An Ashland educator is helping to develop lesson plans about Ukrainian history and current events for American high school students. Paul Huard, an AP U.S. History teacher at Ashland High School, has traveled to Poland and Ukraine in recent summers to do humanitarian relief work as the country continues to resist a Russian invasion. From a colleague there, he learned about the “On Ukraine” project through Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
Huard and a handful of other educators selected to participate in the program have been working with letters, documents and other primary sources from the Lviv Center for Urban History to develop teaching materials for American educators. He joins us with more details on the project and why it’s important for American students to learn about Ukraine.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with Paul Huard. He teaches AP U.S. History at Ashland High School. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Huard traveled to Ukraine to do humanitarian relief work. From that trip and subsequent ones, he learned about an international project to develop new lesson plans about both Ukrainian history and current events. Paul Huard joins us now to talk about all of this. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Paul Huard: Hey, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Miller: It’s great to have you on. What kind of connection did you have with Ukraine before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022?
Huard: Essentially personal interest and scholarly education – that was really it. I’m not Ukrainian. I have studied Russian history. That was the entree for me as a history major many years ago, but I’m kind of an outlier. But the work in Ukraine definitely connected me to larger issues, including just the cause that Ukrainians have to try to let the world know they are a legitimate country, they are a legitimate democracy, and they believe that they have a future that is much more aligned with the West and liberal democracy, than the East and the Russia of Vladimir Putin.
Miller: It’s possible that you just answered, partway, my next question. I’m gonna ask it anyway. I’m still curious what made you go on that first trip?
Huard: That’s a fair question because a lot of people say, “Huard, why?” It’s complicated.
Miller: I could have asked it in a much shorter way. Huard, why?
Huard: Yeah, I’ll try to make this as simple as I can. First, a sense of outrage that in the 21st century, warfare, on a scale that we have not seen since World War II, could occur on the European continent. And I think that fact escapes a lot of people in the United States. Outraged that close to 14 million people were displaced by the war, either internally or have left Ukraine because of the effects of the war. And again, we haven’t seen any kind of humanitarian crisis like that in Europe since World War II.
So, the problem, being trained as a historian, is I know how these books end, unless people do the right thing. I got tired of yelling at the TV. I just had to go do something. And also, in some ways, it is an extension of my faith. I believe that my faith is lived best out in works as well as ideas, and I wanted to go make a difference. I wanted to do something that would help people and do it in the right way.
Miller: What did you do on that first trip or, if you want, ones that followed?
Huard: Sure. In the trips that I’ve taken to Poland and Ukraine – I’ve worked in both countries, essentially in the border area as well as in the interior of Ukraine – my first trip, I helped refugees. If you recall the news coverage of the initial months of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, you may recall a train station, where there’d be up to 2,000 refugees an hour coming off of trains to escape to Poland and essentially take refuge in that country, in the west of Western Europe. It’s in Przemyśl, Poland. That’s where I worked. That was in the summer of 2022. It wasn’t the same volume as the initial days and weeks of the war. But it could easily be 1,000 people per train load, or several train loads that were coming in during the course of the day.
I helped them move their luggage. I helped them find social services. I helped, in some ways, with fundraising with the organization that I worked through, which is through my denomination, the church that I attend. I just tried to help in any way I could. And it sounds corny, but it’s the truth – I really felt like I was trying to give some reason to hope that there were still humans who cared.
Miller: So that summer of 2022 and then in subsequent summers, the last two of them in 2023, and this past one, my understanding is that you went to Ukraine itself … I’m just curious after that first trip, when you came back and were in front of your history students again, AP U.S. History, did you bring anything to your students from that summer you spent helping Ukrainian refugees in Poland?
Huard: I did, and here’s the deal … Yes, I’m an American history teacher. Yes, in many ways, I’m kind of an outlier in terms of the group of people that I’m working with to develop curriculum about Ukraine. But after the AP exam is over, you’ve got about a month at the end of the school year before school is out. And I turned that into a unit on current affairs. I try to help students understand, this is something you should know about. This is something that you should care about.
I think that students and Americans need to understand these things for two reasons. One, again, this is the largest war that has taken place in Europe since World War II. We have the return of great power conflict to Central and Western Europe. You’ve got to go back to the 1930s and ‘40s, to have a reason to understand those kinds of events.
Secondly, call me old fashioned, but I think the United States has an obligation to fellow democracies, and I would like young people to understand as part of their civics education, they can choose on their own whether or not they care about Ukraine. But I tried to help them understand that Ukraine is a nation that since 1991, has been struggling mightily to be part of liberal Western democracy – and particularly since 2014. Many Ukrainians have put their lives on the line to make that shift away from the Russian sphere of influence, and more toward the EU and NATO.
