Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape History Instruction

During the evenings, I interacted with others who defined historical study as a way of thinking, a manner of conducting research, and a style of writing. We participated in a professional community to improve the quality of our historical work. History at the university was a discipline, a unique way of knowing the world that professionals shared. In the high school, history was a subject students took and teachers taught, differing from other subjects only in the facts covered. Students claimed that they did in history exactly what they did in other courses used texts, memorized facts, did homework, and took tests. In the minds of adolescents, there is little unique about history. Early in my teaching career, it became clear that making these two worlds less dichotomous would be valuable for my students and for me. Actually, my research goals and teaching goals were not so different. As a historian, I tried to develop and use my critical intelligence to build an understanding of the past; as a teacher, I wanted to help others develop their critical faculties and deepen their understanding of the world. The discipline of history, filled with lively debate and thoughtful interactions, held great promise for my high school students. With an analytical stance deeply embedded in the discipline, history did not want for higher-level thinking or need any special, decontextualized add-ons to promote critical thought. Though this point is not widely acknowledged in schools or schools of education, history is more than a discrete subject matter; it is an epistemic activity.1 The discipline of history depends upon historians reconstructing the past, for doing history is more than merely uncovering facts. Likewise, learning history is more than memorizing facts. Students of history actively construct the past in their own minds. As the discipline of history has unique problems, practices, and habits of mind, so learning history involves distinctive problems and cognitive characteristics. History as a discipline and a course of study demands "meaning over memory. "2 Historians work to give meaning to historical facts, while students must work to give meaning to their historical experiences. This chapter supports a cognitive approach toward learning history, demanding that teachers understand the nature of historical knowledge, student thinking about history, and the context within which learning history occurs. It urges teachers to consider their classes within disciplinary frames, to design activities consistent with the generalizations, concepts, methods, and cognitive processes of the discipline of history itself. 3 How to do this? The problem for history teachers begins with trying to understand what defines meaning-making in history. What makes it distinctive? How do historians construct meaning? History teachers, of course, must have subject-matter knowledge to teach history. I share the concerns of those who point to the alarming numbers of teachers who are teaching out of their areas of academic preparation.4 However, teachers must go beyond merely knowing the subject. They also must consider how students typically learn history. How do students build meaning as they study the past? How can teachers help students move from surface or scholastic understanding to "deep" understanding? Little in my training prepared me for these pedagogical questions. As a high school history teacher for more than twenty-five years, I found great value in historyspecific research on cognition. A chance reading of an article by Samuel Wineburg introduced me to research by Wineburg, Leinhardt, Voss, Seixas, and Beck, among others.5 These scholars shared my historian-educator's belief that, as Seixas wrote, "there is something distinctive about the teaching and learning of history, which cannot be known by simply applying general principles of teaching and learning to issues of history education. "6 Unfortunately, little of this work seems to have found its way into national conversations about teaching history. This essay demonstrates the value of research for practitioners. It argues that emerging research can assist history teachers in designing and implementing instruction. To illustrate these points, I provide examples from my own practice in a ninth-grade world history course.