Tag: historical thinking

History without Reading

January 12, 2010

Teaching

In “History without Reading,” Jim Cullen talks about a dirty little truth: a lot of students in our courses do not read, but we teach the courses as if they had done the reading, thereby only making things worse, because the students are getting nothing out of their classroom time. He suggests that it should be possible to teach history and historical thinking in such a way that we do not assume that the reading has been done. One reason students do not read, he says, is that we teach history assuming that it is obvious why one would want to study history, instead of trying to sell the relevance of history to students in the first place. Indeed, “so much of history education, from middle school through college, is a matter of going through the motions.” Cullen suggests that we not accept that and instead asks, “What would it actually mean to teach a course that presumed ignorance or indifference rather than one of preparation and engagement?”

Much of my teaching makes just this assumption, because the Western Civilization survey that I regularly teach is a general education requirement at George Mason University. People have to take it, whether they want to or not. I usually ask myself how I can teach a given class in a way that lets everyone get something out of it, no matter how well prepared they are. Of course, a well-done presentation can convey information to everyone, if they are engaged in it, but working with source material, visual or short texts, is often more helpful. Still, if the assumption that students read too little, if at all, frequently guides my preparation for individual classes, I refuse to accept it as a premise for a whole course. In the end, I want students to read, because it is impossible to do everything in class, and much of history is about reading and critical thinking. I want students to read and connect this reading to what goes on in class, and I want to hold students accountable for that reading.

Hence, last semester I began doing regular “surprise” reading quizzes. I usually posed the questions in a way that allowed students to answer in five minutes in a paragraph or with bullet points. Some questions would work if students had just done an internet search on the subject, but rising above a very low grade required actual reading. In the end, the carrot and sick that is the reading quiz seemed to work; however, it also increased the grading workload considerably, which is why I plan to vary formats in the coming semester. (See Plagiarism Again.)

Of course, doing things this way feeds into a system of rewards and punishments that still does not get across to students the value of studying history. I still need to convey why we are doing the work and even encourage them to want to do it. But relying on these factors alone does not seem to be enough, not even for the most engaged students in an elective history course.

Last week I listened to Daniel Pink talk about rethinking traditional carrots and sticks in the workplace. Pink argued that our minds and hearts do not always follow such logic, and employers could get more out of us with more nuanced approaches. His ideas found their limit, however, when a philosophy professor called in. Pink thought the professor was right to use the carrot-and-stick approach there, because it would work. On the other hand, the fact that the caller felt the need to ask indicated a certain level of dissatisfaction with her own approach, as I feel with mine. Pink himself added the caveat that students who learned only to react to incentives and sanctions would be ill-prepared for many workplaces that required more autonomy and initiative.

This last concern worries me, but maybe it is okay to ignore it in my large survey courses. After all, undergraduate education includes more independent work too, once students advance and specialize. Moreover, just getting to class and fulfilling the requirements of the General Education courses can help to train students in other ways, both intellectually and in terms of life habits such as self-discipline and task management.

This post originally appeared on Clio and Me (now closed) on on this date.
Contemporary Political Rhetoric and Teaching History

October 28, 2009

Past and Present, Teaching

Earlier this month I did a post on my Hist 100 blog that might be of some interest to readers here, “Contemporary Politics and History.” My audience was primarily freshmen in their first semester at university, most of them too young to have voted in the last election.

I have said this in class, but it needs repeating here: Our contemporary American political discourse about socialism and nazism has absolutely nothing to do with those terms and phenomena in actual history. While we are not in class to talk about American politics, I want to point out how language and history are being abused for political purposes. I am not doing this to undermine the stances of politicians who use hyperbole to make their points. There are perfectly good ideological and policy reasons that one can bring to either side of the health care debate, the energy policy debate, environmental policy debates, and so on. But none of these reasons has anything to do with Hitler, nazism, communism, or socialism—not if we are being honest, and as long as we are willing to see the slippery slope argument for what it is, a logical fallacy.

