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Historiography and Teacher Education: Reflections on an Experimental Course
Thomas D. Fallace
University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia
| IN RECENT YEARS, professional historians have encouraged policy makers to increase content requirements in history in hopes of improving the overall teaching of history in American schools. Support for such proposals has come from many sources. The origins of this movement can be traced to the 1983 National Commission on Excellence in Education's Nation at Risk report, which declared that the ignorance of American youth was at a crisis level. E. D. Hirsch reiterated this concern in his best-selling Cultural Literacy, in which he also decried the lack of content knowledge of American students. Further studies, such as Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn's What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? and the Bradley Commission's Historical Literacy, argued that students were particularly deficient in historical knowledge. As a result, in the 1990s, many historians and policy makers endorsed a strengthening of history teacher requirements and the addition of expanded required historical content in the curriculum.1 |
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In the 1980s and 1990s, new advances in cognitive and learning theory also supported increased disciplinary knowledge for teachers. In 1987, Lee Shulman's influential article, "Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of a New Reform," introduced the concept of pedagogical content knowledge—"a special amalgam of content and pedagogy that is uniquely the province of teachers, their own special form of professional understanding."2 Shulman argued that effective history teachers draw upon techniques and understandings unique to the discipline, not upon a generic set of instructional tools that can be applied across domains and subjects. He inspired new cognitive research suggesting that the discipline of history has its own domain-specific set of understandings upon which effective teachers draw. |
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For history, researcher Peter Seixas argues, disciplined or historical understanding involves "not only a set of factual claims, but also an understanding of the warrant for those claims."3 Similarly, Bruce VanSledright argues that teaching historical thinking involves closing the "academic developmental distance between novices and experts." More specifically, historical thinking as defined by VanSledright includes the ability to construct a reasonable narrative inter-textually by comparing sources, accounting for bias, and making reasonable explanations of the past based on the evidence.4 These are the intellectual skills that historians have, but novices do not. As Sam Wineburg's influential 1991 study has demonstrated, historians can successfully engage in this type of historical thinking (by reading for the source's subtext), even when they are working in an area outside their historical expertise. On the other hand, empirical research by Wineburg and others has shown that students, teachers, and teacher candidates, who may be successful students of history (i.e., by memorizing facts), do not necessarily have the ability to think historically.5 |
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Closing the "breach" or "distance" between teachers and historians has become a focus in teacher education and has gained greater prominence in the research on preservice teachers. Overall, most educational researchers now believe that a definition of historical knowledge includes not only a basic understanding of the facts, but also an understanding of how the facts were constructed. The general assumption is that historiographical knowledge will allow teachers to provide a more accurate view of the epistemological value of history, and that teachers will pass this knowledge to their students. More importantly, the assumption is that instructing preservice teachers to think historiographically will somehow improve their overall teaching. Along these lines, a recent challenge issued jointly by the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, and National Council on History Education suggests that "to make themselves better mentors to future history teachers," historians need to assure that teacher candidates "know how to 'do history,' how to construct historical narratives and arguments."6 |
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Unfortunately, thus far, evidence of improved teaching as a result of historiographical knowledge has not been convincing. In a 1996 study, VanSledright studied a high school teacher who had recently completed a Ph.D. in history. He discovered that, despite the teacher's deep knowledge about the dynamic nature of historical knowledge, she still tended to favor the "objectivist image of history conveyed by school district curriculum documents and objectives."7 In other words, despite her historical expertise, this teacher failed to pass her historiographical knowledge to her students. She continued to relate history as series of facts. |
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Likewise, in a study of preservice teachers who had just participated in a successful seminar on historiography, researcher G. Williamson McDiarmid reported that their views on the teaching of history were largely unchanged. While most of these preservice teachers enjoyed the course and learned a great deal about the dynamic nature of historical knowledge, most were unconvinced that an inquiry-based approach would ever work in a high school classroom. McDiarmid concluded: "Changes in understanding of historical knowledge appear compartmentalized, cut off from [their] beliefs about teaching and learning history."8 |
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These cases challenge the assumption that disciplinary thinking automatically translates into changed or improved views on the teaching of history. To change thoughts on teaching, it is not enough merely to "bridge the gap" between novice and expert, one must also find a way to overcome the barrier of the "compartmentalized" beliefs about the content and its teaching.9 |
