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Images and the History Lecture: Teaching the History Channel Generation
Joseph Coohill1
Pennsylvania State University, New Kensington
| NO SENSIBLE HISTORIAN would argue that using images in history lectures is a pedagogical waste of time. We all seem to accept the idea that visual elements (paintings, photographs, films, maps, charts, etc.) enhance the retention of historical information and add greatly to student enjoyment of the subject. Further, many of us remember fondly those professors who enlivened their lectures with well-chosen and well-presented images (usually from slides). Equally, of course, we have all sat through tedious and clumsy attempts to use images, usually accompanied by inexpert use of visual technology and unimaginative balancing of images and lecture notes. But there seems to be very little discussion among historians about how and why images seem to help students understand history, and perhaps most urgently, how to succeed in seamlessly weaving images into lectures without hiring Ken Burns as an technical assistant.2 Based on a two-year study of my own use of images in the classroom, along with other material, this article attempts to address these issues. It provides a brief discussion of the value of images in teaching history and of the recent trends in technology available to aid the history lecturer. It then provides a detailed analysis of how images have been received by my students and offers "pedagogical techniques for success" for any historian who wishes to integrate images more fully into lectures. |
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Any discussion of the value of using images to enhance history teaching should begin by reflecting on some of the more recent interpretations of how images are a part of history and how this new thinking can improve our use of images in presenting history to undergraduates. The evidential validity of most historical images is no longer in dispute, and few serious historians would argue that evidence gleaned from visual sources is less important for historical analysis and understanding than evidence from written sources. Also, there are many instances when images must be used as evidence in lectures. For example, maps and diagrams are often needed to show what happened and why. The eminent art historian, Francis Haskell, argues, however, that historians should also pay attention to "the impact of the image on the historical imagination."3 The noted cultural historian, Peter Burke, agrees. Images, he says, "allow us...to share the non-verbal experiences or knowledge of past cultures.... In short, images allow us to 'imagine' the past more vividly'."4 Finally, art historian Stephen Bann argues that the direct viewing of images ("our position face-to-face with an image") brings us "face-to-face with history."5 These newer appeals for the strength of visual representations in history teaching are not meant in an antiquarian (or time-traveling) sense. The idea is not to urge students to imagine themselves in the past, but to convince them to imagine themselves with the past. That is, only by presenting them with as full a range of sources as possible will students begin to comprehend the atmospheres and mentalities of past cultures. |
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More importantly, however, the use of images can further what Greg Dening often refers to as our "double helix" relationship with the past, a relationship consisting of parallel strands of discourse and meaning, connected by attempts to understand each other.6 As historians and history students, we cross over and examine the strand of the past, and then cross back to the strand of the present. But the experience of that journey alters our consciousness about both the past and the present. When we return from the past, if you will, we have changed and therefore have come back to a different present. This relates to the purpose of this article in the following way. Students will understand the nature of history in a fuller way if they are presented with the fact that images from the past are also artifacts of the present. For example, David's famous painting of Napoleon on horseback is obviously an artifact from 1800 when it was painted; but it also exists in the contemporary world, hanging in the Musee du Louvre. Presenting it in a classroom also brings it into the present, and using it in ways similar to an exercise with a written primary source shows students that history is a dialogue with the past in which they are an important conversant. Their ideas about the nature of history will change. They come to our courses expecting to be told an immutable story of past events and peoples. If we use images well they will leave our classes much less sure of a fixed history and have greater confidence in their abilities to engage with its complexity. |
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The Trajectory of Visual Technology in the History Classroom | |
