In one of the more unusual career moves among Union faculty and something few of his peers may know, Dr. David Thomas, associate professor of history, was once an aeronautical engineer.

“That seems like quite a jump, doesn’t it?” laughs Thomas. He admits he had wide and varied interests during his early days of college. “I was the only guy in the entire engineering school that also took Shakespeare and romantic poetry.”

An engineering major at Ohio State University specializing in aeronautics, the one aspect Thomas really liked about the field was fluid mechanics. So when he decided to pursue a master’s degree, it was the oceanography route – not engineering – that Thomas chose to take. Completing his master’s at the University of Michigan, he headed to California, working with computer imaging of ocean waves.

“While I was in California, I learned two things,” explains Thomas. “First, I really wasn’t a very good engineer. To be a good engineer or oceanographer, you have to have that sort of instinctive feel for math, and we’re not talking algebra – it’s tough math. I didn’t have that. The second thing I learned was that I really wanted to work with people. More specifically, I wanted to answer the question of where our faith comes from, and the history that surrounds it.”

Thomas audited a church history course at a local seminary. That, he says, was the turning point for his career. Confident in the direction in which he wanted to move, he immediately applied for graduate school in history, going on to receive a second master’s degree and his doctorate from Ohio State.

“My parents were appalled. Four years of undergraduate school and a year working on my master’s degree already completed, and by this time I was married and we were expecting our first child. They couldn’t under-stand why I was throwing away a good career in oceanography,” remembers Thomas.

The Engineer Becomes a Teacher
As a graduate student, Thomas says that he was never particularly attracted to teaching. But over time, working as a teaching assistant and instructor while completing his master’s and Ph.D., he discovered he loved the classroom.

“Though I originally set out to be researcher, once I got into the classroom, I realized that I really liked working with people, talking about history,” says Thomas. “What really attracts me to teaching today is the students – particularly the ones here at Union – and the ideas. I love having the opportunity to encourage the students to think about their past and how their past makes them who they are.”

A professor here since the fall of 1994, Thomas has enjoyed teaching American History, mostly to history and elementary education majors.

“One of the things I like to encourage in my students is a sense of gratitude, because so many of the things we discuss, whether political ideas of Thomas Jefferson or technological ideas of Thomas Edison, work to our benefit. Look at electricity and how much our lives have changed over the last fifty years because of it. It’s revolutionary, but something students today don’t tend to think about,” laments Thomas.

Blending North and South
Always willing to entertain comments and questions from the students, Thomas describes his teaching style as casual, consistently encouraging feedback and dialogue from the students. He does admit, though, that there was somewhat of a culture shock when he first arrived in Tennessee from Ohio. “The biggest transition I had to face was the challenge of sparking dialogue in the classroom,” says Thomas.

“Students at Ohio State were a little more aggressive, so it was easier to get a discussion going – but they were also more disrespectful. The respectful student at Union, however, sits in my class and wants to hear what I have to say, which means she’s going to be a little less aggressive on the one hand and a little more polite on the other. So it’s a sword that cuts both ways – I love the politeness and the respect but I do wish they would ask more questions.”

Helping Students Learn Through Innovative Teaching
Winner of the 2001 Innovative Teaching Award, Thomas was honored for his development of a four-part assignment titled “Perceiving the Past” which encourages students to under-stand the past more broadly. Selected by a committee of his peers, the innovative teaching award is designed to reward new approaches and ideas in the classroom.

“We learn from our history,” says Thomas. “We call people without history Alzheimer’s patients – it’s absolutely tragic what happens when you forget your past. You don’t even know your name.”

The first task Thomas gives to the students is to investigate some part of their culture – reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, watching TV, even listening to conversation with friends at lunch – and then deciding how the past influences those things. The students then each turn in papers, and the class discusses what has been learned. According to Thomas, this can be a real “eye-opener” for the students.

“When friends talk to each other at lunch, what they’re doing is telling stories about what happened yesterday,” explains Thomas. “And you can’t read the newspaper without knowing that the news is really what happened yesterday.”

The second assignment Thomas gives to the students is more on material culture. Each student is assigned a different item such as a pencil, athletic shoes or mascara. The students then have to discover when their assigned item showed up in history and what people did before without that particular item.

For the third and fourth assignments, students are asked to read children’s books –the story of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, by Virginia Lee Burton, for example – as well as biographies of authors of these books. A class discussion follows on how the past is used in the books that are read and what occurs in the author’s past that might have influenced him or her in what they wrote. One example Thomas gives is Dr. Seuss, who wrote Horton Hears a Who after Hiroshima was bombed in World War II.

“An accurate understanding of our past is quite important to understanding today's successes and problems, and to understanding ourselves,” explains Thomas. “As a teacher, I want to be accurate and I want my students to be informed, both in their knowledge of the history and in their understanding of what that history means.”

Steve Beverly is filmed by ABC’s 20/20 while teaching an advertising class.

Having spent a lot of his time in news management – working with young people beginning their first jobs – Beverly feels that teaching is definitely a calling for him. He relishes the chances he has to help another generation enter a tough, competitive industry.

“To have the opportunity to prepare young people in a highly demanding field to be competent professionals in the way that I was taught and to hopefully be a value-added influence in their lives is something I live for,” says Beverly, who joined the faculty in 1993.

A national expert known for his insights into the current game show and reality television craze, Beverly has taken his classes into the 21st century by using telecommunication technology, a project that resulted in his nomination for the Innovative Teaching Award. He brings students in his media and advertising sections face-to-face with mass media personalities such as Herb Stempel, the whistle blower for the 21 quiz show scandal and Jean Jordan, a contestant in the Reality-TV competition “Big Brother” which premiered on CBS. Beverly says this allows students to really be aware of what the entertainment industry is like, and the personalities who are creating that industry.

The Union professor has recently become a mini-celebrity himself with his work on game shows featured in the New York Times Magazine and on ABC’s 20/20 newsmagazine. Beverly also hosts the website www.tvgameshows.net.

Brad Green, assistant professor of Christian studies, introduces
students to great ideas that form their “intellectual inheritance.”

Honorable Mention
Brad Green, Assistant Professor of Christian Studies
“I like teaching because of the opportunity it gives me to help young men and women begin to think about the world around them in light of God and his revelation to us,” says Brad Green, assistant professor of Christian studies and an honorable mention recipient in the 2001 Innovative Teaching Award.

Joining the Union faculty in 1998, Green’s primary area of teaching is theology, a subject dear to his heart, which he helped start a major for that will officially begin this fall.

“I want to be able to expose students to their own great intellectual inheritance, and help them to begin navigating those waters and the world of ideas without throwing them to the sharks,” explains Green. That’s what prompted him to begin a “disputatio” (formal debate) program in his classes.

Five times throughout the semester, classes were devoted to formal debates on the more controversial issues in the church such as the bondage of the will, the role of women in the pastorate, and the nature of atonement, using the model of the medieval university.

According to Green, the medieval university did a much better job in producing a widely-educated person. “Part of the thinking, then,” says Green, “is that since the modern university is not producing the kind of person it should, can we retrieve some older models which are tried and true, and reclaim those in the cause of Christian higher education?”

Green hopes that incorporating disputatios will help to do just that.