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In this essay, I reflect on my own struggle to overcome this "barrier" with preservice teachers through three semesters of an experimental course called a counterpoint seminar. I co-taught these courses with different historians in the Spring of 2004, 2006, and 2007. I trace the successes and shortcomings of these courses and how my view on the role of historiography in teacher education evolved over the years. I conclude with some suggestions for how historiography can play a role in strengthening history teacher education. |
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Counterpoint Seminar I:
Turning Teacher Candidates into Historians | |
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I co-taught the first counterpoint seminar with a doctoral candidate in American history in the Spring of 2004. At the time, I was a doctorate candidate in social studies education at a large, mid-Atlantic state institution. The course was funded by an initiative designed to foster cooperation between the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Education. Prior to this course, there was little collaboration or coordination between the schools. The designers linked the counterpoint seminar to a specific "content" class, a history survey covering American history 1865 to present. The completion of the survey course was a prerequisite for the preservice teachers taking the counterpoint seminar. In this particular state, social studies teacher candidates are required to major in history or a content-relevant social science; they cannot major in education. Therefore, all seven students who were enrolled in this experimental course were history majors who had taken at least a survey course in American history. By drawing upon the expertise of both the historian and social studies educator, the counterpoint seminar was designed to explore issues of how to teach the content covered in the history survey in the most effective and accurate manner. |
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History majors at the university were exposed to the kind of disciplinary thinking and skills described above as part of the existing programs. For example, many of the history courses included activities wherein students constructed historical accounts based on primary sources from online databases or the University archives. These activities were reinforced in the two-semester sequence of social studies methods courses. In these classes, the instructor modeled several disciplinary based activities. For example, in one class, preservice teachers engaged in an activity where they read conflicting testimonies of the Battle of Lexington and Concord and were asked to rank the sources according to reliability. The point is that, despite their lack of coordination, the existing programs on both sides of campus already offered authentic, disciplinary activities meant to develop the preservice teachers' historical thinking. |
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Most of the research on historical thinking, as well as the programs at this institution, centered on the interpretation of primary source documents. We designed the counterpoint seminar to move beyond primary sources to address the specific content of competing secondary accounts of historical periods (i.e., historiography). We approached the counterpoint seminar as an introduction to historiographical debates—similar to the kind of course a first-year history graduate student would take. However, we also explored issues of pedagogy through weekly readings on history education (See Appendix I for readings). We realized that the reconciliation of specific historiographical knowledge with pedagogy was an issue that was not being systematically addressed in either the history program or social studies teacher education program. Such knowledge, the instructors hoped, would build upon and bridge the pedagogical and disciplinary skills the preservice teachers were already learning. We hypothesized that teaching historiography alongside essays on the teaching of history would allow them to make immediate connections between the content and the high-stakes testing environment of the classroom.10 |
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The course had two major assignments, a book review and a final project. During the sixth week, students submitted a book review of the secondary text A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Era, 1870–1920 by Michael McGerr. They were asked to offer a critical evaluation of the text in light of the two assigned historiographic essays on the Progressive Era. This assignment was designed to stimulate the students' historiographical thinking in preparation for the final project. The project served as the major assessment for the course, constituting fifty percent of their final grade. The project consisted of three components. For the first component, the teacher candidates were asked to select a broad historical topic from American history since 1865. The topics were required to be closely related to the state standards of learning. They were asked to explore a minimum of five secondary sources that offered different perspectives and interpretations on their selected topic. In their essay, they were invited to argue which interpretation they found most convincing. The second component of the assignment was a rationale statement in which the teacher candidates were asked to draw upon the course readings on pedagogy and historiographical theory to consider three issues: 1) Should the history curriculum place more emphasis on the transmission of historical content, or the development of historical skills? 2) Should the American historical narrative be organized as a single narrative, or as multiple narratives? 3) To what degree should history instruction be organized around student needs and contemporary problems? The third component of the final project was a unit outline. The teacher candidates were asked to describe how they would teach this content in a manner that was consistent with the historiographic essay and the rationale statement. They were not required to write full lesson plans for each day, but rather provide a brief outline of what content they would cover each day, how they would organize that content, and what student activities they would employ. Drafts of each part were submitted and given feedback by the instructors before they were turned in at the end of the semester. |
