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Closing the Distance Between Authentic History Pedagogy and Everyday Classroom Practice
Wilson J. Warren
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan
| ONE OF THE GREAT CHALLENGES for the Teaching American History (TAH) grant program is changing conventional K-12 history pedagogy. It is well known that in both elementary and secondary schools, the typical American history teacher relies upon textbooks and a standard array of ancillary materials, including worksheets, maps, study guides, quizzes, and tests, to facilitate instruction. Arguably, the quality of much of this array has improved over the past couple of decades, but reliance on it has meant that students have not been encouraged to do much, if any, history. Although Senator Robert Byrd's intent in founding the TAH program was simply to improve teachers' historical knowledge so that their students would learn more historical facts, many of the TAH projects that I am familiar with have been focused primarily on exposing teachers to a more ambitious agenda of critical pedagogy, including methods of teaching historical inquiry to their students. In this respect, TAH projects are attempting to add greater authenticity to the way K-12 American history teachers provide instruction in the hope that the grants will eventually result in a complete revamping of school history pedagogy. |
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The literature is full of a myriad of complaints that echo mine about the traditionally poor pedagogy of secondary school history teachers.1 History faculty are among the most severe critics. Yet their complaints are often fuzzy and more than a bit hypocritical since history pedagogy among college and university professors is often just as hide-bound and lacking in authenticity as that found in the secondary schools. Relatively few college students, including history majors, are exposed to teaching methods that utilize what is known about how best to teach history. In fact, my colleagues often say that undergraduates cannot really do history, at which point I often think, though seldom say, that it is because the students are not taught how to do it. The result is that future teachers are rarely exposed to historical inquiry methods. Even among academics who focus on history and social studies education, there has been a lack of consensus about the value of teaching K-12 students historical inquiry methods. As Peter J. Lee says in one of the essays in the recently-published How Students Learn History in the Classroom, "although there is a growing volume of research on students' ideas about history... there has been much less work of this kind in history than in science or mathematics."2 Indeed, part of the problem with teaching historical inquiry is that historical thinking, as Sam Wineburg has said, is an "unnatural" act.3 |
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Nevertheless, as the essays in How Students Learn History in the Classroom emphasize, it is indeed possible to restructure secondary-level history instruction to emphasize historical thinking and approaches that are more authentic. In the context of the TAH program, however, these new approaches are not, of course, taught directly to students but are taught to their teachers. This fact begs one of the key questions in the TAH enterprise: how receptive are United States history teachers to more authentic historical instruction? One of the instruments that I developed for the TAH projects centered at Western Michigan University is a survey of teachers' history dispositions. In it, teachers are asked to evaluate their historical beliefs and attitudes using a Likert scale of strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, or strongly agree for several statements. Each statement also asks the teachers to indicate how often they perform a particular activity, skill, or belief (never, seldom, sometimes, usually, and consistently). We administered this survey to our teacher participants both before the institute as a pre-test and after the institute as a post-test.4 |
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Before beginning our high school project, we sent out this questionnaire to high school United States history teachers throughout Michigan in early 2004 so that we would have a baseline with which to compare our participating teachers' responses. We received 325 total responses. Sixty-three percent of the respondents were men and thirty-seven percent were women. Eighty-nine percent were certified in history, while eleven percent were not. Thirty-four percent had fewer than five years of teaching experience. The questionnaire includes a total of twenty-seven statements that reflect six categories of behavior: basic historical thinking, intensive (or authentic) historical thinking, reading and understanding subtext, comparing cultural perspectives, understanding historical assumptions and ambiguity, and professional development and learning. In the basic historical thinking category are two statements with a Likert scale; one saying teachers should ask students to read textbooks and another saying teachers should require students to do recall exercises using worksheets. Teachers said they agreed or strongly agreed with students reading textbooks in seventy-seven percent of the responses. They said they usually used or consistently used textbooks in sixty-seven percent of the responses. They agreed or strongly agreed with the use of recall worksheets in sixty percent of the responses. They said they used recall worksheets in forty-three percent of the responses. |
