Textbooks and Teaching

Teaching Students to Become Producers of New Historical Knowledge on the Web

Kathryn Kish Sklar

Historians do a relatively poor job of explaining their work process to others. Perhaps this and the ahistorical bent of our culture explain why my undergraduate students—even history majors—know astonishingly little about historical methods. Too many students think the study of the past consists of reading secondary works and reporting on them. At most they might evaluate a few primary sources. Yet the exceptions to this rule—students who write honors theses—show that undergraduates are capable of more serious work. We can coax them out of the box to become producers of new historical knowledge.	1
In 1997, in an undergraduate seminar for history majors at the State University of New York, Binghamton, I began a project that rewarded students' efforts with publication of their term projects on the course Web site. Binghamton, one of four university centers in the SUNY (State University of New York) system, attracts a very diverse and highly motivated population of students, primarily from New York City. Partly because we have a strong graduate program in U.S. women's history, we also offer an array of undergraduate courses in U.S. women's history. Focusing on "women and social movements in the U.S.," this seminar had no prerequisites and included nonmajors as well as majors. Students in this and subsequent seminars came to see how their course projects could open exciting new windows onto American history for high school and college students. It is a lot of work—for them and for me—but by becoming historical practitioners themselves my seminar students have gained a much more complete understanding of how historians work. In the process they have also acquired useful skills that help them evaluate information, interpret evidence, and construct arguments.	2
Do not let the technology scare you; college teachers do not need to be Web wonks to do this. I was not yet on e-mail when I began using Web-based technology in that seminar in January 1997. My conversion to the new order occurred during the first week of class, when I attended a funding panel at the Library of Congress. Meeting with librarians, professors, and teachers of kindergarten through twelfth grade classes, I found myself in the company of colleagues who were creating the vanguard of history Web technology—Ed Ayers of the University of Virginia, Roy Rosenzweig of George Mason University, and John McClymer of Assumption College. I noticed that U.S. women's history was dramatically underrepresented among the submitted proposals and realized that this absence symbolized a growing gender digital divide in U.S. history on the Web. There I also learned from high school teachers that what they needed most from the Web were sites where information was focused in such a way as to permit students to learn something significant in an hour. Browsing the Web might be a way of life for many students, but learning meaningful history is rarely achieved by simple and undirected Web browsing. This made me wonder how the need for pedagogically effective resources in U.S. history could be met by women's history materials, a strategy that would simultaneously address the needs of U.S. history teachers and the gender digital divide.	. . .