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The overall quality of the final projects was high. The students were able to identify historiographical debates on their topic and draw upon this knowledge to construct a reasonable social studies unit. However, a closer examination of the projects revealed an interesting phenomenon. Despite all their exposure to historiography, the students constructed diverging and often naïve theories about the epistemological value of history. One student who studied the Gilded Age held onto his positivist epistemology by asserting that those historians who emphasized the negative aspects of the era were simply wrong. Another student who researched the New Deal asserted that historians who are farther removed from the event are inherently more accurate. Another student who studied the Cold War fell into what McDiramid in his research on preservice teachers referred to as "reflective cynicism," wherein "all accounts are equally biased."11 In fact, VanSledright in his research on exposing fifth graders to historiography found a similar result. His students' initial response to conflicting accounts was to declare all accounts equally disingenuous and unreliable, because, he explains, for novices, "bias detection takes on the character of a good-bad dichotomy."12 |
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Overall, all the students in the counterpoint class defined bias as the author's conscious or subconscious effort to omit evidence, rather than an unavoidable consequence of the author's context, background, and position. But more importantly, they were not looking at the specifics of the historians' evidence itself, but rather formulating theories for why and how certain historians were hopelessly biased. Nevertheless, this naïveté did not seem to have any detrimental effects on their lesson planning. All of the preservice teachers' unit outlines were largely inquiry-based and student centered, and most of them ended their units with an essay in which their potential students were expected to apply evidence in support of the interpretation they found most convincing.13 |
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What I found most fascinating was that the variables of historiographical thinking and lesson planning seemed to be largely independent of one another. In other words, the course was more successful at breaking down the "compartmentalized thinking" between the discipline and pedagogy then they were at closing the "breach" between novice and expert. While considerable cognitive developmental distance still exists between these preservice teachers and historians, the course seemed to have a positive effect on their thinking about curriculum design. In this sense, the course was a qualified success. The university seemed to agree and so they approved another course for Spring 2006. Only this time, the content would be far more daunting: world history. |
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Counterpoint Seminar II:
Historiography and World History | |
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In this state, as in many others, high school students are required to take a two-year sequence of world history courses and then pass a multiple-choice standardized test on its contents to graduate. Many of the University's education graduates go on to teach one of these world history courses. However, the University, like many others, does not offer survey courses in world history. This is just another incongruity between academy and public schools. So when a history professor at the University designed a new course called "Perspectives in World History," he thought the course would be of interest to prospective teachers. The administrators of the grant agreed and so they tied the counterpoint seminar to this new course. Students wishing to take the counterpoint seminar would have to take both courses simultaneously. This six-credit commitment scared many students away, and so the Spring 2006 counterpoint seminar had only three students taking both courses. Two additional students, who were intimidated by the contents of the world history course and threatened to drop them both, were permitted to take only the counterpoint. A dozen other history majors enrolled in the world history course only. |
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The history doctoral student with whom I taught the second counterpoint course was a European specialist with a strong background in Latin American history. The goals for the course were the same. We hoped to expose students to historiographical debates and link these to the state content standards and classroom teaching. Choosing readings for this course was far more challenging than the American history class. There were simply far too many issues, regions, and periods in world history to cover in a semester. Rather than trying to be comprehensive, my colleague ended up choosing texts with which he was familiar and that he thought imparted some historiographical lessons (See Appendix II for readings). It is interesting to note that, free from the burden of having to cover the material, the choice of readings derived more from the pedagogical objectives of the course than from the state of knowledge in the discipline. This shift was less a matter of choice than necessity, but it resulted in a more effective course.14 |
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Just as the first counterpoint seminar, students had two major assignments. In the tenth week, students submitted a book review of Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 in light of assigned historiographic essays on the Protestant Reformation in England. They also submitted a final project with the same requisite parts above. One minor difference was that, in addition to a unit outline, the teacher candidates had to construct and write out one full lesson plan with accompanying materials. |
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The teacher candidates had a more difficult time this time around. The topics listed in the state standards were so broad that they did not coordinate with the existing historiography. For example, one preservice teacher who studied the Reformation had a difficult time locating secondary texts addressing the topic holistically. Instead, he had to select and synthesize interpretations from texts on Martin Luther, Calvinism, and studies of the Reformation in local regions or cities. Once again, this points to the incongruity between the discipline of history and the high school classroom. After they selected topics, the teacher candidates also had a more difficult time translating the debates into effective lessons because what was expected in the state standards was so detached from scholarship. A couple of the students needed extensive meetings with me to discuss how to do this. Despite these early obstacles, the final projects were strong. |
