"Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it." Alright, so that's a hackneyed old explanation for why studying history is important. For me, it conjures up wars and catastrophes, plagues and injustices that we must keep abreast in order to avoid. It also suggests that we are comfortably removed from the bygone horrors that we study—that a knowledge of history is crucial for our future but not necessarily for the present.
I'm writing about these ideas because my classmates and I engaged in a lively discussion about the purpose of teaching and learning history in our social studies teaching methods class this evening. While my view on the purpose of studying history may change with time, I have some strong opinions on the matter right now.
It is easy to go about history by evaluating the past with moral judgments; it is more intellectually challenging to develop and ponder questions about how and why certain events occurred so that we might learn to ask similar questions about our world today. This is why I oppose the notion that the purpose of history education is to instill students with a heritage or a narrow set of value-judgments coinciding with good-and-evil dichotomies or the narrative of American exceptionalism. As another popular saying goes, in order to understand the causes and implications of historical moments, we must learn to approach the past as a foreign country. And this includes the American past. As such, it will be my role as a history educator to shed light on the nuances of historical processes and on the construction of history itself. The study of American history demands that students learn how to formulate questions and use evidence to probe people acted in a certain way at a certain time...be it BCE or 2003.
But yet another conundrum remains: what pedagogical tools do I need in order to make my theory of teaching history a reality?
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I love what you're saying here, Jenny, and there's a lot here. One opportunity that seems to be suggested by your comments is that it frames a necessity to think about how we question. How can we help our students to bring out their natural inquisitiveness in a way that serves their engagement with issues like motivation? Why *did* this leader choose to take this action? what concerns/constraints/blind spots/strategies led her to do *this* rather than *that*? I think we could make the case that there's something to be gained from being able to offer your students different angles of approach. Here's a link, for example to the Questionning Toolkit resource that was published in the Educational Technology Journal. Another useful door to empowering your students along the lines that you describe here is to start on the "playground," so to speak. It can help to remind our students that the historical figures they study were people, after all, and in some respects their motivations can be explored through analogy to experiences that your students have had themselves.
ReplyDeleteJenny, so thankful for your thoughts. I have been thinking the same things concerning teaching English. I get excited by the thought of learning history so we can ask similar questions of our world today...this makes history very relevant to students and as a student, I would be motivated to learn.
ReplyDeleteYou also have a way with words Miss Armstrong. I enjoy reading your prose.
Thanks for your responses, Jeff and Leah! Jeff, the "Questioning Toolkit" is a great resource. After starting to teach little by little in my student-teaching placement, I have found that it's hard to ask open-ended, provocative questions on the spot, much less to ask these questions without leading students to an answer that I want. POOT is certainly a great class for exploring these issues!
ReplyDeleteLeah, I'm excited to hear that you have similar feelings about engaging students with past issues by aligning our questions about the past with questions that we can ask about our world today.