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We explored the use of intensive (or authentic) historical thinking with, among others, two statements, one that said teachers should ask students to use historical documents and another that said teachers should ask students to compare different historians' perspectives on the same topic or theme. Interestingly, while eighty-nine percent of the teachers' responses said they agreed or strongly agreed that they should ask students to use historical documents, only fifty-seven percent of the teachers' responses indicated that they did so usually or consistently. On the question of using contrasting historical interpretations, eighty-three percent of the teachers' responses said they agreed or strongly agreed with this teaching emphasis. Here the drop-off in actual performance was even steeper; only forty-one percent they actually did so. |
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Not surprisingly, the pre-institute survey of our actual participating high school teachers generally suggested that they failed to understand the value and use of authentic teaching methods. We found this showed up most dramatically in the statements that fell into two of the six categories: reading and understanding subtext and understanding cultural assumptions and ambiguities. Here, in terms of the first category, teachers generally reported that they did not engage students in reading activities that required them to examine either historians' varying perspectives or people's differing historical behaviors. In terms of the second category, teachers generally indicated that they did not have students examine the political, economic, cultural, or ethical context for historical peoples' actions or decisions. |
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Another issue that we found impacted teachers' receptiveness to authentic instruction was their content background, preparation, and interests in United States history. A survey of their academic preparation asked teachers to tell us what courses they have taken and what their favorite topics were. We also asked what topics they find most interesting or most difficult to teach. Among the first two cohorts of high school teachers in our TAH program in 2004 and 2005, we found that they had primarily taken courses in, and were primarily interested in, recent (post-1940) United States history, particularly in the Civil Rights movement, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War. This is not surprising and although politics and economics were noted generally as the two most difficult topics to teach, in terms of particular periods and topics, they noted late nineteenth century subjects, such as Reconstruction and Populism, as the most difficult to teach. In this survey, as contrasted with the dispositional survey that I described earlier, teachers were not prompted with statements about their favorite instructional activities; they were simply asked to list them. Regarding their favorite and most difficult topics to teach, however, using films came in first and was mentioned frequently. Only one teacher mentioned artifacts. |
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We have found, however, during participation in the our TAH summer institutes, that high school teachers generally have been interested in and responsive to activities emphasizing authentic historical activities. For instance, in her sessions dealing with the Civil War and the remaining decades of the nineteenth century, Professor Nora Faires focused especially on ways to use The Valley of the Shadow website, developed by prominent Civil War historian Edward Ayers, as well as various document-rich websites that focus on the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. As part of his sessions, Tom Dietz, one of the Kalamazoo Valley Museum's curators, has demonstrated artifacts from the museum's collection that illustrate the Civil War's impact on the Kalamazoo area and items pertaining to the world's fair. Teachers were also given examples of lesson materials, developed by the OAH and National Center for History in the Schools, which integrate primary sources on topics such as women and sweated industrial labor as well as imperialism and the Spanish-American War. |
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Though the teachers had clearly been interested in this material, it was evident from the post-institute evaluations on these sessions that many of the teachers had failed to understand the value of using these approaches in teaching this period of United States history. For instance, several teachers commented that they failed to see the relevance of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to anything that they might teach in their classes. Professor Faires' rationale for emphasizing this topic was to have the teachers think about how this event encapsulated much about how Americans viewed themselves and the rest of the world at a very crucial period in our history. But many teachers seemed to see the Exposition simply as a sideshow to more important issues, such as the Spanish American War or imperialism. They apparently did not see that evidence of American jingoism, for instance, was commonplace at the fair. |
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It may be too harsh to say that many of the participating teachers lacked sophistication or creativity in their views about the teaching of United States history, but it often seemed that way. It seemed evident that teachers who had indicated that they felt they knew less about the late nineteenth century (and that it was difficult to teach) also impacted how they evaluated the institute sessions dealing with this time period. In a similar way, many teachers said in their post-institute evaluations that they wanted more information on World War I and World War II without apparently recalling that the focus in our sessions was primarily to convey how these wars affected southwestern Michigan as evidenced through available artifacts and documents. |
