
History graduate adviser Patryk Babiracki speaks during a Humanities Applied event in 2024.
UTA’s liberal arts programs have a branding problem, and enrollment is declining.
Students find many liberal arts courses, particularly history, obsolete and unrelated to the modern job market, which favors “more practical” disciplines like science, technology and business. Teaching methods focusing on classroom-based skills like rote learning or note-taking, seem out of touch in our fast-moving, multimedia dominated world.
To counter this, several UTA Department of History and Geography professors are experimenting with more innovative forms of teaching beyond traditional lecture hall methods or textbooks — incorporating experiential, multidisciplinary and creative techniques to make the subject more dynamic, alive and palpable.
To put it bluntly, these professors are making history cool. Doing so not only sparks new enthusiasm toward the subject among students but also better prepares graduates to face real-world challenges after graduation.
First, what is innovation?
“Innovation is a combination of two things. One is novelty, the second is impact,” said Dr. Ogan Gurel, UTA BioHealth Innovation specialist. “Innovation is actually more than just coming up with an idea, it’s making it into a reality.”
For a long time, the prevailing model of history courses was characterized by lectures and memorization of facts, names and dates delivering a type of academic rigor. Yet, it was scarcely to the advantage of students. The dullness of passively listening to lectures fails to promote critical thinking, creativity or real-world application, all of which are important in the workforce.
Kimberly Breuer, history associate professor of instruction, recalls one eye-opening moment when lecturing that inspired her to take a hands-on experiential learning approach. Breuer realized she said something wrong and when her students didn’t recognize it, she decided to stop the lecture and change her approach.
“It started with that class where we were all asleep, and no one was paying attention,” Breuer said.

Kimberly Breuer, history associate professor of instruction, speaks to students in UTA Special Collections.
She quickly recognized the mismatch between teaching styles and student learning styles. Modern students have grown up in the age of technology and multimedia, accustomed to learning interactively from videos and apps and witnessing the dissemination and conversation of social media.
Hours of lecture presentations are an anachronistic and uninspiring experience. Most students find the traditional classroom boring, and it’s more difficult for them to see the utility of the discipline.
Experiential learning, or hands-on history, is an exciting approach to the subject, getting students out of the classroom and engaging with history live and often off-site.
So, how do professors in the history department “innovate”?
“[Innovation] means stepping out of the classroom,” history assistant professor Alberto Ortiz Díaz said. “We go and work with partners, we’ll go do history, we’ll go out and try to figure out history.”
Ortiz Díaz has taken students to prisons and mental hospitals. He said students have to adapt to a different set of assumptions and different environments. That’s how they learn history in a new way.
These activities improve transferable skills such as research, critical thinking and project management, which are valuable for many jobs, not just those considered the ‘usual’ path for history students.
Ortiz Díaz said the goal is to expand their horizons and link traditional skills with what excites them, which often means being in the field, working hands-on and being part of history in action.
Amid this emerging digital age, most history departments have embraced technology to provide students with a hyperconnected learning experience. Digital humanities may be relatively new, but historical study can now occur thanks to digital archives, geographic information systems, and even virtual reality.
Geographic information systems, for example, can help students map events that were not possible before, such as the spread of an empire or the movement of trade routes across the globe over the centuries.
But Stephanie Cole, UTA’s History department chair, has cautions.
“You have to innovate in a way that suits your own teaching style. Certain innovation methods require a tolerance for pandemonium in the classroom for a few minutes,” Cole said.

Kimberly Breuer, history associate professor of instruction, center, poses with her class in the UTA Special Collections.
The History Department also collaborates with other units on campus. Whether this means media studies, computer science business or inviting students into interdisciplinary classroom projects, working on these different subjects can encourage students to bring historical thinking into the present by analyzing demographic data trends in business or telling historical stories through media production. Collaborations like these allow the history classroom to move out into the world.
History graduate adviser Patryk Babiracki recently initiated an annual Humanities Applied Symposium, which brings alumni and community members from different industries to campus to discuss the impact their liberal arts degrees have had on their careers.
“It’s a question of building a curriculum that helps our students think in terms of business and tech and open up to these other disciplines through these courses and helps other students relate,” Babiracki said.
The future of history education requires imagination and implementation. If history departments want graduates to have a broad understanding of the human condition and practical mental tools, they need to continue innovating in the classroom, creating lessons and assignments that bring history to life for today’s students.
They need to keep the subject interesting to prospective majors, minors and those who, as history graduates, are tasked with bringing disciplined understanding and clear thinking to the problems of our existence and humanity’s difficult journey.