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The History Learning Project: A Department "Decodes" Its Students
Arlene Díaz, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Leah Shopkow
| It is a story replicated in many history classrooms during the course of a semester. Students have once again done poorly on an assignment or exam. Their essays are the sites of massive, undifferentiated data dumps. They have paraphrased primary sources instead of analyzing them, ignored argumentation, confused past and present, and failed completely to grasp the "otherness" of a different era. A few students, as always, have done extremely well, but many have done poorly. What is wrong with these students? How can a teacher help them understand history? |
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These sorts of poor performance often result from a mismatch between what college history teachers expect of their students and what those students imagine their task to be. Most college professors learned how to be historians more or less by osmosis, without explicit instruction on how to perform many of the operations necessary to produce historical knowledge. They, like the minority of students who seem to perform historical tasks effortlessly, are naturals who have not had to reflect consciously on what they do automatically. As a result, professors often do not model for their students some of the most basic—and most essential—steps in historical analysis. As Sam Wineburg has noted, it is so habitual for historians to check the author and date of a passage before they begin reading it that they do not realize that such procedures are not natural for many of their students.1 Such intellectual maneuvers, unmarked by the professor and as invisible to the students as the sleight of hand of a magician, often leave students with the "facts" of history, but no idea of how they were created. |
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Yet, such mismatches between instructors and their students can become occasions for some very productive exploration. Once the fundamental misunderstandings that lurk beneath the surface of so many classroom disasters are submitted to systematic analysis through the scholarship of teaching and learning, such problems can serve as a starting point for studies that not only explore what must be explicitly taught to increase learning in history courses, but also what the faculty perception of bottlenecks to learning tells us about the students themselves.2 The History Learning Project (HLP) is leading the history department at Indiana University through an analysis of such obstacles to learning, and in the process we are learning much about the students who inhabit our classrooms. Using the "decoding the disciplines" process, developed in Indiana University's Freshman Learning Project (FLP), we are working to make explicit the basic operations students must master to succeed in history courses.3 |
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In the summer of 2006 the four authors (three historians and an educational developer) conducted and videotaped seventeen ninety-minute interviews with faculty in the history department, in which they defined bottlenecks, places where significant numbers of students are unable to grasp basic concepts or successfully complete important tasks. The interviewers worked with each historian to define as precisely as possible what an expert in the field would do to get past the obstacle that interrupted student learning. The result was the definition of a series of basic operations students must master to succeed in particular kinds of history courses.4 |
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