This abuse of history used to just offend me as a citizen who knew something about history, but addressing the abuse became part of my teaching job this summer when I had a student try to explain Hitler in terms of “socialism” and “big government.” That is when I realized that not only was history being abused for political purposes, but our contemporary political discourse was getting in the way of students understanding the past. That’s why I wrote a blog post on my own history blog sarcastically entitled, “What Having a Socialist Nazi in the White House Means for the Classroom.”

I could follow the logic of the student who described Hitler in terms of “socialism” and “big government,” if I were willing to understand the past in terms of this country’s contemporary self-image, but I am not. We need to take the past on its own terms and try to understand it in some detail before we attempt easy analogies. In other words, my concern relates to historical thinking, that is, that thing I began teaching you with the reading assignments from August 31st, including Gerald Schlabach’s “A Sense of History.”

This post originally appeared on Clio and Me (now closed) on on this date.
What Having a Socialist Nazi in the White House Means for the Classroom

August 28, 2009

Past and Present, Teaching

I am probably not alone when I say that I have a hard time taking GOP “socialism” rhetoric seriously. The same goes for right-wing attempts to equate Obama with Hitler. Apparently, however, I need to keep this rhetoric in mind when planning my classes, for it has entered my classroom in an unexpected way. In a blue book essay about totalitarianism this summer, one student explained nazism in terms of “socialism” and “big government.” There was no political intent behind these statements. The student simply drew on the language of everyday life, as students are wont to do.

This is a sad commentary on what rhetorical excess on the right is doing to our everyday vocabulary, but it also presents an opportunity. Without engaging in politicking, I can use this apparent linguistic and cultural deficit not only as motivation to be more thorough about how I teach socialism, nazism, and other modern political ideologies and systems, but also as an example for historical thinking. My instinct here is to talk about the use and abuse of history, which is probably what I will do. On the other hand, however, some of those who throw around the “s” word really believe that socialism is on the march in the United States. If I were to take such fears seriously, I would also use them to teach my students about how the meaning of language shifts and even mutates over time, sometimes meaning different things to different groups of people. This too would be a worthwhile lesson, although it would bring me closer to something that some students might perceive as politicking. I should probably take that chance.

This post originally appeared on Clio and Me (now closed) on on this date.
Human Rights in the History Survey

May 15, 2008

Teaching

I have been teaching History 100, the one-semester survey of Western Civilization that is required for all students at George Mason University. Yes, really. One semester. As I mentioned earlier, this semester I decided to abandon the old chronological approach and follow a thematic one instead. I organized the course into six major themes, plus an introductory unit on historical thinking. One of those themes was “Politics and Human Rights.”

If one looks at Western Civ textbooks or the reading lists from my days as a graduate student, human rights are not going to be an obvious subject of study, especially not for a history survey that can only afford to choose six major topics. Yet they are not only important to learn about, they also offer a powerful integrative vehicle for talking about a variety of issues that have been central to the history of the West since the eighteenth century.

I took my cue from a nice little collection of primary sources that Lynn Hunt edited and translated: The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996). Of course, people did not use the term “human rights” in the eighteenth century, but they did reimagine and rework the relationship between the individual and the state in a fundamental way. The rights that eighteenth-century thinkers and politicians posited and then fought for formed the basis of what we now consider fundamental human rights: freedom of religion and expression, the protection of one’s property, and the right to pursue an occupation and earn rewards according to one’s talents, not birth. Government existed to protect these and other rights, not according to the whims of a monarch above the law.

The English gained such rights based on the accumulation of precedents over time. Milestones included the Magna Carta (1215) and the English Bill of Rights (1689). Rights grew more expansive, but they adhered to Englishmen as Englishmen. Enlightenment thought, on the other hand, was characterized by its universality. Men had rights by virtue of their common humanity. Thomas Jefferson reflected both traditions in the Declaration of Independence (1776), which enumerated English offenses against the colonists’ rights, on one hand, but contained language whose bold universality conveyed a message far beyond its original purpose:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

As we know from American history, this famous declaration left many questions unanswered and long went unrealized in society. Who was to be included in this equality? At first it was only all free men. Black slaves were property. There was also the question of property qualifications for voting rights. Could the poor and uneducated be trusted to make the right decisions in a democracy? And what about women? Much of American history can be told as the history of making Jefferson’s words become a reality.