Miller: I’m curious how you talk about this in your classes? When it gets closer to questions about U.S. policy, about the extent to which the U.S. should be supporting Ukraine, that the kinds of weapons, say, that we should be giving them, loaning them or training them on … the extent to which there should be military personnel who are doing that training on Ukrainian soil. There’s all kinds of policy questions that could follow from what you’re talking about. I’m wondering how you approach those in the context of a high school classroom?
Huard: Well, it’s part of the history of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th and 21st century. Again, I’m not gonna tell a kid what they should think about that issue, but I can present the facts. And I can have them examined. For example, the trends in U.S. foreign policy, particularly since the Reagan era, which was, as you know, in the 1980s and extending through the 1990s, at least in terms of foreign policy. The United States has a long history of supporting nations that stood in the way of what would have been then Soviet expansionism and then Russian expansionism. In fact, at one time, you could say that would have been one of the hallmarks of the Republican Party, at least from the 1980s onward.
Miller: Or arguably well before that, in terms of the Cold War.
Huard: Certainly during the Cold War. There’s also a strong isolationist strain within the Republican Party that goes back to people like Senator Robert Taft, but I won’t turn this into a lecture into one of my classes. What I try to do though is put those things in context. How that has been a trend, how that has been challenged, how that has changed. I think, more than anything, I see myself as somebody who can point kids in the direction of where they can get good information about what is going on internationally.
And I say that because, in my opinion, there’s not only an enormous amount of indifference now toward Ukraine, but there is – I’ll be polite – an astounding amount of misinformation among just ordinary Americans and also seems to be mouthed by the president-elect. And it’s hard to be the “good” social studies teacher who is neutral about everything. I concede with my students, I know where I am in terms of my point of view and my opinion on these things, but I try very hard not to tell them what my opinion is for 85 minutes of a classroom block. It’s like, what do you think about this? What does this evidence say? How do you approach this? What’s the right thing for the United States to do? They’re gonna be voters in a couple of years anyhow, and Ukraine is not going to go away. I consider it the most consequential foreign policy question that the United States has faced in the 21st century.
Miller: What’s the idea behind this curriculum project that you’re now a part of, run by Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and European Studies?
Huard: Yeah, the volunteer community in Ukraine … and I’m very much a very small cog in a machine, if you will, of thousands of foreign volunteers. But we network. And I had made acquaintance and friendship with an instructor in Slavic languages at University of Indiana, Bloomington, named Sofiya Asher. And we’re all on WhatsApp and we stay in contact with one another. I got a WhatsApp message from her one day about, frankly last year, saying, “Hey, Paul, have you seen this?” And it was an invitation to U.S. high school teachers to apply for this fellowship offered by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, essentially to be involved in a project that would develop curriculum in conjunction with the Lviv Center for History, using their resources, their primary documents.
And I said, “No, I haven’t seen this. It’s Harvard, and I probably have a very poor chance of getting on board.” That’s not to be self-deprecating, but that’s a pretty tall castle to storm. But I also said, “What do I have to lose?” She sent me the application, I applied, I went through the application process, and the next thing I know, I was one of six teachers that was selected for the project. So for the last year, I have been working on developing curriculum, working with people in Lviv, Ukraine, online and in person, and also working with these other teachers. We’re developing our own independent lesson plans and unit plans and things like that, but I went in the direction of developing lesson plans on Ukrainian identity. Which I think is very important, because one of the things that Vladimir Putin says about Ukraine is it has no right to exist and it has no identity. I consider that ludicrous, but that is his foreign policy point of view, and he’s willing to fight a war over it.
Miller: In the time we have left, I’m just curious, we’ve been talking about Ukraine, but I’m curious if you talk with your students about other huge international issues that the U.S. are intimately connected to, things like the war in Gaza or migration from Central America. How much do these issues come up in that month after the test?
Huard: Oh, they do, but one of the things I always do is I don’t tell kids what to think. I ask them questions. I’m very much a believer in Socratic method, and one of the things that I ask is, does the United States have the ability to deal with Gaza, to deal with the issues involving the U.S. border, to deal with Ukraine? Can we do all these things at the same time? And I’ll tell you, the majority of my students say yes. They say it’s, for them, a question of what is right and what is wrong. I mean, these are teenagers, they’re trying to navigate a world where they want to make sure that, frankly, they’re on the morally correct side of history.
And I would say that the vast number of my students begin to say we can deal with these issues simultaneously, because if nothing else, we’re the United States, and we’re supposed to be on the right side of history regarding these moral issues and foreign policy. Now, they come up with a variety of solutions in terms of how they would deal with those things, but that’s generally the trend, at least in what I see with their conclusions.
Miller: Paul Huard, thanks so much.
Huard: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to be on.
Miller: Paul Huard is an AP U.S. History teacher at Ashland High School. He has traveled to Ukraine in recent years. He’s now part of a project to develop new lesson plans about Ukrainian history, identity and current events for American high school students.
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