Big Ideas From

Bibliography of Texts:

Tom Holt, (1995). Thinking Historically: Narrative, Imagination, and Understanding. New York: College Board.

•James W. Loewen, (1995). Lies My Teacher Told Me. New York: Free Press.

•Sam Wineburg, (2001). Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, Philadelphia, PA: Temple.

•Joanne Robinson, (2001). Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.

•Eric Foner, (1997). The New American History. Philadelphia, PA: Temple.

•Course Reader

Find this article:

Grant Wiggins (1989). The Futility of Trying to Teach

Everything of Importance. Educational Leadership. p. 44-59

Big Ideas From

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

By Sam Wineburg

Recommended book: A Midwife’s Tale by Ulrich

Washington’s Farwell Address

Federalist #10

Federalist #84 (Hamilton’s argument against the Bill of Rights)

Historians- reconstruct the past!

Academic fields-constitute different ways of knowing-

Kids need to know what a “Skilled reader of history does.”

Kids need to judge the trustworthiness of documents- assess the validity

Kids need to look for, find, and understand the subtext of historical documents.

Kids need to reconstruct the author’s purpose/intention/goals-and search for the goals

Kids should know how to use an author’s words and personal story to learn about his assumptions, worldview, beliefs, and the type of people they are.

Kids need to understand the social context of historical documents top get at the subtext and meaning of the document.

Kids need to understand that history is a chain of motive, action, result.

Interpretation is key to history.

Five Pillars of Historical Inquiry:

• Interpretation
• Perspective
• Context
• Multiple causality
• Evidence

1917 high school graduates as a group answered correctly only 33 out of 100 US History questions. The conclusion “Kids don’t know history.”

Problem: Structurally people look at what students don’t know vs. what they do know.

Traditional History Pedagogy Discussions:

Teaching content vs. skills

How to periodize the U.S. History course (assigning the proper sequence to topics in the curriculum

What are kids getting out of History?

Historical knowledge “Seeps into the cultural pores ‘even if it is not readily retrievable by 17 year olds on a quiz.” (Schudson)

Some Essential Questions:

• What does the teaching of History contribute to democratic society?
• What does history contribute to social literacy?

• What ways of thinking, writing, and questioning would be lost if we eliminated history form the curriculum?

“History endows us with the “invaluable mental power we call judgment.”

Woodrow Wilson

Wineburg advocates, the role of history as -

A tool for changing how we think.

• To promote a literacy of discernment
• A literacy of judgment
• A literacy of caution

Key approach- History teaches us:

A way to make choices

A way to balance opinions

A way to tell stories

Example: What is the text doing?

Page X

Wineburg wanted to know:

What are the challenges that historical texts posed to young people?

What prevents kids from reading texts more critically?

He started an inquiry into “Understanding Historical Understanding”

Historical cognition and Historical Practice

Found that kids need to read aloud and think aloud through the historical process.

He wants to analyze and present the answer to:

What is it exactly that historians do when they read historically?

What concrete acts of cognition lead to sophisticated historical interpretations?

Book outline:

Ch. 1. Why teach History

Ch. 2. Surveys research on teaching and learning history.

Part II Challenges Faced by novices in Learning History

Part III History Teaching

Part IV Context of history instruction

Chapter 1. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts

Why Study History at All?

“History holds the potential of humanizing us…”

“By tying our own stories to those who have come before us the past becomes a useful resource.”

“To situate ourselves in time.” To conceptualize ourselves

He sees a problem that the “concept of the usable past.” “We are not called upon to stretch our understanding to learn from the past.”

(Problem-Also- people shape and mold desired understandings.)

He is really arguing how history can be viewed
On the one hand- history as a validation manipulated for gratification.

On the other hand- “History to surprise and spur us to reconsider how we conceptualize ourselves.” He says this is too Esoteric- this needs to be explicit lessons for all.

Tip- We need to feel kinship with the people we study. If we do this it engages us and makes us feel connected.

Why does history have a Humanizing effect?

According to Degler:

“To expand our conception and understanding of what it means to be human.”

This means that if we understand the distant past, we will understand that we are more than the labels ascribed to us at birth.”

Historical Thinking is not a natural process it needs to be taught and learned

Wineburg argues historical thinking goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think.

It calls on people to change the basic mental structures we use to grasp the meaning of the past.

One example he cites is an AP student who is typical- he interprets history from the lens of today, but is thinking about the history in a context of today, verses a context of the period.

Wineburg is implying that – history students should:

• Monitor their own cognition
• Reflect on the differences of modern actions, views of today to those of the period they are studying.