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One of the more successful students, whose project covered the French Revolution, wrote that having her potential "students see all different kinds of sources from different perspectives will help them to understand the event and make the information more relevant and meaningful." Accordingly, she included a lesson in her teaching unit wherein students read and compared brief excerpts from Baily Stone's Reinterpreting the French Revolution, Iain Hampsher-Monk's The Impact of the French Revolution, and Gary Kates' The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies, and a high school world history textbook. In groups, her potential students had to choose and report upon which interpretation they found most convincing. |
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The students had managed to do a much better job of grasping the epistemological value of historians' work and overcoming the good/bad bias dichotomy of the first class. This was likely because my co-instructor and I directly addressed this issue throughout the semester. In addition, these ideas were reinforced for the three students taking the "Perspectives in World History" course, where the professor explored issues of historical theory. However, the most useful tool was the use of Paul Cohen's History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth. The preservice teachers really enjoyed this text and could easily comprehend the theoretic divisions Cohen explored. They expressed how they hoped to use such an approach to history when they became teachers. Many drew upon this text in their rationale statements and teaching units. |
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Perhaps the most enlightening moment of the second counterpoint seminar for me was when I invited an alumnus of the first counterpoint seminar as a guest speaker. Although his counterpoint seminar was on American history, ironically, he was now in his second year of teaching world history at a local high school. Earlier, he had shared kind words about the impact of the class. "If anything, this course renewed my interest in history," he wrote, "because I realized that 'dead' topics such as Ancient World History that I teach, are in fact very much alive and are debated widely today. As a result, I attempt to read more recent research from historians to get a better sense of what the commonly held theories are."15 Although sincere, when pressed, he admitted that he could apply little of what he had learned in the counterpoint class directly to his teaching. On an abstract level, he had a fuller understanding of the discipline of history, which he often passed on to his students. But, obviously, the specific content he had learned about the historiographic debates of American history were useless in a course covering five thousand years of world history. He was also frustrated to discover that many of the resources he had come to enjoy at the University were no longer available to him out in the public school. He had inquired about obtaining access to the JSTOR online journal database, but the librarian told him it was too expensive. Likewise, his school library offered him little help in keeping up with the historiography. |
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His comments made me reflect more on exactly what skills and knowledge historians had to offer the high school teacher. Around this time, I was becoming more influenced by the work of Keith Barton and Linda Levstik, teacher educators who have been critical of the movement to turn teachers into historians. In their 2004 text Teaching History for the Common Good, they argue that researchers have paid too much attention to Wineburg and Shulman's notion of pedagogical content knowledge, which requires a robust understanding of the discipline.16 Citing the research I discussed in the introduction, they argue that a deep knowledge of the discipline does not directly improve instruction. Instead, they suggest, teacher educators should concentrate on an instructors' sense of purpose, because this will ultimately have the greatest impact on how a teacher will run his/her class. While far from ready to abandon the idea of historiographical knowledge for teachers, I found their argument intriguing. |
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Counterpoint Seminar III:
Using Historiography to Inform Teaching | |
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The second counterpoint seminar was more successful at closing the gap between expert and novice, but the second objective, having preservice teachers translate this new knowledge into improved lesson planning was still a challenge. Having them actually write out a full lesson for the final project instead of a mere outline seemed to help the process. However, after reflecting on the difficulty many of them had, I realized that I was not directly addressing how to design lessons in class. The teacher candidates had all taken social studies methods where lesson writing skills were taught, but translating historiographical debates into lessons was not as easy as I had hoped. |
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The third counterpoint seminar was taught in Spring 2007, again on American history. We had six students. This time around, we decided to put more direct emphasis on lesson planning. We did so by modeling two historiographically-informed lessons in class, and in addition to a final unit outline, we had the teacher candidates submit three lessons throughout the semester on the particular historiographical debates we covered in class. We also spent time in class brainstorming specific strategies and approaches to applying the historiographic knowledge to their lessons. Overall, the objectives of the course, although still steeped in historiography, shifted slightly away from skills and knowledge valued in the discipline towards the skills and knowledge needed for the high school classroom (See Appendix III for readings). |