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Faced with the need to cover the entire history of the United States in their courses, teachers are skeptical about how deeply they can be expected to go with any given topic. In this matter academic historians may not understand or appreciate the gap between what they think they do in their courses and what school teachers can be asked to do. As the teachers reminded us not only in their evaluations, but generally everyday at some point in the institute sessions, much of how they see their task in their high school settings is covering the entire time span of United States history. They feel they must do this in order to help students deal with topics that might appear on the state's social studies assessment, now called the Michigan Merit Exam. Instead of seeing our emphasis on the use of documents and artifacts as central to understanding what history is, many of the teachers saw our focus on artifacts and documents as a sort of window dressing that might occasionally be dropped into a lecture to help illustrate a more general point. In fact, this is not too dissimilar to the way that primary source materials are often used even in AP courses—a fact that I know all too well based on eight years of reading United States history "document-based question" essays for the College Board and Educational Testing Service. |
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Our TAH experiences also suggest that, in general, the longer a teacher has been working in secondary school, the less receptive they seem to be to hearing us discuss more authentic approaches to teaching history. Men seem a bit more likely to convey this attitude than women, but generally speaking, we observe that the veteran teachers are more critical (and sometimes even cynical) about approaches that stress historical investigation. I believe that much of this attitude among the older teachers is based on their immersion in (and acceptance of) a culture of secondary teaching that sees teaching as a matter of covering the subject matter and maybe, at best, entertaining students about the facts of United States history. Certainly, we have had some exceptions to this, including teachers who not only astound us with their use of primary source materials in the required lesson plans that they produce, but who also show us their class websites, already crowded with examples of authentic use of historical materials. But we have generally sensed more success with the younger teachers who are, perhaps, more easily convinced (or less jaded) than their older colleagues about the possibilities for teaching history using authentic approaches. |
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During my two stints demonstrating to TAH participants in Michigan's Upper Peninsula ways to use primary source websites in teaching United States history, and then helping them develop their own primary source based lesson plans, I have experienced some of the same frustrations with teachers' attitudes. One of the examples of a lesson plan I presented used census data from the Historical Census Browser developed at the University of Virginia. I presented an exercise comparing the development of a county from the Upper Peninsula to Wayne County (Detroit) over the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century in terms of demographic, economic, and education indicators. Part of the exercise involved data collection (one of the skills emphasized in the Michigan secondary-level history and social studies standards). The other part of the exercise involved interpretation of the data. When it came to interpretations, many of the teachers seemed puzzled about how much variation there was among their interpretations. Instead of seeing this variation as a fairly normal part of the historian's endeavor, they seemed to fear that variation in responses was something to be avoided. While polite, some of the observations teachers made about the activity suggested that teachers should just stick with having the students do some data gathering and forget about the interpretive parts. |
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TAH projects that focus on helping teachers to think about ways to incorporate inquiry into their United States history classes are engaged in noble and vitally important work. But as I have tried to stress in this essay, I also feel this is an effort that is complicated by the constraints and expectations that accompany the realm of secondary schools and their teachers. Academics, museum educators, and curators certainly need to understand the teaching environment of their counterparts in the schools. Yet once they have some understanding of the school teachers' world, it is necessary to think creatively about convincing teachers of the importance of teaching historical inquiry skills and use of authentic methods and sources. In my opinion, the TAH program's most important achievement would be the leveling of the barriers that exist between academic and K-12 history teaching so that all students can learn better how to do history. |
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Notes
1. See, for instance, Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890–1980 (New York: Longman Group, 1984); Peter Seixas, Peter Stearns, and Sam Wineburg, eds., Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Wilson J. Warren, "Teaching Authentic History," in Teaching History in the Digital Classroom, ed. D. Antonio Cantu and Wilson J. Warren, (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 167–179; and Ronald W. Evans, The Social Studies Wars: What Should We Teach the Children? (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004).
2. National Research Council of the National Academies, How Students Learn History in the Classroom (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005), 33.
3. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
4. The survey instrument is included and explained in Yuanlong Liu, Jianping Shen, Wilson J. Warren, and Lynne E. Cowart, "Assessing the Factorial Structure of High School History Teachers' Perceptions on Teaching American History, Teacher Development 10 (October 2006): 375–387.
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