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The slide projector is dead. Even the most expert use of trays of slides required the history lecturer to work long, hard hours to collect slides, to choose them and put them in order, and then to haul them from office to classroom. Similarly the overhead projector was primitive and difficult to manipulate. However, over the past decade or so, instructors have found that computer "presentation" software such as PowerPoint and Keynote is much easier to use and that it takes far less time to prepare excellent visuals for classroom use. Further, as Michelle DenBeste argued in an earlier volume of this journal, and as many of us have experienced first hand, "professors are increasingly under pressure to integrate [new] technology into their courses."7 Many classrooms are now "wired," providing built-in projectors, easy connections for portable computers, and excellent sound systems. But DenBeste rightly asks whether all this is necessarily a good thing. Where does presenting serious and sophisticated history end and infotainment begin? Should we succumb to the pressure to use "multimedia" to a greater extent in our lectures and classes? As an explanation of my Penn State case study will show, there are no clear-cut and definitive answers to these questions, just like history itself is not clear cut. Some of the ways in which this new technology has been put to use in the classroom are, frankly, worthless and childish. As historians, who think of themselves as being among the most demanding of scholars, we must use this technology to enhance the quality of teaching, not dumb it down. |
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My Penn State Case Study | |
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Right at the beginning of my teaching career, I was struck by how many students would describe to me documentaries they had seen on the History Channel, PBS, or on other stations, in tremendous detail, not only relating the "facts" they learned, but often discussing some of the nuances and shades of interpretation presented in those programs. (History Channel productions usually lack any reasonable degree of historical sophistication when it comes to the complexities of interpretation, but PBS programs sometimes do.)8 While I was generally pleased to see that students were at least engaged with a certain type of history media, I was also disturbed to compare their level of comprehension and retention of material from documentaries with that from their assigned course readings. Students seemed to absorb History Channel information almost instantly, but had to be taken through written material at a much slower pace with a greater degree of intervention and assistance from me. This troubled me, naturally, because television history is usually over-simplified and ignores the most attractive aspects of history, its complexity and its contentious nature. I had to accept, though, that however much I might dislike the History Channel's Hitler-soaked programming, television history is a major component of this generation's historical consciousness, and students are very used to learning things visually. Rather than rail against this trend, I decided to try to use some of the basic elements of visual learning to improve students' reception of quality history education. |
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Increasingly, I had wanted to use more images in my lectures. I was also determined to test the effect of an extensive use of images in my lectures. Beginning in the fall semester of 2002 and continuing into the spring semester of 2004, I employed images very extensively in my survey course lectures and took anonymous surveys of student opinion of their effectiveness.9 After considering several methods of improving my use of images, I settled upon showing a moving succession of images on a screen behind me as I lectured. Perhaps the best way to describe this process is to liken what I would be doing to a "live" Ken Burns or History Channel documentary. The images were projected on a large screen, with my lecture providing the narrative. For each lecture, I chose between twenty and one hundred images and put them in a PowerPoint presentation. These included portraits of individuals, photographs, maps, diagrams, film clips, depictions of battles, and any other type of image that fit the lecture material. I wish to stress that these visual elements were purely visual. I did not use any text in the PowerPoint presentation, nor did I provide any text outlines of what I was going to say. Having sat through many tedious presentations where information was simply read off the screen, I thought a purely image approach would be best. Although I realized there might be problelms, I hoped this method would result in students listening more carefully to what I said while they let the images wash over them the way they do in a television documentary. The idea was that the textual information of my spoken lecture would mesh so well with the images flowing behind me that the visual learning process would be fully engaged, and that students would retain much more than from traditional lectures. |
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Overall, the student response to this approach was very encouraging. Averaging the two years of my survey, eighty-seven percent of my students said that my use of images helped them with the material and made my lectures more effective. Not surprisingly, as I became more comfortable performing this new style of lecturing, positive student reaction increased. During the 2002 fall semester only seventy-four percent of the students had said the images were helpful. By the spring semester of 2004, however, that had risen to ninety-eight percent. Some other trends became visible as well. Students in larger classes responded more favorably to the images than those in smaller classes. This perhaps indicates that the type of lecturing I used was not quite as well suited to a smaller group where a more conversational approach might have been better. On the other hand, the difference in responses between large and small classes was very small, between two and five percent depending on the sizes compared. |