These questions also held great urgency during the French Revolution, which offers unparalleled opportunities for students to read about, reflect on, and discuss the major issues thrown up by the advent of citizenship and individual rights. For instead of struggling with the major issues over a period of some two centuries, the revolutionaries in France tried to do it all in a period of only five years, from the onset of the Revolution in 1789 to the end of the Terror in 1794.

The most enduring document from that time was The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), but students can also consider Olympes de Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791). Besides these and some other famous documents, Hunt’s book contains a host of compelling material otherwise unavailable in English. The main point of the exercise is to help students think about where our notions of such rights come from and to understand better their contingent and contested nature in the past.

Discussing Hunt’s book covered one seventy-five minute unit. Two more units entailed a lecture that walked students through these issues in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along the way exploring the issues of nationalism, feminism, socialism, and totalitarianism. I am still not satisfied with the result, but the topic of human rights lent Europe’s confusing political history more narrative coherence than I had been able to muster in the past. It also permitted me to push the issue into the second half of the twentieth century and include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), decolonization, the Helsinki Accords (1975), the collapse of Europe’s communist regimes, and the human rights abuses that followed Yugoslavia’s breakup.

My mind was dizzy after such a trip, especially since I use slides but no prepared text. I’m sure some students had trouble with the shifting geography and rapidly advancing timeline. Nonetheless, they were able to follow one theme over the course of two hundred years and see how it touches on nearly every major aspect of history in this time. How many other topics link politics, the economy, gender, race, religion, ideology, party politics, war, and international relations in such clearly important ways? In future I will surely make changes in how I cover the topic, but I will continue to give it an important place in my survey courses.

First published on this date on the now closed Clio and Me.
Fostering Historical Thinking with Brecht’s Galileo

March 14, 2008

Teaching
Spring is almost here, which means its time to order books for the summer term. Summer in DC gets hot, and the summer terms are short, so I usually try to assign things that are both reasonably entertaining and not too long for the general audience I get in my introductory survey courses that are mandatory requirements for all majors. Besides covering a variety of themes and genres, I often try to pick one book that will jump-start historical thinking. I want a book that will make students more aware of how much “the past is like a foreign country” that we will not understand, if we do not try to fathom the conditions and assumptions of the time without letting our contemporary worldview get in our way.
Last year I tried Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, which I had first experienced as a TA for Sandra Horvath-Peterson at Georgetown University back in the 1990s. Of course, Brecht adapts Galileo’s story to his own purposes, but it provides a useful point of departure for a discussion about the Scientific Revolution. It also forces students to come to terms with the limits of historical fiction.

It usually goes pretty well, though the first section I did it in was a little rocky, partly because not enough students had done the reading, but also because I was surprised that so few people had any general knowledge of fascism. The paperback edition we used, translated by Eric Bently, contains some excellent material on Brecht’s prejudices, but it spends too much time on material more of interest to specialists in drama. Some students read the first part of it, but most gave up and went straight to the play. So I integrated a mini talk of Brecht’s time into the discussions and got them to reason out how the problems of the nineteen thirties and forties had manifested themselves in a play Brecht had set in the seventeenth century. I also assigned sources from 1615 and 1633, so that they could get a sense of the issues from Galileo’s own time.

One point I tried to make clear was that science was only then beginning to manifest itself as an independent discourse, that it was perfectly natural for the Church to be interested in science at the time and even claim authority on the matter. Of course, I’m no specialist on the matter, but it seems to me that this basic point is worth making. Most students seemed to get it too. Indeed, I felt like cheering when one woman near the end of a class wondered aloud what people would think about our own world in another few hundred years. Sound trivial? Maybe to historians and those for whom historical thinking comes naturally. In our presentist society and with this presentist generation, I think the question was excellent. This student and her classmates were thinking historically.

