Putting History Teaching "In Its Place'

Over the past four decades, the reigning paradigm among history educators has tacitly ignored the concept of place in its emphasis on helping students “do history.” In practice, the slogan has included a range of activities, from skillful cognitive explorations of what it means to think and read and write “like a historian” to document-based questions on advanced placement history exams to simply giving students photocopies of “primary sources.” In recent years, the discussion has included an exploration of the concept of “signature pedagogy.” Drawing on his work with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Lee Shulman observed that some professions employ discipline-specific pedagogies to train future practitioners in the knowledge, values, and worldview of the profession—law students debate practice cases, medical students conduct clinical rounds, and seminary students follow a routine of prayer and sermons. Shulman contrasted discipline-specific pedagogy with the apparent default pedagogy of arts and science education grounded in textbooks and lectures and he called for the creation of signature pedagogies rooted in the theory and practice of individual disciplines.1 Historians have taken up Shulman's challenge, and, in the process, have begun to debate the “signature pedagogy of history.” Scholars such as Sam Wineburg, Lendol Calder, and David Pace have applied recent findings in cognitive science to begin to identify the mental tasks performed by practicing historians—sourcing, corroborating, and connecting, among others.2 In another approach, Stéphane Lévesque, Keith Barton and Linda Levstik, and Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke have sought to embed history pedagogy in “procedural concepts” (Lévesque's term) unique to, or at least uniquely applied among, historians—change over time, context, narrative, empathy, significance, and distance from the past, among others.3 Third, Peter Lee and Rosalyn Ashby, Gaea Leinhardt, and the Visual Knowledge Project participants explore critical thinking in history to highlight historians’ use of evidence, argumentation, explanation, and perspective.4 Finally, Calder and Bob Bain emphasize the unique way that historians problematize previous stories about the past, formulate their own questions, and design and follow processes of inquiry.5 In part because of the context of Shulman's plea, the parties pursuing cognition, concepts, critical thinking, and inquiry approach the question as an intellectual problem about disciplinary knowledge. All four approaches will be enriched by remembering that the power of the pedagogies highlighted by Shulman originates not in epistemology but in experience. Explicitly, learning occurs by inhabiting a professionally relevant place—medical students train at the bedside, law students argue in a mock courtroom, preachers practice at the pulpit. One other characteristic that further defines these places of pedagogy is that they are public. This observation does not discount the fact that the professionals also study, or attend conventions, or host consultations in their office, or haggle with potential jurors and health insurance providers—it merely identifies as crucial the moment when a professional looks up from learning to diagnose a patient, persuade a jury, or preach a sermon. Where do we historians practice history? Can our students conceivably do history in the same places that we do? What would our teaching look like if we sought to put our students in the places of historical practice? We can put history teaching back “in its place” by uniting archival research, scholarship on the learning and teaching of history, and effective teaching methods within a new paradigm conscientiously constructed around the places of history practice. When our students experience where we do history they will more readily understand why we do what we do when we do history. Putting history teaching back in its place may also be the first necessary step to restoring the value of history—in school curricula, in the humanities, and in public life. The first question for consideration is deceptively simple: where do we practice history? Most likely, the answer that initially springs to mind will be in an archive. This answer reflects the roots of the historical profession in the work of Leopold von Ranke and the generation of American doctoral students who went to Germany for training among the sources. The answer reflects over a century of academic historical practice emphasizing objectivity and archival sourcework. The answer provides context for the critiques of history education—from the “progressive historians” to the Foxfire approach to active learning strategies—that have called for student engagement of primary sources. The answer also reflects current rhetoric about historical practice: the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich created a compelling PBS documentary about her archival work to reconstruct the eighteenth-century world of the midwife Martha Ballard, the “Top Young Historians” spotlighted by the History News Network frequently share “personal anecdotes” that locate their professional development in the archive, and the academy rewards research far more than it rewards teaching.6 But is the archive the only place where we practice history? Do young historians have transformative experiences in archives, or is that simply what they imagine their established colleagues will want to hear? After a distinguished career, Perry Miller explained that his interest in Puritan history came not in an archive but in an “epiphany” in the jungles of Africa. Years after the death of James B. Randall, “the dean of Lincoln studies,” his wife revealed that his fascination with the sixteenth president originated when, as a child, he spent hours drawing and painting the craggy face of Abraham Lincoln. Free from tenure-track restraints, the journalist Tony Horwitz reported that his passion for Civil War history began as a child looking at photographs with his grandfather.7 The archive certainly forms an essential part of our experience, but not the most important. We do not just stumble into the nearest archive and ask for the daily special. Archival research is preceded by an intense and sometimes lengthy conceptualization process that involves at least the unarticulated awareness of present needs, current historiographical debates, the types of sources