Bringing History Alive

D ahpon Ho still remembers the first college course he taught. As he stood before 40 students at American University, where he was an instructor, “my heart was beating so fast I thought it was going to burst.” He was glad that a tall lectern hid his quaking knees.

He glanced at his lecture notes but cast them aside.

“Who are you?” he asked the students. “Why are you here?”

“I got to know their names,” he says. “I established rapport, and that was immensely helpful to me as a teacher. If not for that, I probably would have quit in my first year.”

The image of Mr. Ho cowering at the lectern is hard to square with his approach in the classroom today. He’s an assistant professor of history at the University of Rochester who specializes in China and East Asia and tries to bring history alive for students. He wants his classes not only to inform students but also to help form who they become. A 2016 course on the Korean War was so full of role-playing and props that his teaching assistant, Jim Rankine, says it was “daunting” to take the position.

“He was willing to try things that had never even occurred to me,” says Mr. Rankine, a Ph.D. candidate from Australia. “He asked students to enter into historical situations using techniques that are more akin to a drama class than a history class.”

In that course, Mr. Ho split the class into two groups, North Korea and South Korea, for a competitive role-playing project set in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating the two countries. For eight weeks, during a short period at the beginning of class, the two groups plotted strategy, issued propaganda, held parades, and conducted “rocket” tests. They even re-enacted the 1994 funeral of North Korea’s longtime leader Kim Il-sung, using a coffin built by one of the students.

Using their imagination, students absorb history far better than from a textbook, Mr. Ho says.

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“Students have to feel that they’re part of the historical community,” he says. “If history is fossilized, it will perish.”

Yet Mr. Ho knows that for many students such role-playing can provoke anxiety — especially at a time when tensions between the United States and North Korea are so high. To encourage them to participate, he takes risks himself. Near the end of the course on the Korean War, he pulled out a guitar and, apologizing all the while, played a modified version of the Cat Stevens song “Father and Son,” which Mr. Ho had renamed “History and Life.”

“First we need to change ourselves, … and it starts by living history,” he sang.

“That’s the way, and I know, that you won’t forget this class.”

Though he insists that such antics do not come naturally, he says he’s willing to stumble through a song for the good of his students.

“I’m always willing to make a fool out of myself,” he says, “if it will serve a pedagogical purpose.”

Mr. Ho’s parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan in the 1970s. His family had moved around the world during his youth, living in Saudi Arabia, Texas, Indonesia, Singapore, Switzerland, and China, as his father, a geophysicist, worked on oil projects.

At Rice University, Mr. Ho started out as a mechanical-engineering major but then took a course with Richard J. Smith, a history professor specializing in China. Mr. Smith not only urged Mr. Ho to become an academic but “taught me everything I know about how to be great professor,” Mr. Ho says. (Mr. Smith is still at Rice, where he is a scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy.)

Mr. Ho arrived in Rochester in 2010, after earning a Ph.D. in history at the University of California at San Diego and spending a year teaching at American University. His courses include “Modern China,” “Tibet: History and Myth,” and “The Samurai.” In 2013 he won a universitywide teaching award for his “dynamic and creative approaches,” helping students discover the relevance of history in their own lives.

M r. Ho sets the tone on the first day of class. Students are asked to create a slide introducing themselves, including a photo and anything that makes them special. “It’s about building community,” the professor says.

Rule No. 1, stated on every syllabus: No B.S. (He does not abbreviate the word.) “It means I won’t B.S. my students, and if they don’t know something, they should tell me, too,” he says.

Every class has a culminating project designed to fill students with excitement rather than dread. The course on Tibet ends with two debate projects: In one, a group of students argues for Chinese rule and says criticism of China’s human-rights record hurts Tibetans by putting China on the defensive. The other side argues for a free Tibet and says global pressure will end atrocities there. The remaining students must vote for the winner based on the arguments presented. Those arguing the Chinese position usually win, Mr. Ho says.

Mr. Ho says such competitions work because students want to win and get a thrill out of presenting before their peers. He tried assigning routine term papers in his first year of teaching but found that students responded with the same lack of imagination reflected in the assignments.

“It’s wrong to say that students don’t want to write,” he says. “They simply don’t want to write in the ways that have been dictated to them over time. They want to write to speak, they want to get their message out. If you give them the chance, they will respond.”

Matthew Sisto, a 2016 graduate who took five courses with Mr. Ho, praises all of them but says the first four were merely steppingstones to the Korean War course.

In that course, several Korean War veterans visited the class, as did a young North Korean refugee. The climax was the DMZ role-playing project. Mr. Sisto, assigned to North Korea, was voted Great Leader by his teammates, which meant he spent several weeks playing Kim Il-sung. He and his father built a coffin so that the team could stage Kim Il-sung’s funeral; it was later donated to a student theater company.

Mr. Ho is now working on a documentary film about the Korean War course. He hopes to show it in a Rochester movie theater.

“As fun as the experience was, it was also quite a good learning experience,” says Mr. Sisto, now an English teacher at a local Christian high school. “We really had to take on the mind-set of a side that most of us didn’t even agree with. That’s what critical thinking is all about.”

He says Mr. Ho brings an energy to his courses that is contagious. When the professor outlined the DMZ project, Mr. Sisto recalls, he said he had taught the class once before, in 2012, and described some of the theatrics that students pulled in that class.

“Then he said: ‘I’m sure you guys will do even more.’ "

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