Posts Tagged ‘History of History Teaching’

The Future of History

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

I’ve been spending a lot of time of late clearing out the house my parents lived in from 1965-2009 and among the many, many boxes of junk in the attic I found some old folders of mine from (shudder) high school. Among the many things I found was an editorial I had clipped from the Washington Post dated December 31, 1976, titled “The Future of History.” I just re-read it last night and was struck by how much it sounds like today. Among the many present-sounding bits are the following:

The job crisis in academia has shattered many historians’ faith in the tangible rewards of scholarship. As if it were not traumatic enough, there is also great controversy about the content of history courses and the very nature of the historians’ craft. Such problems affect most humanistic fields these days, but it especially ironic that in the bicentennial year, the professional analysts of the past should be so troubled by unemployment and insecurities.

Anyone recently exposed to historical studies is award of hte swift changes in the field–the uneasy alliances with sociology, psychology, geography and other disciplines; the growing use of computers and quantitative analysis, and the fascination with ethnicity, sexism, popular culture and other fashionable themes…

There is a real danger that history could become a discipline adrift, thus losing both its audience and its identity as an exacting humanistic art.

The dilemma has emerged most clearly in the debates over history-teaching in elementary and secondary schools and community colleges. The emphasis on new themes and techniques has made many history courses more appealing and provocative–but at considerable cost in terms of students’ understanding of historical context and basic facts and dates. This experience has also shown that historical study cannot be “modernized” too much without losing its integrity and its value for non-specialists.

What makes these arguments so painful is the generall depression inteh liberal arts. Historians, like professors of literature and social scientists, are getting a belated education in the hard facts of academic economics and demography. The students who flooded the history departments a decade agao are now a crowd of hunger Ph.Ds who scramble after every temporary post and have little chance of securing tenured professorships at all. These days, not even the best proteges of the finest professors can count on finding academic work–and the situation is not likely to improve for a decade or more…

Sound familiar?

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Irony of Ironies

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

This semester I am teaching my graduate course — Teaching and Learning History in the Digital Age — and on our first night of the semester we had what my older son would call “a fail.” In this case, it was a “classroom fail.” Why? Because the room to which we were assigned was not only almost too small to fit the 16 of us, but because the technological capability of the room was decidedly old school.

We had an overhead projector and a television set with DVD/VHS player.

Somehow, it seemed to me (and to the students), it was going to be a little difficult to teach and learn about teaching and learning in the digital age in a decidedly undigital room. Fortunately, I was able to locate a conference room (with a laptop and a projector) that we could use. Otherwise it would have been a very challenging semester, to say the least. It was, however, a good lesson for the students, many of whom are already or plan to be history teachers. You never know what kind of classroom you are going to get until you get there, so be prepared just in case.

And, of course, the power might go off, or the servers might crash, or your laptop my start smoking. So always be ready.

I would share my syllabus and/or class blog for this course, but this semester the whole thing has gone into a closed Zotero group. Like my colleague Sean Takats, I am teaching through a Zotero group (using the 2.0 Beta version) of the software instead of the blog I’ve used with such good results over the past six years.

Why would I forsake the blog platform when it has worked reasonably well? I am hoping that by having my students create a Zotero library for the course, complete with notes, tags, annotations, related resources, etc., something new and different will happen. In prior years, my graduate students used the class blog quite well, posting reflections on readings and talking to one another. But once the semester was over, pffttt, the blog was over. In six or seven years of class blogging with students, only once or twice did anyone ever go back to the blog and add something. And even then it was an isolated post that didn’t generate any response.

But, a Zotero library that will become an annotated bibliography on teaching and learning history is a resource that not only my students, but history teachers all over the world can use now and in the future. My hope is that not only my students, but also others (once we open it up to the public) will use and add to the library we are creating.

Why keep it closed to the public during the semester? Despite my devotion to opening our teaching to public inspection, at least for now, I want the students to have some privacy as they learn the ins and outs of Zotero. Also, because we are creating a public resource that will eventually become open to others who might want to edit or add to what we’ve created, I need to be able to assess the work my students have done for the purpose of grading them. If anyone wandering by can change their work, it will be quite difficult for me to give my students a clear and valid assessment.

Stay tuned for more updates on this project.

For those who have been regular readers of this blog, I apologize for going silent throughout the summer. Personal matters dictated that I push aside all but the most essential things and I have to admit that, as much as I am devoted to it, this blog fell into the category of an optional activity. I’m back now.

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A Crisis Diminishing Expectations?

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

“You made history enjoyable, which let me tell you is no easy task!”

This particular quotation came from one of my undergraduate students last semester who wrote this in the comment field of our end-of-semester course evaluation form. I’ve been reflecting on it for a couple of weeks now, because over the past few years I’ve had dozens of similar comments from students and they bother me a lot.

Why? Because they speak to what I think is a fundamental problem in the teaching and learning of history. For too long now, those teaching history have managed to drain the fun out of a discipline we love. And it’s not just us who loves history. Just go to any mass market book store and see how much shelf space is devoted to books about the past. A few other sections of the store are larger, but only a few.

So why is it that undergraduates show up in my classes with such low expectations of history courses?

It would be easy to haul out the old canards complaining about high school teachers who do little more than require their students to memorize one fact after another. But my experiences with high school teachers over the past five or six years has convinced me that this is more of an urban legend than an accurate picture of how history is taught in high school.

So if we can’t blame high school teachers, who can we blame. As Pogo used to say, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The past twenty years or so of reform in the teaching and learning of history at the college level–the place where today’s high school teachers learn how to teach by example–has focused on the close reading of primary sources. I’ve taught in five different colleges and universities and visited countless history departments over the past ten years and everywhere the professors I met or worked with proudly told me about the various exercises they had created to help students become better, closer, more critical readers of primary sources.

Yawn.

Or, at least, that is what far too many of our students think.

Don’t believe me? Just ask them. Ask them questions like “What is it about history that you like?” or “When you think about a history class, what do you think you ought to get out of that class?” Ask them at the beginning of the semester–now for instance–rather than waiting until you’ve taught them for 14 weeks and they have a sense for the answer you’re looking for.

The answers you get will, almost certainly never be a version of “I really like learning how to read primary sources carefully” or “I think it’s really important to be able to analyze primary sources.” Sure, sure, a few bright and devoted history majors will say back what we’d love to hear, but most won’t.

Now think about the moments in one of your classes where the students really caught fire, where they went way beyond your expectations, where you could see real learning happening. Write those moments down. Then make a list of the characteristics of the assignment that sparked the learning, that set off that discussion where all you had to do was sit back and watch, that resulted in papers you were excited to grade.

In tomorrow’s post I’ll share my list and we can compare notes.

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