Teaching History in the Digital Age

This week’s readings on historians and the scholarship of teaching and learning must be taken as a collection of documents on the pedagogy of developing the skills required of the history professional.  The skills that these articles cite as important to develop are quite different than what fledgling historians learn in graduate school.  David Pace places an entirely new burden on his fellow historians.  He challenges his peers and the profession to not give up on teaching and consider it to be a collateral duty that allows for scholarship.  Historians must view teaching as a new form of scholarship, one that is both personal and collective.  Just as they keep current on the crucial arguments in their field, they must also work to keep up with “the creation and dissemination of better tools for responding to the challenges of teaching history today could allow us to apply the intellectual skills that we have honed so carefully to the solution of the very real problems that we face in the classroom and that the nation as a whole faces on a larger scale.”  Pace is correct that historian/educators are fighting against societal pressures that reduce student’s abilities to consider historical questions.  Rather than succumb to such pressures and assume a defeatist, cynical attitude historians must redouble their efforts or else see the field become “impotent and irrelevant.”

As I continue to read these articles, one claim becomes very familiar and links them all together.  Each author seems believe that students today are far less historically minded than previous generations.  Kornblith and Lasser for instance write that there exists a “familiar concern with the lack of historical knowledge today’s students manifest.”  While they and other authors continually make this claim, I have not yet seen concrete evidence to support this line of thinking.  In fact what I have seen makes me believe that there is little difference between past and current students.  Max Ferrand’s 1908 “Report of the Conference on History in the College Curriculum” shows that concerns over how best to teach history are by no means a recent development.  Frankly, I believe the problem lies in the inability of some historians to take ownership of their own shortcomings.  It is easy to claim that students are less historically minded than in the past.  Placing blame on others is far less painful than it is to admit that one’s own teaching methods are simply failing to impart the desired skills and knowledge.  Historians must take ownership of their faults, begin to study the scholarship of history teaching, and familiarize themselves with the educational tools and technological advancements of the modern classroom.