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"Because It Is My Culture": Technology and Agency in the Overseas U.S. Cultural History Classroom
JoAnne Marie Mancini
| In a 2002 essay in the Journal of American History, Kathryn Kish Sklar made a powerful case, based upon the experience of her own undergraduate seminar in U.S. women's history, for the capacity of the Internet to help address a particular pedagogical concern. Accusing historians of doing "a relatively poor job of explaining their work process to others" and lamenting the fact that most students had little occasion to do more than passively consume secondary literature, Sklar proposed that the Internet—with its capacity to "democratize the availability and analysis of documents"—could lay bare the normally opaque process that historians use to analyze and interpret their sources and thereby assist teachers of history in transforming students into "producers of new historical knowledge."1 In her own case, Sklar turned her seminar into a laboratory for creating and posting to the Internet "pedagogic units that pose central interpretive questions and provide about twenty primary documents ... annotations of the primary documents, a bibliography, and a list of related Web links." In this way, her students gained a firsthand understanding of historical methods, produced new historical knowledge that other students could use, and disseminated primary sources that were previously available on microfilm in a new and more accessible format.2 |
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Like Sklar and many other historians of the United States, I am preoccupied with agency and see it as important to both the writing and the teaching of history. As a cultural historian, my expression of this preoccupation has taken a particular form: the imperative to understand not only works of culture (be they "high" or "low," mass-produced or unique, ephemeral or canonical, or produced by women or men) but also the processes by which people engage and become engaged in the making of such works and the worlds in which those works are made. I wish to understand, in other words, how the particular institutional arrangements within those worlds have facilitated—or discouraged—people's participation in the creation of images and objects. This imperative has also caused me to reconsider the limits of my responsibilities as a researcher. While I began with the assumption that the job of the historian was only to foster historical understanding, my belief that a "good art world is one that foregrounds human capabilities"—a belief developed in response to my historical research—has also led me to make normative claims about the "worlds" I study and even to adopt a position of advocacy on behalf of programs that foster artistic creation by nonprofessionals.3 |
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This emphasis on agency and process in cultural history is pursued relatively straightforwardly in the context of research and writing. In the cultural history classroom, however, the pursuit presents immediate and difficult challenges. There, students are frequently cast as the inert recipients of secondary literature or as the more or less submissive consumers of cultural works from the American past. This is the case even as many of us have emphasized the analysis of the institutions and processes that underpin cultural production, and even as we have defined the works and the pasts that belong to "American cultural history" in ever-broadening terms (in my case, to include sources on precontact Cahokia, Chaco Canyon, and Hawaii; colonial New Spain, "the middle ground," and the African Atlantic; and material culture, popular music, and digital media). |
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