Wentworth Professor Teaches Facing History for More Than 20 Years

Joanne Tuck is a seasoned teacher who has spent the last 25 years as a professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. In 1984 she introduced a course titled "Facing History and Ourselves," which has since become one of the most popular courses at the college. A recent alumni magazine listed 50 things to do before graduation. Number 16 was "take Facing History . . .the true reward is the knowledge acquired through a deep exploration of the past and how it affects us all as humans existing in the present," the article said.

The course follows the full Facing History scope and sequence-identity, membership, history, judgment, memory & legacy and choosing to participate-focusing on the case study of the Holocaust. Because Facing History is always introducing new resources, Tuck's course is constantly evolving. In addition to using Holocaust and Human Behavior and Elements of Time, Tuck also uses Race and Membership materials and study guides such as Becoming American: The Chinese Experience and Choosing to Participate.

"Facing History and Ourselves is an extremely compelling course in which students must not only look at the case study of the Holocaust and related historical events, but they have to look at themselves and the kind of choices they're going to make in their own lives," says Tuck.

Tuck, who has had a sabbatical at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and also studied at Yad Vashem, has done research on the engineers of the Holocaust, a topic she presented at a workshop at Yad Vashem last summer. When she presents this topic in class, the students learn how the Auschwitz death camp was designed to kill the most people in the most efficient manner possible.

"This exploration is perfect for my students because they are engineers and I don't want them to just be as Jacob Bronowski would say ‘educated barbarians.' They have to make the link between morality and what they're building. These kind of decisions come up all of the time-not in the same light as the horror of the Holocaust-but they will face environmental concerns, for example," explains Tuck.

One of Tuck's students was the speaker at the Wentworth Institute of Technology graduation a few years ago. "Professor Tuck's Facing History class was one of the most important I have ever taken. From this class we learned a number of lessons that are important to us as civilized people, and also as engineers and architects," said Carl P. Evans in his commencement address.

In 2004, Tuck received the Grant Johnson Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award. One of the reasons cited was her outstanding work with Facing History. Joanne also serves on Facing History's New England Teacher Advisory Board.