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My use of images was obviously popular. What was less obvious was how well they helped students retain the material. As will be seen below, when discussing why this use of images in history lectures helped them, the why was less clear than the fact that the students clearly said and believed that they did help them. But that is not the same as measuring the retention of material presented in my new style of lecturing. I had no previous basis upon which to compare student performance on tests. I had only started my Penn State job at the same time I began using images in the way described here. There was no previous group of students who had taken my tests without seeing and hearing my lectures with images to use as a comparative (or "control") group. I had, therefore, to contrive an experiment to test retention. One day I gave the same lecture to each of my two sections of the U.S. history survey course, but used images only in one of the classes. I then gave both classes the same quiz on the basic material. Each group contained twenty-five students exactly. The group that was given a traditional lecture without images averaged seventy-six percent retention. The second group that heard the lecture with images averaged ninety-two percent retention, a sixteen percent improvement. |
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Obviously, the conclusions that can be drawn from this must be handled with caution. The image lecture seemed to provide greater retention of material, at least immediately after it was over. There were further experiments I could have run to test retention over time. I could have switched the groups that received and did not receive the image lecture and tested both again, I could have tested history majors and non-history majors separately, and on and on in order to make it more scientific. But that would have meant experimenting almost indefinitely and my job in this course was to teach, not to use my students as lab rats. As long as the results I did measure are taken informally as representing the likelihood of greater retention when using images extensively, I think they are meaningful. |
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Another question I asked was whether my use of images changed the type of classroom presentation that students desired from me. A usual week in one of my courses consists of a mixture of lecture days and discussion days. I was intrigued to see if, after experiencing my new style of lecturing, my students would want more lectures and fewer discussion days. I wondered both whether this new approach was proving so effective that students wanted more, or whether they simply liked this approach better because it was more entertaining. It turned out that the students, by and large, did not want more lectures. A plurality of students, forty-eight percent responded that they wished the number of lecture days and discussion days per week (roughly a fifty-fifty balance) to remain the same. Thirty-two percent, however, said that they wanted more lecture days, which seemed to indicate that the new approach had a good degree of popularity. The remaining twenty percent wanted more discussion days. I considered the responses to this question to indicate that I had struck a reasonable balance. I was actually pleased to see that students did not simply wish to be entertained by my new-fangled lectures, but wanted to take part in discussions in roughly equal measure. |
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The effectiveness of the use of images in terms of retention of class material, and students' attitudes toward the balance of lectures and discussion days were quantitatively measurable to a reasonable degree. But what is more difficult to assess is why the use of images seems to help students in retaining and understanding historical material. Here it was necessary to rely on students' responses to a question on this issue. Generally speaking, students felt that they (and their generation) were "visual learners," and that they needed images to help them follow the lectures. In addition, they said the images kept their interest. A few representative examples show these points. Students answered:
It helps me understand better if I have a visual of what is going on.
The images, particularly the maps of Europe, helped in understanding the development as well as the imbalance of change throughout Europe. The images of various rulers gave a face to the people that we were learning about, and that helped in remembering them.
I am a visual learner and when I have a face to go along with the topic it makes it a lot easier to help me remember. I do enjoy the images.
I liked the images. People are very visual and eyesight is most used sense we have. It drew attention to the subject matter and helped us to "be there." It also gave us a clue as to what it was like during that time frame.
The students also had good suggestions for improvement, implying that an even better use of images would have increase their understanding. They suggested:
Perhaps more video [should be used] as well.
They [the images] could have been a little more incorporated in the discussion.
More time could be spent explaining them; sometimes they were just glanced over.
The only thing I would change is having more of a variety of images or maps for each individual subject you discuss with [the] class. Staring at the same picture of Kissinger for ten minutes while we discussed what he did was a bit much.
