Teaching Historiography

How do we make historical knowledge? And how can we help high school and college students better understand the ways in which interpretations of history change over time? This module introduces a new curricular and instructional model, Historiography-Based Inquiry, or HBI, that allows students to see the processes through which historians make claims and marshal evidence to support them. A framing essay outlines the HBI’s structure and design principles, highlighting the challenges and opportunities involved in translating the work of historical interpretation for students. Following the framing essay, the HBI team provides a complete unit of instruction that engages students in a historiographical investigation of the role survivor testimony and voices of victims play in writing the history of the Holocaust. The unit provides teachers with a historiographical map of debates over the use of Holocaust testimony; a document packet that focuses on the place of testimony in the work of three leading historians of the Holocaust; and links to primary sources that will enable students to directly engage with some of the key sources that have driven major interpretative approaches to Holocaust history. High school history teachers today must chart a path through polarization, censorship, and intimidation.1 Present-day history wars in the United States, eerily reminiscent of prior episodes, reinforce a recurring and dangerous curricular fallacy: that a neutral historical narrative exists in the first place.2 As historians and history educators, we believe this moment calls for curricular innovation that will equip students to analyze discourses about the past, examine how these discourses emerge, and locate them in broader sociopolitical contexts. To do this, we seek to invite students into the very process by which historians construct historical knowledge: historiography. Is there room for historiography in the high school history classroom? Some might say it is a bridge too far for content-packed curricula that must balance competing priorities amid an increasingly fraught political landscape. Our work in recent years has convinced us otherwise. Historiography not only belongs in high school classrooms but has the potential to reinvigorate secondary history teaching. It can bring new rigor and curiosity to students’ research and class discussions; deepen students’ engagement with primary sources; and help students understand that history is neither a fixed nor a finished product, that it changes and evolves over time, and that these changes in turn shape how we understand ourselves and our world. Taught well, historiography can help students break through the reductive discourse of the history wars and foster collective understanding of the dynamic nature of historical knowledge and how it might be leveraged to learn from, commemorate, and reckon with the past.3 But if historiography is to be pedagogically generative, the key question is, how should it figure in high school instruction? We have found answering this question enormously challenging. It calls for a deep understanding of pedagogy, classroom realities, and the disciplinary practices of professional historians. In this essay, we introduce our work and invite readers to join us in exploring this complex problem space of methodological and pedagogical translation. Over the past several years, we have been developing a new curricular model that we are calling a “Historiography-Based Inquiry”—a learning sequence that invites students to explore how historians make claims and support their arguments with evidence; how they respond to one another; and how historical understandings change over time because of new archival findings, methodological innovations, epistemological reorientations, historians’ positionalities, changing sociopolitical contexts and power dynamics, and other factors. Typically, this kind of work is reserved for undergraduate research courses and graduate seminars. We decided to explore whether it is possible to bring high school students into this conceptual space through excerpted texts, carefully chosen from the works of historians. We have been exploring this challenge by building and testing curricular materials focused on historiographically informed questions, including “How did the French Revolution turn into the Reign of Terror?” “How did freedpeople assert their agency during Reconstruction?” and “Did Bolsheviks have popular support when they seized power in October 1917?” Moving between such complex bodies of scholarship and navigating the constraints—as well as opportunities—of high school classrooms requires many decisions that range from the most abstract (how do we represent a broad historiographical landscape that encompasses diverse methodological and epistemological approaches?) to the most fine-grained (how do we include historians’ footnotes to invite student exploration? what font size best supports close reading among adolescents?). Each of our choices is guided by the goal of making historians’ disciplinary practices transparent to novice learners. Each requires knowledge about students, teachers, learning theory, and the realities of classrooms that are still emerging from the traumas of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are optimistic about our endeavor, yet mindful that the work of curricular translation is ongoing, just like the historical knowledge it seeks to represent. Taping of the testimony of Stephen H. and Marion L. in 1985. Photo courtesy of Fortunoff Video Archive. 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