Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past

370 Pages·2001·3.28 MB·English

by  Sam Wineburg

Historical Thinking and Other
Unnatural Acts
CHARTING THE FUTURE OF TEACHING THE PAST

Sam Wineburg

Temple University Press
PHILADELPHIA
2
Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122
Copyright © 2001 by Temple University
All rights reserved
Published 2001
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements
of the American National Standard for Information Sciences
—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48–1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wineburg, Samuel S.
Historical thinking and other unnatural acts : charting the
future of teaching the past / Sam Wineburg.
p. cm.—(Critical perspectives on the past)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-56639-855-X (cloth : alk.p aper)—ISBN 1-56639-
856-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
e-ISBN: 978-1-43990-301-8
1 . History—Study and teaching—Philosophy. 2 . United
States—History—Study and teaching. 3. Historiography. 4.
Culture conflict—United States. I. Title. II. Series.
D16.2.W56 2001
907 21; aa05 11–06—dc00 00–
053214
3
Contents
Introduction: Understanding Historical Understanding
Part I
WHY STUDY HISTORY?
1. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts
2. The Psychology of Teaching and Learning History
Part II
CHALLENGES FOR THE STUDENT
3. On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach
Between School and Academy
4. Reading Abraham Lincoln: A Case Study in Contextualized
Thinking
5. Picturing the Past
Part III
CHALLENGES FOR THE TEACHER
6. Peering at History Through Different Lenses: The Role of
Disciplinary Perspectives in Teaching History
7. Models of Wisdom in the Teaching of History
8 . Wrinkles in Time and Place: Using Performance
Assessments to Understand the Knowledge of History
Teachers
Part IV
HISTORY AS NATIONAL MEMORY
9. Lost in Words: Moral Ambiguity in the History Classroom
10. Making (Historical) Sense in the New Millennium
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Introduction
Understanding Historical Understanding
Identify the source of the following statement:
Surely a grade of 33 in 100 on the simplest and most
obvious facts of American history is not a record in
which any high school can take pride.
The above characterization of high school student'
historical knowledge comes from:
(a) Ravitch and Finn's report on the 1987 National
Assessment of Educational Progress, in which they
argued that student's test scores place them “at risk
of being gravely handicapped by…ignorance upon
entry into adulthood, citizenship, and parenthood.”
(b) The 1976 New York Times test of American youth,
published under the banner “Times Test Shows
Knowledge of American History Limited.”
(c) Reports on the 1942 New York Times history exam
that prompted Allan Nevins to write that high
school students are “all too ignorant of American
history.”
(d) None of the above.
The correct answer is (d), none of the above.1 This
quotation comes neither from the 1987 National Assessment
nor from any of the earlier reports. To find its source we have
to go back to 1917, long before television, the social studies
lobby, the teaching of “thinking skills,” the breakup of the
family, the growth of the Internet, or any of the other factors
we use to explain low test scores. Yet the conclusions of J.
Carleton Bell and David McCollum, who in 1917 tested 668
Texas high school students and published their findings in the
fledging Journal of Educational Psychology, differ little from
those of subsequent commentators. Considering the vast
differences between those who attended high school in 1917
and the near-universal enrollments of today, the stability of
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student's ignorance is amazing. The whole world has turned
on its head, but one thing has stayed the same: Kids don't
know history.
Or so the conventional story goes. But it is a story that
rests on shaky foundations.2 It may be that we have spent so
much time discovering (only to rediscover over and over and
over…) what students don't know that we have neglected
more useful questions about young people's historical
knowledge. For example, what do students know about the
past? What sources beyond teachers and textbooks
contribute to their understanding? How do they make
meaning from complex historical documents? How do they
navigate between images of the past learned in the home and
those encountered in school? How do they situate their own
personal histories in the context of national and world
history?
These questions have rarely been asked. From Bell and
McCollum's 1917 survey to the latest national assessments,
efforts to understand children's historical knowledge have
followed a well-beaten path. Adults come together to
determine what facts kids should know. They administer a
test. When results come back showing that students did
poorly, they seldom ask what youngsters might have been
thinking or how students might have interpreted the task
before them. Deliberations about children's minds resemble
those of an entomologist peering at an ant: the ant (or child)
is viewed as a species not only smaller but vastly inferior to
ourselves.3 We look at it from the outside, measure it, and
assign it a number. And, with reference to young people, we
quickly forget the leap of faith between the statement that
students don't know what we want them to know and the
conclusion that they don't know anything at all.
The strategy of labeling, rather than trying to understand,
student's historical knowledge has led to arid discussions of
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pedagogy. Students would know more history, according to
one common explanation, if teachers taught content rather
than “skills.” For commentators like Arthur Bestor, writing in
1953, or Sean Wilentz, writing in 1996, the bogeyman is the
“social studies lobby” (one wonders what kind of lobby
worked Texas backrooms in 1917, something neither Bestor
nor Wilentz happened to mention).4 Other aspects of the
discussion focus on how to periodize the U.S. history course
or assign the proper sequence to topics in the curriculum. The
1987 Bradley Commission noted that, with respect to
pedagogy, variety is the spice of learning, and it encouraged
teachers to select from a mix of teaching methods and
techniques. But skilled history teaching is no more a matter
of selecting the right mix of methods than historical
interpretation is a matter of selecting the right mix of
documents. The common factor in all these discussions is a
blurry image of the learner and what that learner brings to
instruction. To be sure, historical knowledge, as Michael
Schudson put it, “seeps into the cultural pores” even if such