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Both types of responses show, of course, that it is impossible to please every student, and that students perceive instruction very differently (which is not only to be expected, but should be considered a good thing). Many of the suggestions for improvement have already been incorporated, where relevant. In addition to providing advice about how to construct such image presentations, the following section expands on these student comments and what they mean for success in the classroom. |
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Finding and Using the Best Images | |
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By far the most challenging aspect of incorporating images into lectures is choosing good images, acquiring them, and using them well in the presentation. The best concise advice I can offer is to "think Ken Burns." View one of the episodes from his Civil War series and analyze carefully how he used images. In short, you will see the following. Big and simple images are the best (unless there are very good reasons to choose a specific complex image). Portraits should show mostly the face and head. Maps should be very simple, unless you plan to explain them in detail. Images with lots of small elements do not work well. Students lose their concentration on the overall flow of the lecture when they are faced with a complicated image. Finally, use as many "primary" images as possible. For example, when discussing the United States Civil War, it is generally more effective to use an 1860s photograph of Lincoln than a 1920s portrait (unless, of course, you are discussing subsequent imagery of Lincoln). |
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It is vital not to suspend your trained critical faculties when choosing images. They are historical sources with all the strengths and weaknesses of other types of sources. Accuracy is very important, and a little time invested checking to be sure that an image or film clip is not doctored is time well spent. Perhaps the best example of a doctored historical film clip is the famous "Hitler jig." Generations of people have seen the brief clip of a grinning Hitler dancing a little jig of celebration after the French surrender in 1940. The obvious message of this sequence is to show a maniacal dictator in a childish moment, thus puncturing his carefully crafted image as a world leader. The problem is that Hitler never danced that jig. The newsreel of the French surrender in June 1940 was doctored to make it look like he did, and it became a very effective piece of anti- Nazi propaganda.10 Admittedly, many of us teach survey courses that cover vast periods of time, most of which do not within our individual research period. We cannot be experts in everything historical. It is vital, however, that we do not perpetuate myths and misunderstandings in our survey courses, which very well may be the only history course many of our students will take in college. Be vigilant, therefore, in terms of image accuracy. |
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Avoid the temptation of showing an image of every person mentioned in your lecture. Choose a handful of images of central figures. At least one of my students complained that I tried to cram too many portraits into each lecture. If showing anonymous people, either in a group or as an historical type (such as a Depression era farmer), make sure to point this out in your lecture. Students will sometimes attach names to these people incorrectly. A photograph of a working class man, for instance, may be confused with the name of a social reformer mentioned in the same lecture. Again, take care to clarify these things to your students. |
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Maps should be very simple and should convey only one point. This may require you using more than one map to present a certain subject, or to use multiple maps to show the development of some aspect of history. Maps are also very good to have up on the screen when you are talking about general things. In a way, they can serve as "spacers" or "filler" between more specific images. Film clips should be short, unless there is a very good reason to show a long sequence. Video or film with audio can work well, but it means an interruption to the lecture. |
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Acquiring images used to be very difficult, but the internet has made it much easier. A simple Google Image search (go to www.google.com, click on Images, and type in a search term) usually results in many image choices from a variety of websites. As long as they are used for purely educational purposes, there are usually no copyright problems with downloading these images and putting them into your presentation software. Caution should be used, however, when downloading these images. A Google Image search presents images out of the context of their web pages. Look extra carefully for any potential inaccuracies or doctoring. Once, while rushing to put together a presentation on the 1960s, I downloaded a photograph of an early stage of the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas on 22 November 1963. I put this into my PowerPoint presentation and hurried to class. As I was describing the events of that November day, with this photograph looming large behind me, a student shouted out, "Hey, Bert is in the crowd," pointing out that a picture of the Sesame Street character had been inserted into the crowd behind the President's limousine. In my hurry to put my presentation together, I failed to notice that the Kennedy image I had downloaded came from a comedy website called www.bertisevil.tv. This proved very embarrassing (particularly since I had hectored the students only the day before on the importance of being wary of internet information), but it also became a good running joke in the class. In one of the end of semester comments, a student with a sense of humor wrote that she liked the use of images because "they made me realize that Bert killed JFK." |