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The first lesson we modeled was a reenactment of the Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr Duel of 1804. The teacher candidates read excerpts from the correspondence between Hamilton and Burr leading up the confrontation. We provided the necessary background information, emphasizing the importance of maintaining honor in the early years of the Republic. For the event itself, the teacher candidates were asked to examine three documents depicting conflicting versions of what took place during the "Interview at Weehawken." Each group then reenacted what they thought actually happened and supported it with evidence. |
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Afterwards, my colleague used the activity as a jumping off point to explore the challenges of writing history. I discussed how the idea for the lesson originated from my reading of Joseph Ellis's Pulitzer prize-winning Founding Brothers, and how I located the collection of documents used in the activity in one of his footnotes. I shared how I selected certain documents I thought would be effective, edited them down the essential text, and even translated some of the more difficult language to make the documents accessible to high school students. In essence, we modeled how to design and deliver a lesson in a way that drew upon both historiographical and pedagogical knowledge (or pedagogical content knowledge). |
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However, we wanted to move beyond the analysis or primary sources and model how to engage students in the historiographical debates of historians. To do this, we assigned a historiographical essay on Reconstruction and discussed the four major interpretations of those years: the Dunning, progressive, revisionist, and post-revisionist schools. We then gave the teacher candidates twenty-eight pieces of evidence and asked them to place them into each of the four schools. Some examples of this evidence included, "The Northern economy, both agricultural and industrial, boomed during the war and postwar years;" "In the mid-1960s, blacks achieved the right to practice law, sit on juries, testify in court, and ride integrated streetcars;" and "Military officials in charge of early Reconstruction forced blacks to sign labor contracts and work on plantations." |
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We followed the activity with a discussion of why certain schools emerged, how each school employed different evidence and/or used the same evidence in different and new ways. We concluded the lesson with a discussion of how the four interpretive frameworks could be applied to reconstruction in Iraq. We believe this was an important step because the ultimate goal of teaching history is not to inspire a love of history for history's sake, but rather to inform active citizenship. We believe this was the most significant activity of the semester because it allowed the students to conceptualize how to link historiographic knowledge to the objectives of teaching. However, this strategy also led to some unintended misconceptions, which later appeared in their lesson plans. |
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At various points in the semester, the teacher candidates submitted historiographically-informed lessons on Reconstruction, Cold War, and the Civil Rights movement. I was impressed by their ability to draw upon outside resources, such as contemporaneous political cartoons, personal testimonies, primary documents, and even excerpts of conflicting secondary accounts of the event. But, several of the preservice teachers' lessons introduced historiographical interpretations (or schools) in a decontextualized and inauthentic way. Rather than using the schools to aid in the task of open-ended inquiry, they simply became another set of "correct answers." In other words, the historiographical schools were reduced to "content" for students to memorize and recall. We discussed this problem in class, and emphasized that the historiographic frameworks were intended to help them choose appropriate activities and resources that reflected the state of the discipline. More importantly, we emphasized that the historiography should help them and their students ask more authentic historical questions. |
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With these goals explicitly stated, the final set of lessons on the Civil Rights movement was the strongest; each one was focused on a historical question, provided various forms of conflicting evidence, and asked potential students to use the evidence to support a position. In many cases, direct links to the specific contents of the reading for the previous week, John Dittmer's Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, were tenuous. Nevertheless, almost all the teacher candidates drew upon Dittmer's book to frame the lesson around the central question: Was the Civil Rights movement a top-down or bottom-up movement? Here, we can see the distinction between content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. The former, the facts of Mississippi Civil Rights movement at the local level, were irrelevant to the teacher candidates, because they were teaching in a different state and were required to cover specific content listed in the state standards of learning. However, the teacher candidates extracted pedagogical content knowledge from the text by recognizing the central historiographical question, and then applied this to the required content of the standards. One teacher candidate even researched the local response to the desegregation for the county in which he hoped to teach. He presented his students with primary documents from that area and asked them to consider the local response in light of national events. |
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For the final projects, once again students wrote a historiographic essay, rationale statement, and unit outline. The historiographic essays were strong; students addressed the topics of the New Deal, Cold War domestic policy, westward expansion, prewar immigration, and the Jim Crow South. They located and drew upon published historiographic reviews, and read conflicting secondary narrative accounts. |