Basically if students think deeply about history and documents-

• They spur new questions
• New issues of human experience are discovered
• However, current perspectives can blur new understandings and this is to be guarded against.

Example: Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre:

Other people are other. If we want to understand their thingking we should set out with the idea of capturing otherness… We constantly need to be shaken out of false sense of familiarity with the past--- we need culture schock.”

Page 10

Darnton is arguing for students to understand how people thought and came to these understandings in the period they lived.

P.11 History should be strange:

“Any good historian begins in strangeness the past should not be comfortable. The past should not be a familiar echo of the present, for if it is familiar why revisit it? The past should be do strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.”

Necromancy: the practice of supposedly communicating with the spirits of the dead to predict the future.

Which are the goals of historical study?

Goals #1:

To see through the eyes of the people who were there.

Goal #2 :

To teach us what we cannot see”

Why Study History?

Idea: Historical knowledge should serve as a bank of examples for (contemplating) present problems.

P12

“The past is a foreign country.”

Historical thinking requires us to reconcile two contradicting positions.

1. The present thinking (caution- we need not be too influenced by either)

2. Thinking in the past

Example: A Midwife’s Tale

There seems to be a discussion of how to balance the present minded thinking with thinking in the past- and to make connections and draw conclusions.

Finding how foreign history is and understanding how similar it is to our own experience.

P 12

Textbooks present history, “The way things are told is simply the way things were.”

Textbooks eliminate discussions of how history is written- No discussion of documentation.

There is no meta-discourse or places in the text where the author intrudes to indicate positionality and stance.

P13

Author suggests that teachers use both textbooks and monographs

Teachers should focus on exploring historical thinking:

Attention to types of evidence used to draw conclusions or build understanding should be included:

Wineburg Examples:

Student should get into the world of an Historian

1. Documents
2. Data
3. Questions to be puzzled over
4. How a historian pieces together a story
5. How the author is present in a text
6. Study each aspect of the story
7. The work of a historian
8. Types of historical study: social history…

Be sure to infuse history with Passion (it’s ok to share subjectivity.

Example- Concept of Prejudice:

Can be seen as patterns of thought that take root in particular historical moments, develop, grow and emerge in new forms in successive generations…

CAUTION: Don’t be overly influenced by present mindedness when studying about the past.

p.23

Kids “need to perceive the experience of others”

“Mature historical knowing, teaches us to go beyond our own image, to go beyond our brief life.”

The idea is to study history not through the lens of today.

Chapter 2 The Psychology of Teaching and Learning History

Why study history?

“Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.”

Cicero ca100 B. C.

Academic fields constitute different ways of knowing.

Piaget- Classified types of thinking required by different school subjects.

“The essence of understanding (history

Synthetic forms of thought:

Cause and Effect

Evaluation

Capacity to follow a sustained argument

Based on a study:

3 levels of achievement were found:

1. Pre-operational: Students did not relate question to the information provided
2. Concrete-operational: well organized response, did not go beyond the text
3. Formal-operational: going beyond the text, stating a hypothesis, checking them against the text

This shows what kind of thinking is desirable in a history class.

History for children under 14 should not contain too much abstraction.

Suggested Discipline Teaching:

What is history? Address the following:

• Nature of historical evidence
• Nature of reasoning from evidence
• Problems of reconstructing the past with partial/ mixed evidence
• Historical Research projects- Inquiries on topics (emphasis on ways of thinking that were different)
• Ability to connect ideas

All disciplines have ways of knowing:

• A body of concepts or key ideas with a common vocabulary
• Distinctive ways of relating concepts and ideas a syntax” for vocabulary
• Characteristic ways of establishing “warrant for truth claims” (veracity or reliability in historical texts/arguments/explanations) “Historians site documentary record”
• Distinctive forms of inquiry

Chapter 3 On the Reading of Historical Texts

Regarding reading tow witness accounts of an incident in history

Important quotation about the writing of history:

No matter how honest the two men may have been, the event described by one has a quite different flavor from that described by the other. The historian can never see the event itself… he can see it only through witnesses, and is as dependent on their eyes and emotions as on their pens. This is not to say that he must share their bias; quite the contrary. But he must understand it in order to allow for it.

Use the think aloud strategy with historical documents

Think aloud asks people to verbalize their thoughts as they solve complex problems or read.

Kids need to know what a “Skilled reader of history does.”

Think Aloud:

Asks people to report their thoughts as they are understanding.