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The Library of Congress' website (www.loc.gov) has links to many wonderful collections of images held there. Commercial websites and electronic resources for libraries are excellent sources for images. ARTstor, which does for images what JSTOR does for journal articles, is a massive new effort to provide online images to colleges and universities, and many institutions subscribe to it. The Mary Evans Picture Library (www.maryevans.com) is also excellent, particularly for British and other European content. Textbook publishers usually provide instructors with a CD-ROM that includes electronic versions of the images printed in the text. These are generally very handy, particularly for maps that are specifically related to the subject matter you are discussing. Publishers' images, however, should be used sparingly. Students complain when too many images obviously come from the text. It makes you look lazy, even if you have toiled to find images elsewhere and had to fall back on the textbook. Several of my students said that I relied too heavily on publisher-supplied images, when in reality I used them about ten percent of the time. |
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| Finally, the technical aspects of presentations require attention. Use a wireless mouse. When attached to your portable computer, it allows you to move through images easily, backward and forward, while walking around the classroom and without having to return to your computer to change images. Use your presentation software's ability to fade between images, but do not try to get fancy. Simple cross-fades or fade in/fade out functions look best in academic presentations. Use as little text as possible. Students (and everyone else) are bored to death with outline-based PowerPoint presentations. They are greatly over-used and have little intellectual legitimacy. Talking off the screen also looks very amateurish. In fact, my most successful lectures have been when I have spoken directly to the students and have had the images appear behind me. I try never to turn around and face the screen. Accomplishing this is a relatively simple process of having your computer's screen facing you while you face the students. You can glance down to make sure you are using the correct image at the right time, and not really break eye-contact with your audience. A little practice will make you quite expert at this, and it impresses students a great deal. |
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Conclusion | |
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During my study, I expected that my enhanced use of images in lectures would be popular with students and that they would say it helped them learn history. I did not, however, expect such an overwhelmingly positive response. Even with my modest technical abilities and in my relatively young career, I was able to present professional and persuasive lectures to media-savvy students. In addition to students' positive responses about the images and their learning, it certainly seemed to me that students' understanding of the course material (as reflected in essays and tests) improved dramatically compared with the semesters before 2002 when I would only show images sporadically. Perhaps this leads to a conclusion that history lecturers should not think of images solely as illustrative add-ons, but should think of images from the very beginning when conceiving a lecture. The overall experience has convinced me that history lectures can no longer be devoid of this essential element. If we really want students to have a dialog with the past, perhaps the History Channel can indeed teach us something. |
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Notes
1. I would like to thank Russell Hall for his help and advice on an early draft of this article. Anna Pegler-Gordon's "Seeing Images in History," Perspectives 44 (2006), 28–31 provides an excellent overview of how to use images for primary source work in the classroom, and should be read in conjunction with this article.
2. The literature on "visual learning" and "visual learners" in educational psychology is, however, vast. This article will not delve into that specialist field. For some of the most recent work on visual learning these fields, see Image, Inquiry, and Transformative Practice: Engaging Learners in Creative and Critical Inquiry through Visual Representation, L. Sanders-Bustle, ed. (New York: P. Lang, 2003); C. A. Ewy, Teaching with Visual Frameworks: Focused Learning and Achievement through Instructional Graphics Co-created by Students and Teachers (Thousand Oaks CA: Corwin Press, 2003); L. Lohr, Creating Graphics for Learning and Performance: Lessons in Visual Literacy (Saddle River NJ: Merrill/Prentice Hall, 2003); and M. McLaughlin and M.E. Vogt, Creativity and Innovation in Content Area Teaching (Norwood MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers, 2000);
3. F. Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 7.
4. P. Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence, (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 13.
5. S. Bann, "Face-to-Face with History," New Literary History 29 (1998), 235–246. See also his excellent, more focused, studies: The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester, 1990).
6. See G. Dening, The Bounty: An Ethnographic History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Historical Monographs, 1988); and "A Poetic for Histories: Transformations that Present the Past," in Clio in Oceania, A. Biersack, ed. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1990).
7. M. DenBeste, "Powerpoint, Technology, and the Web: More Than Just an Overhead Projector for the New Century?" The History Teacher 36, no. 2 (2003), 491.
8. I do not consider History Channel material worthy of use in a university classroom, and therefore do not use it in class. I only rarely show something from a PBS production. In the above paragraph, I am referring to students coming to me outside of class time and talking about something they saw on television, not their reactions to documentaries shown in class.
9. These Penn State courses were Hist 1 and 2 (both parts of the Western Civilization survey sequence), and Hist 20 and 21 (both parts of the U.S. survey sequence). The vast majority of students in these classes were not history majors.
10. See L. Stallings, "Hitler Did Not Dance That Jig," Esquire, Oct. 1958, 280; and J.E. O'Connor and M.A. Jackson, Teaching History with Film (Washington DC: American Historical Association), 11–12.
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