Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser | Beyond Best Practices: Taking Seriously the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser | Beyond Best Practices: Taking Seriously the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Beyond Best Practices: Taking Seriously the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser, Contributing Editors, Textbooks and Teaching

How do we teach American history? And what do our students learn? In this year's "Textbooks and Teaching" section, we present reports from the field, exploring what happens when historians self-consciously study their classroom practices. Inspired by Ernest L. Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered, proponents of this kind of rigorous analysis of pedagogy refer to it as "the scholarship of teaching and learning."¹ When we first approached this subject, we must admit, we had reservations: Would we be moving into the domain of education departments and teacher certification programs that addressed such issues as the relative merits of various classroom technologies, effective construction of multiple-choice tests, and the mysteries of rubric creation, all to serve us better in our quest for efficient "content delivery"? Would we be presented with mind-crushing correlations between student assessment scores and proportions of lecture/discussion observed for various courses at distinct levels of the curriculum? Would we see lesson plans for successful classes presented like recipes in a "best practices" cookbook? Were historians being asked to "dumb down" their specialties in order to don the guise of entertainers who could reach students more accustomed to amusement than to serious intellectual inquiry? To our relief our skepticism proved misplaced. The work presented below is analytically sophisticated, well grounded in empirical research, and provocative. It demands that we engage questions not just about the merits of particular pedagogies, but about our central purposes as academics who both study and teach the American past.

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