Teaching That Changes Sightlines

Memorials don't just spring from nowhere. Among several remarkable features of the Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial that anchors the central plaza of George Mason University's main campus is its origins in student inquiry. How did the innovative teaching valued by the Center for Mason Legacies spark questions and research that led to the memorial's creation? Mason Professor Jennifer Ritterhouse, chair of the Southern Historical Association's Committee on Teaching, wanted to find out. In February 2025, she interviewed CML Director George Oberle about the center's novel approach to pedagogy, archives and digital scholarship.

Excerpts of their conversation appear in the Journal of Southern History's November 2025 special teaching issue under the title, “Teaching That Changes the Sightlines: From the Enslaved Children of George Mason Project to the History of the Old South.” Video clips from the conversation are presented here, along with the syllabus and a sample lesson from a course in which Oberle put CML's principles into action.

In his course on the History of the Old South (Fall 2024), Oberle led undergraduates to question the popular notion of a unified South with a static populace neatly divided along racial lines. Students encounter these complications in a digital research lesson based on a rare written account of a working-class White man's experience, the dictated Confessions of condemned murderer Edward Isham, which describe peripatetic living and frequent relationships across racial lines involving lovers, friends and foes.

In the digital mapping assignment created under Oberle's direction by doctoral student Kristina Nohe, students digitally map Isham's peregrinations, revealing a surprisingly diverse and mobile "Old South" while sparking enthusiasm for original research. "What it really emphasized," Oberle tells Rittenhouse in the "Sightlines" interview, "was just how much students want to be involved in the creation of historical projects and that the digital ... allows us the flexibility to provide new platforms ..."