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However, their rationale statements again displayed some elements of epistemological naïveté. Many of the teacher candidates emphasized the importance of conveying history as an interpretation, but still made vague references to "facts" and "context." This time around, I was less concerned with these inconsistencies, because their unit outlines demonstrated that they understood history to be about inquiry and evidence. All the teacher candidates focused each lesson plan and unit upon authentic questions derived from the historiography. For example, one preservice teacher's unit addressed the "Big Question: Where did Jim Crow come from?" Another focused his unit on the "Essential Question: What are the consequences and results of Westward Expansion in American society?" |
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The big lesson that we learned in the third counterpoint seminar was that historiographical schools should not be taught directly to students as more "content" to be memorized, rather the historiography should inform the selection of resources and focus authentic inquiry. Most importantly, historiography should help the teachers and their students construct meaningful questions and provide tools for answering them. The complicated process of constructing historiograhically-informed lessons can only be accomplished by engaging directly in the activity of connecting the reading of history to the writing of lessons. |
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Reflections and Suggestions | |
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First it should be pointed out that the institution at which counterpoint seminars were taught was no average University. This was one of the top public schools in the nation. The education program had recently been singled out by two highly-regarded studies as one of the strongest teacher education programs in the U.S.17 In other words, the successes these elite students enjoyed may not be exported to other schools so easily. In addition, we do not have direct evidence that the preservice teachers who took the counterpoint seminars became more effective teachers than their peers, or significantly increased student achievement as a result of their new understanding. Nevertheless, by the third counterpoint seminar, a successful model was in place that allowed the teacher candidates to develop graduate-level historiographical knowledge and translate this knowledge into inquiry-based lessons. I believe other institutions can employ a similar approach. Below, I share some suggestions for how this may be accomplished. |
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First, my experience with the counterpoint seminars confirms that classes on historiography should not in any way replace traditional methods courses in social studies. The success of the class was contingent upon the fact that the participants already knew how to design effective lessons. The course should be a forum where preservice teachers and professors can explore together how to develop pedagogical content knowledge by drawing connections between the content of the subject, the epistemology of the discipline, and the reality of the classroom. My experiences confirm VanSledright and McDiramid's research that this connection will not happen automatically through separate coursework in each field. Rather, it must develop dialectically from a strong foundation of preexisting knowledge in both disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge. |
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Second, the course should focus specifically on the development of pedagogical content knowledge, not upon disciplinary knowledge more narrowly conceived. Barton and Levstik are correct to remind us that teachers and historians do not do the same thing. The ultimate goal of teaching history to adolescents is to create effective, responsible citizens. Sometimes, the knowledge and structures of the discipline align with this greater goal; sometimes they do not. The purpose is not to turn preservice teachers into historians, but rather to convey a more accurate view of the epistemological value of history, and to provide tools for more meaningful, authentic instruction. |
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Third, it is importance to model historigraphically-informed lessons in class. It is also vital to have students make links between content and pedagogy throughout the semester on a continual basis. The teacher candidates internalized the process of writing historiographically-informed lessons by having to engage in it four times through the semester. The system of assigning a historiographical essay, reading an important secondary work related to that essay, and then writing a lesson based on the new knowledge worked very well. We also allowed the teacher candidates to brainstorm lesson ideas in class the week before the lessons were due. |
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Finally, the success of the counterpoint seminars was dependent upon the effectiveness of the existing programs in history and social studies education. The professor who teaches the two-semester sequence of social studies methods courses at the University engaged her teacher candidates in historical content through modeled lessons and readings. Likewise, the history department employed a range of progressive methods like exploring archives and writing primary source-based papers. Departments and/or Schools of Education and History can do much to the close the gap between content and pedagogy through their own approaches to the respective fields. When students see history professors lecturing content as "fact," or education professors modeling content-free generic lessons, this only reinforces the divide between the two areas. |
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Forging pedagogical content knowledge from historical content and pedagogical skill is an ambitious, but achievable goal. The counterpoint seminars represent one path towards that goal; there are likely many others. However, one thing is clear. Simply requiring teacher candidates to be history majors will not improve the teaching of the subject.18 Preservice and inservice teachers need the opportunity and the intellectual support to allow the difficult connection between content and pedagogy to develop. Professors from both sides on campus are needed to make this happen. |
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Notes
I thank Daniel Holt and Victoria Fantozzi for suggestions and feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.
1. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983); E. D. Hirsh, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know: A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York: Harper and Row, 1987); Paul Gagnon, ed., Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American Education (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989).
2. Lee Shulman, "Knowledge and Teaching: Foundation of a New Reform," Harvard Educational Review 57 (1987): 8, 10.
3. Peter Seixas, "Beyond 'Content' and 'Pedagogy': In Search of a Way to Talk about History Education," Journal of Curriculum Studies 31 (1999): 322.
4. Bruce VanSledright, "What Does It Mean to Think Historically... and How Do You Teach It? Social Education 68, no. 3 (2004): 230.
5. Sam Wineburg, "Reading Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy," American Educational Research Journal 28 (1991): 495–519.
6. American Historical Association, "The Next Generation of History Teachers: Challenge to Departments of History at American Colleges and Universities—Some Strategies," <http://www.historians.org/pubs/Free/historyteaching/strategies.htm>.
7. Bruce VanSledright, "Closing the Gap Between School and Disciplinary History? Historian as High School Teacher," in Jere Brophy, ed., Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol 6. Teaching and Learning History (Greenwich, CT: Jai Press Inc, 1996), 260.
8. G. Williamson McDiarmid, "Understanding History for Teaching: A Study of the Historical Understanding of Prospective Teachers," in M. Carretero and F. J. Voss, eds., Cognitive and Instructional Processes in History and the Social Studies (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), 178.
9. In a subsequent article, McDiarmid and Vinten-Johansen (2000) described a course in which they were more successful at negotiating this barrier. The course—taught over two semesters in the place of a traditional methods course—was designed to have students develop disciplinary knowledge alongside pedagogical strategies through issue-based curriculum units. The course's success was demonstrated in the quality of the unit lesson plans. However, some students later complained that they felt less prepared than their peers who took the regular methods course to plan lessons on a daily basis, and some found the material too demanding. Nonetheless, the authors did manage to narrow the gap between preservice teachers and historians as well as find ways to connect this knowledge to their instruction.
10. For more on the rationale for the course, see Thomas Fallace and Johann Neem, "Historiographical Thinking: Towards a New Approach to Preparing History Teachers," Theory and Research in Social Education 33, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 244–261.
11. McDiarmid, "Understanding History for Teaching," 172, 176.
12. VanSledright, 231.
13. For a fuller analysis of these final projects, see Thomas Fallace, "Once More unto the Breach: Trying to Get Preservice Teachers to Link Historiographical Knowledge to Pedagogy," Theory and Research in Social Education 35 (3): 427–446.
14. Originally, we had intended to make connections between the counterpoint and world history courses throughout the semester. Unfortunately, this quickly broke down. One week, we did invite the world history professor as a guest speaker. However, he spent most of the period clarifying many of the abstract concepts (e.g., agency, narrative, communal ethos) he had introduced in his class, and we ended up devoting only a few minutes to pedagogical matters.
15. This quotation appeared in Stephanie van Hover, William Thomas, Thomas Fallace, and Johann Neem, "Balancing Content and Pedagogy in the Preparation of High School Teachers," paper presented at the Thirteenth Conference of the Aspen Institute Congressional Program (February 2006, Montego Bay, Jamaica), 6.
16. Keith Barton and Linda Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), conclusion.
17. Linda Darling-Hammond, Powerful Teacher Education: Lessons From Exemplary Programs (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2006); Arthur Levine, Educating School Teachers: Executive Summary, <http://www.edschools.org/pdf/Educating_Teachers_Exec_Summ.pdf>, 7.
18. This is the argument put forth by Diane Ravitch, "Who Prepares Our History Teachers? Who Should Prepare Our History Teachers?" The History Teacher 31(August 1998): 495–503, although Ravitch would likely support the idea of the counterpoint seminar.
Appendix I
Readings for Counterpoint I: American History 1865-Present
BooksMcGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920. New York: Free Press, 2003.
Nash, Gary B., Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn. History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past. New York, Vintage, 1997.
Ravitch, Diane. The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Wineburg, Sam. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001.Articles and Book ChaptersCronon, William. "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, Narrative," Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1346–1376.
