“Narrative is the basic way in which we make sense of our experience.”
In his low-lit office filled with books, family photos and lamps, Dr. David Thomas looked at me with eyes full of quiet earnestness as he carefully selected the best words to describe his passion for teaching history.
“I want students to see that too: not just what happened in the past but how we construct narratives out of our histories, our personal past,” Thomas said.
Thomas, a history professor who is currently Union’s Faculty of the Year, is going on 31 years teaching American history courses, the honors Wisdom course and a prayer practicum.
When he first started at Union in 1994, he had just come from Ohio State University after receiving his Ph.D. in history, and he calls his experience coming to Tennessee a modest culture shock.
“It’s a different culture: different ways of organizing into community and different expectations for church and different expectations for relationships at Walmart,” he laughed.
By observing him in class and conversing with him, it is evident that Thomas’ primary focus is relationships: in history, in his classroom and in his home.
“Every year, I’m experimenting with that relationship; there are three basic relationships — the professor to the student to the content,” Thomas explained. “Content is all the created order unless you’re in biblical studies. And so, it’s very relational, and one of the real fun parts is trying to make those relationships work.”
When the relationships between past and present finally click in a student’s head, a light goes on. For a professor, it’s one of the most satisfying things to witness.
“That’s definitely what gets me up in the morning,” Thomas said.
Once, he had a student who was smiling after taking her final exam, and when Thomas questioned her about her surprisingly happy disposition, the student explained that she finally knew her stuff. She had learned something new and finally could do it, something she hadn’t been able to accomplish before.
In contrast, a student once discovered in Thomas’ course that history wasn’t for her, and she went on to become a successful pottery major.
“My course helped her realize that she didn’t want to do this,” Thomas smiled. “That was great.”
This dedication to the well-being of individuals has significantly impacted Union students, one of them being Eliana Isom, a senior psychology and English double major. She had him for one of her first classes as a freshman, the Wisdom honors course.
“He’s humble in the way that if you ask him a question, he’ll be like, ‘I don’t know,'” Isom said. “I haven’t ever seen a professor do that, in honors, or in my other classes. For someone to just say, ‘I don’t really know,’ or ‘I don’t have the answer to that, what do you think?'”
Thomas is in the business of lifting the veil of fear that most new students have in his classes. He wants them to ask questions then to search deeper. It is through this process that he is able to see the real person.
“As they become familiar with me and I become familiar with them, then oftentimes, their fear drops,” Thomas said thoughtfully before leaning in. “They don’t have to be naturally anxious.”
His goal with his classes is to shape the way that people view the world, the past and each other. As a Christian, he believes that the heart of the gospel is love: that you are to love your neighbor. He is not necessarily asking his students to love every person that they discuss in his classes, but rather to understand that the people they encounter in daily life are people that they should love.
“One of the things I want students to be able to do is to generate some kind of empathy. In some way, empathize with the people of the past as being real people, as being not these cardboard cutouts that represent the revolution or a civil war, whatever it may be,” Thomas said. “But real people are making real decisions and believing in sets of values, some of which overlap with our values and some of which really don’t overlap with our values.”
This emphasis on valuing the human being causes students to feel valued and makes them feel comfortable going to him, even with things that cause worry.
Isom tilted her head back as she remembered the conversation with Dr. Thomas that has remained with her all four years of college and probably will for the rest of her life. When she was a junior, she made friends with some seniors and realized that, at some point, they would graduate and move away, leaving her. She could see this loss in the distance, and it scared her. But the words that Thomas spoke changed her whole view of how she looked at something she knew she would lose.
“Gratitude. Gratitude for what the relationship was, what it provided and all the things associated with friendship. To just be grateful for them,” Isom said. “Then, it’s also about intent. Intent, like, how are you deciding to keep up with people … if you are going to make it work.”
Students may enter Thomas’ class expecting to receive historical information then regurgitate it back onto the exam, but they will be challenged to think for themselves, to put their own history into what they are learning and to develop their world view as they learn about the narrative of the world.
“That willingness to enter into somebody else’s experience, enter into somebody else’s life, is right at the core of being interested in history,” Thomas said.