that may be relevant to needs and debates, and the collections and locations of particular archives that might provide those sources. This lengthy process also occurs, in practice, in conversation with others. We explain to grant funders, governments, and our employers why we must travel to the sources (or order reproductions of them). We engage the catalogs and collection guides preserved by families, maintained in archives, and indexed by librarians. We read, discuss, challenge, and absorb the interpretations (or dismissals) of our fellow historians, both past and contemporary. We receive feedback on our work from students, conference attendees, peer reviewers, editors, publishers, interviewers, and members of the general public who attend book talks and post comments on Amazon.com. True, we are hired individually and receive tenure and awards for individual contributions—but even hiring and tenure decisions rest heavily on the responses that our work has received in public. Readers, grant funders, and tenure and promotion committees all look for another narrative about our work—why we went to the archive, what we thought we might find, how what we actually found advanced previous knowledge. The stories we tell others about the archive are just as important—possibly more so—than the stories we tell them from the archives. As we expand the view to see ourselves outside of the archive and engaged in a host of public conversations, we must next ask which of all the interactions will be most helpful in putting history teaching back in its place. If doctors meet patients in hospitals and lawyers join clients in the courtroom, where do we encounter our publics? On some occasions we meet the public as the informed provider of knowledge—we give lectures in classrooms, present papers at conferences, talk about our books in public or televised lectures, and make depositions to governmental hearings. In these settings, we draw on the knowledge gained in our research, determine what is important or relevant, and structure our presentation for the audience. On other occasions, we meet the public in a setting where they determine what is significant and pose the question to us. We work as park rangers at historical sites or docents in museums, we respond to journalists or documentary filmmakers as talking heads, we serve as expert witnesses in the courtroom, we are hired as consultants, or we assess the value of an heirloom on Antiques Roadshow. In this expanded view of historical practice we see historians doing history in the archive and at the presenter's podium. The crucial moment arrives when historians look up from their manuscripts, remove their white archival gloves, and—whether structuring presentations or responding to a prompt—decide which of all the sources examined and books read are most relevant to the situation and significant to the audience. Thus the debate about the signature pedagogy of history must consider both how historians find information, meaning, and evidence in the archive and how we evaluate, select, and organize our findings to address our publics and respond to their questions. The most critical act in the entire process is that of selecting what is most significant and relevant from a mass of information. Good history teaching, therefore, should place students in a position where they turn from their research to either make a presentation or respond to an audience's questions, or both. In a world in which it has been estimated that the total volume of electronic knowledge doubles every eighteen to twenty-four months, no other skill is more vital for humans to master.8 Having located professional historical practice in the archive and at the podium, the question immediately arises: Can students really practice history the same way that trained historians do? To answer this question, I will look up from my own archival research and briefly relate one story of students learning history in the archive and at the podium. The Southwestern Indiana Historical Society was organized in 1920 by the lawyer John E. Iglehart in Evansville, Indiana, and eventually drew over five hundred members from all walks of life and from across the nation. Three times a year for nearly two decades they came from Maine, California, and Texas to southern Indiana to hear historical papers read by one another—lawyers and politicians, university-trained historians and collectors, genealogists and high school drama teachers, college presidents and newspaper editors. Society members reacted to Abraham Lincoln's biographers who had emphasized his presidential greatness by contrasting it with the “stagnant, putrid pool” of the Indiana frontier.9 Out of both familial pride and historical justice, the society worked to put Lincoln into proper historical context by conducting archival research, interviewing elderly residents, indexing old newspapers, erecting monuments, and writing and publishing about their findings. In so doing, members of this society believed it was critically important to help young people. One speaker noted that “if you can get a boy interested in any subject matter at this age he will probably retain his interest for a life time.” Society members believed that students could become interested in history, and they also thought that early twentieth-century American school methods generally erased that interest. 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papers and what that would the was a of of a archival the of a of photographs after in the for hours for a to the of to that of a had really how history one student but and actually doing the research I you for with the to do some I a and I in the future I can these We can and must put history teaching back in its place by teaching our students how to work in the archive and present to the public. We for photocopies of primary sources when archival sources are so that our students can the past and the from its who present their archival findings to the public will to explain not only what they found but also why history every as an archive, every student as a and every as a to the archive and the we will put history teaching back in its place in classrooms, in curricula, and in American public life. Keith is of history at the of Texas at where he the history education and the for History and the feedback he received from to the and in History at and the participants in Project at

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