Undergraduate Teaching. This was his sixth nomination for the award, but the first year to receive the honor.
"What distinguishes Prof. Ledford from many other faculty members is his ability to maintain his popularity among his students while seriously challenging them academically.... He maintains student interest not only through his witty asides and cynical humor, but also by engaging students with questions about the lecture and outside reading," wrote the student nominator.
"I'm always honored when students take the time to write letters to nominate me," says Ledford. For several years, he has had multiple nominations from students, including this year when two students told him that they had nominated him.
The historian of Germany says the ingredients for his successful teaching are that he connects his teaching with his research.
He also shows students the advantage of coming to research institution is that active research and publishing enliven the classroom.
Ledford, an associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, also makes it clear that he has high expectations for his students. He gives them challenging reading -- no textbooks, but novels and other readings reflective of the course's historical period.
Much of his classroom teaching seeks to overcome misconceptions that students learned in high school -- and that many faculty share, he adds -- that "history is multiple-choice answers about dates, presidents, kings, and treaty provisions."
One of his classroom goals is to show students that history is about analyzing multiple perspectives on the past, and he challenges them to synthesize them with class readings and his lectures to develop and support their own arguments of how they interpret history.
When it happens, he says he feels he has accomplished his role as a historian and teacher.
Ledford teaches many undergraduate courses. Among those classes are the introduction to modern world history (a survey course that attracts 125 students); a two-semester sequence course on the history of Germany from 1789-1914 and from 1914-1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and brought Germany into the 21st Century; a modern European history course; a Soviet history course; history of European law; and "Comparative History of the Professions," which he developed with one of the campus's first Glennan Fellowships.
He has a secondary appointment at the CWRU School of Law and also is director of the Max Kade Center for German Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Ledford joined the CWRU faculty in 1991. He earned his B. A. in history with honors as well as his J. D. with honors from the University of North Carolina. He received his M.A. in 1984 and his Ph.D. in 1989 in history from Johns Hopkins University.
He has received several prestigious research awards, including the Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in 1997 and the German Marshall Fund of the United States Research Fellowship in 1998. He is the author of From General Estate to Special Interest: German Lawyers 1878-1933 (Cambridge University Press), which examines the German legal system before the Nazi takeover of Germany.
