Third TA

I had the third session as a TA the day before yesterday. It was about the English Reformation. All of the students, i would say, were well involved in the discussion, partly thanks to the familiarity of the topic.

Of course, it's not to say that the discussion was alwalys analytically perceptive. Sometimes the students were talking about it based on their previous knowledge about the topic, instead of questioning their previous ideas and impressions by using the reading materials given to them. This is perhaps because some of them did not read the material closely. More crucially, however, it can be also because they (and I) have only begun to examine critically the ways in which our perceptions and impressions of the past are constructed. One important lesson I get from studying history is that our impressions on big events like the Reformation are so much sustained by a chain of implicit assumptions that our taken-for-granted knowledge begin to collapse once we see it closely and consider why scholars are still busy writing about it.

Take the very word 'Reformation' for example. The point is that such a word can operate as much to conceal as to reveal what we suppose the word stands for. While the word Reformation gives us an impression of a shift from Catholicism to Protestantism, we are not very sure if we can safely assume that there was a clear shift from one well-established organizaiton and a well-defined system of beliefs, to equal counterparts. Indeed, one of the reading material suggests that while the legisrative aspect of the reformation went well, 'popular' aspect did not. This raises questions like 'whose reformation was it?', and 'how did the word "Reformation" operate when the thoroughgoing reformation was yet to come?' So taking the word 'Reformation' seriously lead us to realize how far we do not know about the subject concerned.

From the next session onward, I will try to draw as much attention to this uncertain aspect of our historical knowledge as possible.