knowledge is not “readily retrievable by seventeen-year-olds
answering a quiz.” Large-scale tests may tell us something
about what young people know, but to assume that they
constitute the alpha and omega of historical knowledge
thwarts any serious investigation of American intellectual life
and culture.5
Beyond the lurid headlines and hand-wringing lies a more
basic question: What does the teaching of history contribute
to a democratic society? Or, as my colleague Gaea Leinhardt
puts it, What does history contribute to social literacy? What
ways of thinking, writing, and questioning would be lost if we
eliminated history from the curriculum?
This is not a new question, of course. Woodrow Wilson
addressed it when he claimed that history endows us with the
“invaluable mental power we call judgment,” and similar
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sentiments echo whenever the American Historical
Association commissions a study on the state of the
undergraduate major.6 But the role of history as a tool for
changing how we think, for promoting a literacy not of
names and dates but of discernment, judgment, and caution,
does not receive prime billing in the public sphere.
The essays in this book begin with the basic assumption
that history teaches us a way to make choices, to balance
opinions, to tell stories, and to become uneasy—when
necessary—about the stories we tell. This history is worlds
apart from Rush Limbaugh's version: “History is real simple.
You know what history is? It's what happened.”7
Limbaugh's history served me well in high school. History
was figuring out what topics were on the test and how to
psyche out Frances T. Peritano, Miss Peritano, in crafting an
essay response. I flourished in this system. It wasn't until my
freshman year at Brown University, in Jacob Neusner's history
of religion course, that I began to worry about my ability as a
history student. Neusner (“an experience not to be missed,”
said the unofficial course guide) began the course at the
beginning, literally. “What is the text doing,” he asked about
Genesis 1, as a hundred students or so collectively quaked in
their seats. One after another, baffled freshmen summarized
the text, only to have Neusner strike his fist on the podium:
”Doing, not saying. What is the text doing?”
When I found myself teaching history to middle and high
school students some years later, I realized that I too could
exhort students to examine the “polemic” of the text (a term
Neusner imprinted on my consciousness). But apart from the
tried-and-true pedagogic strategy of “read it again” (or,
alternatively, “read it slowly” or ”read it to your partner” or
“read it in groups”), I had no clue why some students could,
and others could not, arrive at interpretations that seemed to
me self-evident.
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Books on teaching provided few clues. Textbooks on the
psychology of learning, as well as how-to books like
McKeachie's Teaching Tips8 were concerned mostly with
“technique”—when to insert an example into a lecture, how
to do group work, or how to ask questions at different levels
of Bloom's Taxonomy. But generic issues were not what irked
me. I wanted to know about the specific challenges that
historical texts posed to young people, and what prevented
them from reading these texts more critically.
My arrival at graduate school coincided with the
ascendance of the “cognitive revolution” in psychology and
education. Behaviorism's decades-old hegemony came
crashing down during the early 1980s, as psychologists and
educators realized the folly of trying to understand memory
by examining nonsense syllables or plumbing the nature of
reasoning by using abstract logic problems. Holding a
bachelor's degree in the history of religion, and never having
taken a psychology course in my life, I was a fish out of water
in Stanford's Ph.D. program in “Psychological Studies in
Education.” But somehow my application ended up on the
desk of Lee Shulman, who wagered that what I brought to the
program would outweigh what I lacked.
In my first semester, I took a course that symbolized the
changes brewing in the field. “Cognitive Science and
Education” was filled with the new research on the “naive
epistemologies” of physics students, the “mal-rules” that led
math students into systematic and correctable errors, and the
Lamarckian and instruction-resistant beliefs of biology
students. The requirement for the course was a literature
review on one of the disciplines in the school curriculum.
When I informed the professor that I would review the
literature on history learning, I met a chilly response. “Can't,”
she said matter-of-factly, “there's no literature to review.
Start with the literature on reading.”
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Ever dutiful, I spent the next two weeks slogging through
studies of phonemic awareness, whole language, and issues of
dyslexia and other disabilities. In my darkest moments, I
rummaged my drawers in search of the law school
applications that I had packed away the year before. Finally, I
made an appointment with my advisor. “No literature,”
smiled Shulman, unmoved by my end-of-the-world
expression. “You'll start one.”
The essays in this book represent my response to this
challenge. Since my first acquaintance with the cognitive
sciences, I have been concerned with the question of
understanding historical understanding, to use Suzanne
Wilson's apt expression. Lest I convey the impression that I
discovered this question only by ignoring the vast
historiographic literature on this topic, let me assure readers
that I have benefited immeasurably from the likes of
Collingwood, Hexter, Bloch, Gottschalk, Woodward, Becker,
Bailyn, Novick, Ginzburg, and others. This body of literature,
often autobiographical and self-reflective on the writer's
career as researcher, lecturer, and teacher, contains bountiful
insights. But, by and large, it trains its gaze on skilled
historical practice, and focuses on the endpoints, the termini,
of historical cognition. As a researcher into historical
cognition, I am most interested in what goes on in the
middle: the way stations of skilled historical practice, the
false starts, the half-baked ideas, the wild goose chases that
are edited out of historian's monographs, as well as their
methods books for novices.
To reveal historical cognition before it gets tidied up for
public presentation, I could not rely on the traditional
arsenal of research techniques. Multiple choice tests tell us
only that the correct bubble was blackened, but not what
thinking processes led to the choice. In search of historical
understanding, I have ventured into hundreds of classrooms
—sometimes for months on end—listening, observing,
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