Review

General Books

From the cognitive revolution comes a book by Sam Wineburg, educational psychologist, who asks some provocative questions regarding the discipline of history: What is unique about historical cognition? How does one teach this disciplinary content? How does one learn this disciplinary content? If you are a good teacher, you have wrestled with these questions. Mr. Wineburg approaches these gritty matters by inventing some interesting, sometimes unusual, quantitative and qualitative research activities. He has also spent hours in classrooms observing and interviewing teachers, students, and professional historians. The book is a disjointed collection of articles written over a thirteen year period beginning in 1988, though thematic packaging helps. Part I entitled "Why Study History?" invites us to examine what's valuable and unique about the discipline called history. Though in the current politicized world, there is little agreement on what history is, where it belongs in the canon, and just whose version of history we should teach, Professor Wineburg views history as a unique cognitive discipline, with areas worth cultivating. History ideally teaches us to make choices, examine opinions, tell stories, and make sense of our own lives. Many of these cognitive functions are the training ground of civic behavior in a democratic society, no small matter considering the challenges facing Americans now.	1
Part II, "Challenges for the Student," discusses problems of learning history. For starters, Professor Wineburg takes on the textbook industry in a discussion of textbook bias. Though texts are often presented--and accepted by both teachers and students--as a fixed story of objective truth, they are in reality social instruments. Because the collective authors' voices are never made clear, seem to take no point of view, and present information that is primarily economic and political, he suggests readers examine biases created by omission and commission. An exercise on Abraham Lincoln called "Reading Abraham Lincoln" demonstrates how the author thinks a student could learn history. The exercise asks research subjects to study speeches that Lincoln gave which have seemingly anti-equality racial comments and square these up with his image as "The Great Emancipator." Professor Wineburg suggests that grappling with contradiction, discontinuity, and the "foreignness" of historical subjects leads to meaningful questions about the context of other people's lives and motives. He calls this practice contextualized thinking. The author also questions the "supporting cast" view of women presented in most historical texts: women are typically "contributors" to or minor characters in history. Thirty years of social history have done little to alter these perspectives or to influence historical textbooks. In the section called "Picturing the Past," for example, student subjects were asked to draw pictures of pilgrims. Unsurprisingly, boys drew only male figures while girls drew male, female, and family figures, bearing out a sexist interpretation of history about events as early as the very first Thanksgiving.	2
Part III, "Challenges for the Teacher," is a messy section and most challenging for the reader. In an effort to dissect good teaching practices, the author conducts interviews, makes observations, runs experiments, and studies teacher assessment programs that presumably offer a more wholistic approach to teacher assessment. Though teaching and teacher training have changed, his studies suggest that the ability to translate (transform) knowledge to the learner is a major part of good practice. While a range of approaches works with adolescents and children, good teaching must involve these three things: know the content, know pedagogy, know the learner. Good teachers in all disciplines know this. Using his own criteria, however, Mr. Wineburg fails to roundly criticize teachers who do not link subject to student, and teaching theory to learning theory. The teacher who is not up to date on revisionist history, who ignores social history, and whose lectures are content driven may pass a teacher certification test, but he/she is still not a good teacher. Of course one will find little agreement among history teachers themselves about what history is: is it a factual narrative, is it thematic, is it reading and interpreting, is it all of these? Social studies teachers come from a wide range of disciplines, not often history itself. Teachers have been trained in different eras with varying philosophies. Right now we can watch Max Bickford on Sunday night, where many of these teaching dilemmas are being skillfully played out.	3
TV leads neatly into Section IV: "History as National Memory," which asks us to examine popular culture as a filter for historical perception. Loathed as people are to accept this, Blockbuster Video is as likely a place to get information on the Vietnam War as is the library, the internet, or a conversation with a Vietnam veteran. Family vacations to historical places, and war stories shared around the family table have been replaced by culturally produced images. Popular culture shapes our experiences, influences our reception of history, and colors our reading of historical documents.	4
The collections of thorough citations at the end of each article, taken together, present the full range of the "thirty years war" that has engulfed the history discipline. Using cognition as an organizing approach, the author has asked good questions and made some thoughtful forays into helping us understand why history is so important. Since the history curriculum is still a hot topic, perhaps the cognitive psychologists like Wineburg will make more headway than the historians have. If you review and support the National Standards for History, you will find that Mr. Wineburg has asked the right questions about teaching and learning theory, and treats them as though they were connected.	5
SUNY Empire State College Barbara Kantz

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