Asks people to verbalize the contents of their thoughts

<Not the process of generating thoughts>

Kids need to ask the questions: What does the text do- addressing subtext?

What is the meaning of the text?

There are two types of Subtext related to Historical Documents-

1. Text as rhetorical artifacts

Historians try to reconstruct the author’s purpose/intentions/goals

A subtext of persuasion

1. Text as human artifact-

The text tells about an author’s assumptions, worldview, beliefs

How? In the words they use/ the people they are/

Texts that show how the world is constructed

Concepts we use to decipher human action-

Page 67 Students need to reach beyond the text and look for intention, motive, purpose, plan…

Reading of School Texts:

Texts are biased and must be analyzed

Typical Reading Behaviors of Textbooks:

Monitoring Comprehension

Using Reading Strategies such as “Back-Tracking”

Pauses

Formulate Summaries

Connect content of reading to what is already known

Predicting

Locating information

Literal Questioning

Inferential Questioning

History Disciplinary Reading needs reading for:

Author’s intent

Polemic of a text

Connotation of Words

Situate text in a disciplinary matrix

Winbeburg Suggests:

In order for history students to comprehend difficult texts they must enter (Connect) the text personally and must participate actively

Reading History:

Skilled readers of history talk to themselves as they read- the conversation ranges to meaning of the text to Author’s purpose, message, and personality/background- all asking students to think about why the author says what he says and what he means by saying it.

Readers need to understand about documents:

Author’s intent

Audiences’ reactions

(Meanwhile gauging their own reactions)

Students need to read texts:

“Not as lifeless strings of facts, but the keys to unlocking the character of human beings, people with likes and dislikes, biases and foibles, airs and convictions.”

Students need to sculpt images of the writers- then images are interrogated, mocked, congratulated, dismissed (Authors need to be decoded)

How?

We must shed our presentist conceptions

Immerse ourselves in the language of the past

Feel what past actors felt

Understand the connotations that they attached to words

Only by renouncing our own condition can we come to know the past on its own terms.

The image of the author constructed by the reader’s mind (is influenced by the background of the reader) Page 75

Wineburg Lesson Assignment:

• Goals for student learning
• The sequence of activities you will use to achieve these goals
• The materials you will use
• A rough estimate of how much time each activity will take
• How you will “see” student thinking
• How you will close the lesson
• Think about how this lesson challenges students’ belief that history consists of names and dates and is already a finished story.
• Address how your lesson speaks to one of the core pillars of historical thinking we’ve discussed (i.e., interpretation, perspective, context, multiple causality, evidence).

Page 97

From Ways of Reading to ways of knowing:

The defining features of historical discourse is the constant reference to the documentary record through footnotes.

Kids need to see and look for:

• Human Motive in texts they read
• Mine the truth from innuendo and half truth
• Understand certainty is elusive

Teach kids to see attempts to sway minds, change opinions, and rouse passions-

Students nee to question the text

Contextual Thinking:

Means that words or the views expressed in document are not, disembodied from the when, where, how, what preceded, what followed, why they were spoken, to who said them, to whom they were said to, and to what purpose, what intent, and to what consequence they had.

Contextual thinking is about seeing events through the perspective of the period it unfolded.

In order to think contextually one needs to recognize the discrepancy between personal beliefs and beliefs reflected in the documents.

Such as understanding and recognizing the foreignness of the topic.

Create distance- understand or Inquiry to the social context of documents.

Key component of contextual thinking is to dislocate from present-mindedness.

Peering at History Through Different Lenses

The Role of Disciplinary Perspectives in Teaching History (Pg 139)

Conceptions of History:

Dimensions:

Role of factual knowledge

The place of interpretation

Significance of chronology and continuity

The meaning of causation

History: is a narrative that sets a chain of motive, action, and result. Sequence and chronology must be clear. Individual motives set in motion actions that have results that must be explained. (153)

History is as much interpretation as fact.

Political, economic, social, cultural

Multiple causation

Teachers need to know the structures of their disciplines.

Models of Wisdom in the Teaching of History

Students need to:

Talk to each other

Write term papers

Discuss the significance of the topic they are studying

Debate

Get into the mind of the people who lived history!

Search for cause and motive

Overarching ideas and themes: authority, freedom, and representation

Making history is a dynamic process

What happened in the past was not fated or meant to be.

Human actors shape destinies by choices they made just as today.

It is important for students to embrace beliefs not their own and argue them with zest.

Kids need to investigate in history:

Values

Perspectives

Opinions

The Human side of history

Interpretations

Motives

Historiography

Evidence

Significance