David A. Reichard

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David A. Reichard | How do students understand the history of the American West?: An Argument for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.2 | The History Cooperative

How do students understand the history of the American West?: An Argument for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

What and how do students learn about the history of the American West in their courses? This article suggests that faculty consider the scholarship of teaching and learning as a way to find out, and it discusses why it might be important to do so.

I AM A HISTORIAN who came to the scholarship of teaching and learning almost by accident. In spring 2001, I participated in a teaching cooperative at California State University, Monterey Bay. David Takacs and Gerald Schenk, who had recently been scholars with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, guided the cooperative's research projects, looking closely at student learning in our classes. Few of us had heard of this kind of research—or that this kind of inquiry into teaching and learning was even considered "research" at all. I must confess, I initially signed up to talk about teaching with thoughtful colleagues. Considering these projects as scholarship was indeed a paradigm shift for me.¹

When I began this research project, I initially wanted to look at how students in a lower division multicultural U. S. history course created a public history exhibit. As I developed my project, I noticed I really wanted to understand whether working on the exhibit led to students' deeper understanding of thinking historically.² Recognizing that I could venture into how students came to know history was transformative for me. By the end of the co-op, I realized my research could contribute to a broader conversation about what deep understanding of history looks like for undergraduates. My involvement in the scholarship of teaching and learning had begun—leading eventually to my own selection as a 2003–2004 Carnegie Scholar, where I honed my skills and my understanding of this research, how to approach it, and why it is important.³

Despite a long-standing interest in thinking about teaching, historians are only beginning to embrace the scholarship of teaching and learning. In many ways, I find myself working in a borderlands—moving between my work as a historian and my equally compelling interest in examining what it means for students to learn. As Mary Taylor Huber suggests in Balancing Acts, many faculty face whether the scholarship of teaching and learning even counts for tenure, promotion, recognition, reward, and funding on their campuses. While I am privileged to teach on a campus that values this research as scholarship (even recognizing it in my criteria for retention, tenure, and promotion), I realize that not all historians are so lucky.⁴ "For good or for ill," Mary Taylor Huber and Sherwyn Morreale have observed, "scholars of teaching and learning must address field-specific issues if they are going to be heard in their own disciplines, and they must speak in language that their colleagues understand."⁵ And so it should be!

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