Levstik, Linda. "NCSS and the Teaching of History." In NCSS in Retrospect. Edited by O. L. Davis, Jr. Washington, D.C.: National Council for the Social Studies, 1996.
Oliver, Donald and James P. Shaver. "The Selection of Content in the Social Studies." In Teaching Public Issues in the High School. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966. 3–18.
Ravitch, Diane. "Who Prepares Our History Teachers? Who Should Prepare Our History Teachers?" The History Teacher 31 (August 1998): 495–503.
Rodgers, Daniel T. "In Search of Progressivism." Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 113–132.
Robbins, William G. "Laying Siege to Western History." Reviews in American History 19 (September 1991): 313–331.
Seixas, Peter. "Schweigen! die Kinder! or, Does Postmodern History Have a Place in the Schools?" In Knowing, Teaching and Learning History: National and International Perspectives. Edited by Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg. New York: New York University Press, 2000: 19–37.
Thelen, David. "Making History and Making the United States." Journal of American Studies 32 (1998): 373–397.
Appendix II
Readings for Counterpoint II: World History
BooksClendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan 1517–1570. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Cohen, Paul. History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.
Richter, Daniel. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Ravitch, Diane. The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Spence, Jonathan. God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. New York: Norton, 1996.Articles and Book ChaptersBarton, Keith. "Primary Sources in History: Breaking Through the Myths." Phi Delta Kappan (June 2005): 745–753.
Heath, Peter. "Between Reform and Reformation: The English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries." Journal of Ecclesiastical History 41(1990): 647–678.
Hutton, Ronald."Revisionism." In Debates in Stuart History. Edited by Ronald Hitton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004: 21–25.
McNeill, William. "World History." In Teaching World History: A Research Book. Edited by Heidi Roupp. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997: 5–7.
Miller, Joseph. "A Theme in Variations: A Historical Schema of Slaving in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Regions." Slavery and Abolition 25 (2004): 169–194.
National Center for History in the Schools. "World History Standards for Grades 5–12." In The New World History: A Teachers Companion. Edited by Ross E. Dunn. New York: Bedford/St.Martin's, 2000: 394–405.
Oliver, Donald and James P. Shaver. "The Selection of Content in the Social Studies." In Teaching Public Issues in the High School. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966: 3–18.
Wilson, Suzanne and Sam Wineburg. "Peering at History through Different Lenses: The Role of Disciplinary Perspectives in Teaching History." Teachers College Record 89 (1988): 525–539.
Wineburg, Sam. "On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach between School and Academy." American Educational Research Journal 28 (1991): 495–519.
Appendix III
Readings for Counterpoint III: American History 1865-Present
BooksDittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.
Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920. New York: Free Press, 2003.Articles and Book ChaptersBarton, Keith. "Primary Sources in History: Breaking Through the Myths." Phi Delta Kappan (June 2005): 745–753.
Couvares, Francis, et al. "America and the Cold War: Containment or Hegemony?" In Interpretations of American History; Patterns and Perspectives (seventh edition). New York: Free Press, 2000: 265–281.
Couvares, Francis, et al. "The Civil Rights Movement: Top-Down or Bottom-up?" In Interpretations of American History; Patterns and Perspectives (seventh edition). New York, Free Press, 2000: 307–325.
Couvares, Francis, et al. "The Progressive Movement: Elitist or Democratic?" In Interpretations of American History; Patterns and Perspectives (seventh edition). New York, Free Press, 2000: 176–193.
Leffler, Melvyn P. "The Cold War: What Do 'We Now Know'?" American Historical Review 104 (April 1999): 501–524.
Newmann, Fred and Gary Wehlage. "Five Standards of Authentic Instruction." Educational Leadership 50 (April 1993): 8–12.
Ravitch, Diane. "Who Prepares Our History Teachers? Who Should Prepare Our History Teachers?" The History Teacher 31 (August 1998): 495–503.
Rodgers, Daniel T. "In Search of Progressivism," Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 113–132.
VanSledright, Bruce. "What Does It Mean to Think Historically... and How Do You Teach It?" Social Education 68 (April 2004): 230–233.
Wineburg, Sam. "On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach between School and Academy." American Educational Research Journal 28 (Fall 1991): 495–519. |
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