For expert history teachers, their knowledge of the discipline and be- liefs about its structure interact with their teaching strategies. Rather than simply introduce students to sets of facts to be learned, these teachers help people to understand the problematic nature of historical interpretation and analysis and to appreciate the relevance of history for their everyday lives.
One example of outstanding history teaching comes form the classroom of Bob Bain, a public school teacher in Beechwood, Ohio. Historians, he notes, are cursed with an abundance of data—the traces of the past threaten to overwhelm them unless they find some way of separating what is impor- tant from what is peripheral. The assumptions that historians hold about significance shape how they write their histories, the data they select, and the narrative they compose, as well as the larger schemes they bring to organize and periodize the past. Often these assumptions about historical significance remain unarticulated in the classroom. This contributes to stu- dents’ beliefs that their textbooks are the history rather than a history.
Bob Bain begins his ninth-grade high school class by having all the students create a time capsule of what they think are the most important artifacts from the past. The students’ task, then, is to put down on paper why they chose the items they did. In this way, the students explicitly articulate their underlying assumptions of what constitutes historical signifi- cance. Students’ responses are pooled, and he writes them on a large poster that he hangs on the classroom wall. This poster, which Bob Bain calls “Rules for Determining Historical Significance,” becomes a lightening rod for class discussions throughout the year, undergoing revisions and elabora- tions as students become better able to articulate their ideas.
At first, students apply the rules rigidly and algorithmically, with little understanding that just as they made the rules, they can also change them. But as students become more practiced in plying their judgments of signifi- cance, they come to see the rules as tools for assaying the arguments of different historians, which allows them to begin to understand why histori- ans disagree. In this instance, the students’ growing ability to understand the interpretative nature of history is aided by their teacher’s deep under- standing of a fundamental principle of the discipline.
Leinhardt and Greeno (1991, 1994) spent 2 years studying a highly ac- complished teacher of advanced placement history in an urban high school in Pittsburgh. The teacher, Ms. Sterling, a veteran of over 20 years, began her school year by having her students ponder the meaning of the state- ment, “Every true history is contemporary history.” In the first week of the semester, Sterling thrust her students into the kinds of epistemological issues that one might find in a graduate seminar: “What is history?” “How do we know the past?” “What is the difference between someone who sits down to
BOX 7.1
Comments on Papers on the American Revoloution
Student #7
When the French and Indian war ended, British expected Americans to help them pay back there war debts. That would be a reasonable request if the war was fought for the colonies, but it was fought for English imperialism so you can’t blame them for not wanting to pay. The taxes were just the start of the slow turn toward rebellion another factor was when parliament decided to forbid the colo- nial government to make any more money, Specie became scarcer than ever, and a lot of merchants were pushed into a “two way squeeze” and faced bankruptcy. If I had the choice between being loyal, or rebelling and having something to eat, I know what my choice would be. The colonist who were really loyal never did rebel, and 1/3 support the revolution.
The main thing that turned most people was the amount of propaganda, speeches from people like Patrick Henry, and organizations like the “Associa- tion.” After the Boston Massacre and the issuing of the Intolerable acts, people were convinced there was a conspiracy in the royal government to extinguish America’s liberties. I think a lot of people also just were going with the flow, or were being pressured by the Sons of Liberty. Merchants who didn’t go along with boycotts often became the victims of mob violence. Overall though, people were sick of getting overtaxed and walked on and decided let’s do something about it.
‘write history’ and the artifacts that are produced as part of ordinary experi- ence?” The goal of this extended exercise is to help students understand history as an evidentiary form of knowledge, not as clusters of fixed names and dates.
One might wonder about the advisability of spending 5 days “defining history” in a curriculum with so much to cover. But it is precisely Sterling’s framework of subject-matter knowledge—her overarching understanding of the discipline as a whole—that permits students entry into the advanced world of historical sense-making. By the end of the course, students moved from being passive spectators of the past to enfranchised agents who could participate in the forms of thinking, reasoning, and engagement that are the hallmark of skilled historical cognition. For example, early in the school year, Ms. Sterling asked her students a question about the Constitutional Convention and “what were men able to do.” Paul took the question liter- ally: “Uh, I think one of the biggest things that they did, that we talked about yesterday, was the establishment of the first settlements in the Northwest
area states.” But after 2 months of educating students into a way of thinking about history, Paul began to catch on. By January his responses to ques- tions about the fall of the cotton-based economy in the South were linked to British trade policy and colonial ventures in Asia, as well as to the failure of Southern leaders to read public opinion accurately in Great Britain. Ms. Sterling’s own understanding of history allowed her to create a classroom in which students not only mastered concepts and facts, but also used them in authentic ways to craft historical explanations.