Wineburg, Historical Thinking: It is a pleasure to finally read a book I have heard so much about and read excerpts from. The historical overview of the research is itself a lesson in reading the past. Like the historical overview of the Western Civ course and other aspects of history in the US education system, his survey reveals the odd collection of ideas on which the dogmas about teaching are built. Most striking is the persistent theme of asking the wrong questions, and not being able to dig deep enough to formulate ideas about how to improve classroom practice, or even to prepare practitioners. Calder is an example of a gifted teacher whose work is worthy of study in Wineburg’s scheme.
Among the important aspects of Wineburg’s study, which has not entered the public debate at all, is the critique of standards-setting as an exercise. He mentions the Bradley Report of 1989 that set history standards on what seemed to be a good course—in the direction of bringing historical scholarship back in. Bradley looked at not merely what is taught, but the framework in which it is taught from K-12. Unfortunately, a fork in the road happened with the controversy surrounding the Natl History Standards, which did attempt to set parameters for study, and was taken to task precisely because it tried to draw teachers’ attention to historical research. It was the exemplars, not the standards that were denigrated, and with it the whole document. The organization that continued to carry the Bradley Report model, in contrast, produced a laundry list of history topics to be “covered,” along with a set of questions that were quite biased, at least in world history. The central virtue—at least potentially–of the standards movement, is not addressed by Wineburg. Instead of doing what state curricula have done for decades — tell what classroom teachers TEACH–the writing of good standards can turn that equation on its head, laying out instead what STUDENTS are supposed to be able to DO. Curriculum can be taught to an empty room and still be curriculum. Standards involve backward design—starting with the end point, the skill or objective to be achieved. The other aspect of standards that Wineburg—and most everybody discussing them in the press—is the restructuring of teaching for greater meaning, while incorporating the wealth of knowledge gained in the past 50 years or so. On the way to state standards in the various disciplines, however, much of this has been lost. History standards have fallen prey to the politics of the “Johnny doesn’t know who the President is” folks whose efforts to test students into the Stone Age Wineburg chronicles during the 20th century. It is very thought-provoking how he peels back every effort to analyze history teaching, including his own, to determine that we still don’t know what we are looking for in terms of shaping excellent teaching. Fortunately, not a few students who have come to love history as a study did so because of a teacher.
Reading the whole book almost at one sitting, the way in which it comes full circle struck me; he begins with the politicized efforts of our self-appointed cultural nannies to wag their fingers at the schools who are supposedly teaching the students nothing, leaving each successive generation less aware of the national past (most don’t care a fig for world history knowledge and never test it in their surveys). Wineburg began by questioning the truth of these assessments as indicators of historical un-consciousness, and ends by showing how history in fact figures into the national life in the last chapters. In the intervening chapters, a lot is said about the techniques and possibilities for teaching history. Some very specific techniques are laid out on the example of gifted teachers, but little analysis of how those techniques can be replicated is given. This is freely admitted. To me, an aspect that is very dear to my own efforts at creating and fostering integrated curriculum through my work with teachers is mentioned near the end of the book, namely how the educational experience as a whole can be shaped for maximum effect. The standards movement—if its broadest impulses and serious work are heeded—has the potential to achieve this integration across the curriculum. Not only do we now have a finely graduated picture of what might be taught in each discipline from K-12, but we also have a near-perfect congruence of skills development across the disciplines. That ought to send the message that integrated curriculum is probably the only way to achieve that mass of expectations. The content standards as a group present a veritable buffet of knowledge integration potential that was not accessible to curriculum planning teams before, because each discipline worked in isolation.