Teaching Method and Theory to History Undergraduates. Intellectual Challenges and Professional Responsibilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article seeks to demonstrate why university instructors should make greater efforts to teach our undergraduates about historical methods and the challenges to traditional ways of doing history posed by important recent theoretical approaches and critiques. The stakes are high because liberal progressivist narratives of historical progress are inadequate for the professional study of history, though very powerful for legitimating the political status quo. It is also my goal to show why our experience (and what common sense can make of it) cannot lead us to intellectually responsible methods for the study of history. Unfortunately, 'common sense' can, on the other hand, lead us to ways of doing history that shore up existing power structures. Every refusal to engage with theoretical and methodological issues implies taking a political position about power and the ways in which traditional history‐writing helps to construct and legitimate power. A historian who employs only traditional empiricist methods (common sense, arguments from human nature, etc.) is not really refusing to articulate and apply a theory, but holds and applies a theoretical approach while at the same time denying its existence, its effects and its power to organize and shape historical issues. Hiding behind commonsensical and other unexamined methods reduces history as a practice and as a profession to either antiquarianism or partisanship, both in the service of the (neo‐) liberal establishment. Any such engagement (for or against an establishment) must be clear and declared, not camouflaged as objectivity, neutrality or freedom from theory. We owe it to our students to declare our positions and to encourage them to think systematically and in an informed fashion about theirs as well.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".