Teaching History in the Digital Age

Vansledright gives us qualitative research in narrative form that demonstrates the possibilities mentioned in my posting on Pace’s article. If the activity is well prepared, and the students are given enough latitude and guidance, the desired results can be obtained. Note that the experiment was conducted with a hand-picked (though all the selection criteria are not made known other than ethnic diversity, such as reading ability, behavior, gender, etc.) It is admittedly harder to reproduce such results in a class of 35 that meets a couple of times a week, but it is not impossible to expose students to such things. The idea that historical thinking is so utterly different from any other life situation is a bit far-fetched, and we cannot have it both ways: If learning history is helpful for life, then life experience must aid in learning history. For example, children get tons of practice in describing “historical” situations and reconstructing events when something goes wrong at home or on the playground among friends. They are marvelously adept at creating various narratives, defending them, and arguing the correctness of their version. Surprisingly, children often demonstrate the ability to assume positions that do not necessarily agree with their interests, and show considerable empathy for others’ positions at times.

Along these same lines, in Kornblith et al. “Beyond Best Practices,” the suite of articles describing ways of approaching the task of getting students to think historically, it is fascinating to watch how Coventry worked with students whose training is in various disciplines with a common element of training in media, and took them in multimedia projects through the process of creating historical accounts. Though Coventry doesn’t say it as O’Leary does, both are seeing what the students bring through their experience to the process of learning and constructing history, rather than seeing their non-specialization as an obstacle. O’Leary sees the “critical assets” that the students bring from their experiences as children of immigrants. She then goes on to show how she builds onto these experiences by scaffolding, and it is apparent in the selection of readings that not only is the final product of the course—digital histories—appealing and challenging to this generation, but the models are also highly relevant to these students’ experiences. The results of O’Leary’s work make worthwhile viewing at http://lumen.georgetown.edu/projects/PosterTool/index.cfm?fuseaction=poster.display&posterID=183 . It is interesting by comparison to study the National Standards for History’s K-4 activities for skill-building and creating experiences in history reading, such as the following:

http://nchs.ucla.edu/standards/standardsk-4.html

The standards continue toward developing historical capabilities by building toward notions of other times and places, relating it to what the students have learned from studying their own familiar experience using documents. It is not completely detached from the old Self-Family-School-Community-Nation concentric model, but it is oriented toward learning history rather than on incorporating various social science disciplines and normative outcomes. This approach personifies Bain’s “on-the-job-training” approach to lessons in history, in which “students do what historians do,” while going beyond what he calls the mere “trappings” or mimicking the behavior of historians. O’Leary was engaging students in thinking like historians, not just assembling documents into a collage or diorama. Of course, ideally such activities would not be a one-time thing, but a continuing practice. If the process began in gradeschool rather than in O’Leary’s freshman university classes, students might have acquired the habits of mind in the literal sense. The exercise in modeling in Bain has the students relate as history the shared event of the first school day, then by analyzing the differences among the accounts, come to an idea of what historians do, point of view, selectivity, and so on.

Bain’s article is most useful for its synthesis of the questions we have been considering about the steps historians go through in reading texts and analyzing them and other kinds of evidence. The difference is that he shows based on his own developed techniques how he assists students in developing those skills with very concrete methods. Interactive writing to develop dialogues, reading through writing, and public discussion of readings. I will certainly keep the two or three pages in which he describes strategies for activities with documents and objects, journaling, and others open this year as I design lessons and use those I have designed before. His analysis of the results is very much in line with Wineburg and others who have developed these techniques.

Another common thread is the use of images as entry points into the making of history and its telling. In our discussions of the past couple of weeks, we have more than once touched upon the usefulness of such concrete entry points to stimulate thinking historically. With these projects, another dimension of immediacy is added, because the concrete evidence is so intimate to the experience of the learner/(hi)storyteller. Reichard’s article provides a very concrete presentation of the process of turning anecdotal information about teaching activities that yielded good results, and scholarly analysis of what took place in the course of the instructional experience, citing various examples. This is what divides the “tips and quips” approach to sharing among teachers to something more systematic that allows the transfer of technique rather than method to take place. The concept of scholarship on teaching and learning history as a “borderland” is very appealing to me, beginning doctoral work from that borderland and trying to find a useful focus between studying history as an academic enterprise and studying the teaching of history, in its public and scholarly dimensions.

The Cohen article on Textbooks presented a digital resource as historical evidence, namely the Syllabus Finder, to study reliance on textbooks in undergraduate US history survey courses, and to estimate use of other resources. The data so far indicate that syllabi, and most likely actual practice, rely very heavily on textbooks for information and teaching about history, and that a relatively small selection of supplementary works assigned provide relief from textbooks, with the exception of primary source readers sold with the textbooks. This seems to indicate that the field has a long way to go indeed. I could riff on the situation I have observed in secondary world history education, and draw attention to the abysmal stasis in which the design of world history textbooks is currently mired. Fortunately, few teachers could get away with teaching only from the book, since students’ distaste for this medium would at the K-12 level mean significant discipline problems in the classroom, and low popularity for the teachers. Activities for learning history are thus quite widespread, though not only for that reason.