The success of this discussion was also due in part to another issue. I have begun to “legitimate confusion”¹ for my students, that is, I have begun to cultivate an awareness in them of just how hard historical interpretation can be and how important learning how to ask questions can be. With this attitude, students can explore sources and ideas honestly and thoughtfully without fear of getting it wrong and looking bad. With such an awareness, students were willing to attempt the leaps of imagination necessary to navigate among three different time periods, the early twenty-first century, the nineteen thirties and forties, and the first few decades of the seventeenth century.

I might try this book again, though I could also do with a change. Perhaps some of you have some ideas?

I can’t remember where I got this phrase, but the link is now dead or hidden behind the AHA paywall (November 26, 2014). ↩

This blog post originally appeared on my old history blog, Clio and Me, on this date.
Across Generations

July 21, 2007

Teaching

The following post originally appeared on my old history blog, Clio and Me, on this date.

When I went to the student coffee shop on Friday, the student at the cash register guessed my order before I could tell him what I wanted. I remarked that I had had similar experiences with regulars when I worked at a Dunkin’ Donuts over twenty years ago. His response: “They had Dunkin’ Donuts back then?”

For me there has always been a Dunkin’ Donuts. Indeed, according to Wikipedia and the corporate website of Dunkin’ Donuts, the first store opened in 1950, which is close enough to “always” for someone born in the early 1960s. So why did the student think Dunkin’ Donuts was new? His own answer was eminently practical: “I haven’t even been alive for twenty years.” Still, his underlying assumption that so much of the world around him was new took me aback.

Maybe I should not have been surprised by his presentism. After all, the current generation of students has grown up hearing that they live in a completely different world than the one into which I was born. They have heard from their parents and teachers about a bygone world in the midst of a Cold War without personal computing, the internet, cell phones, iPods, and global warming. And then there are the many students who have grown up in new subdivisions, schools and strip malls.

What do these thoughts have to do with me and Clio?* One of my main goals in undergraduate survey courses is to teach historical thinking, which in part entails helping students appreciate not only that the world has a past, but that the people in that past saw that world through different eyes. But it is not enough for me to ask them to see how the world looks when it is filtered through the experiences of earlier generations. In order to do my job, I find it helps if I meet them halfway and try to understand how the world looks when filtered through their experiences. Of course, I usually end up looking uncool in the process, but as the father of a teenager I am used to that.
Politics in the Classroom

July 10, 2007

Teaching

The following piece first appeared on my former teaching blog, History Survey, on this date, then moved to Clio and Me, before landing here.

Do partisan politics have a place in the classroom? No. On the other hand, in a history class it is hard, even impossible to discuss many subjects without politics forming a subtext of the conversation. This difficulty is especially inherent in modern history. How, for example, can we talk about state-building, gender roles, participatory politics, and political ideologies without entering terrain in which we have a personal stake? And once we do that, how do we keep out partisan politics?

The trick is to make that difficult mental leap into the past and try to understand it from the point of view of people who lived in that time. We do not need to take sides with our ideological forefathers, and we do not need to attack their opponents. Nor do we need to respond to problems in the past with solutions from the present. Instead we need to try to think historically. We need to try to understand people in the past in their historical contexts. Making that leap is difficult, but possible.

Ironically, good civic practices are one potential side-effect of cultivating such historical sensibilities. If we can learn to imagine how people thought in the past, maybe we can imagine how our political opponents think in the present. Once we reach that point, a genuine dialog might be possible. The problems might be just as inextricable, but we might learn how to talk with each other instead of at each other. In other words, when we study history, it is possible to acquire the communicative habits necessary for a healthy civic culture. partisan politics do not belong in the classroom, but the classroom might have some lessons for partisan politics.

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Tag: historical thinking

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