Syllabi Creation, History Courses, and More

The  blog will take a short break as the semester kicks in.  In the meantime, have a look at these posts on teaching, baseball history, syllabi creation, questions for the survey course, American pre-history, and classroom decorum.

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, "Visual Learners and Historical Myopia," April 3, 2013
 
Randall Stephens, "The Plagiarism Gamble and Theory of Mind," August 31, 2011

Dan Allosso, "American Pre-history," February 6, 2012

Bill McCoy, "Key Questions for a World Civ Seminar," July 11, 2011

Jonathan Rees, "Jump Right in, the Water's Fine," June 27, 2011

Heather Cox Richardson, "Richardson's Rules of Order, Part X: A Word to Athletes (or Musicians, or Artists, or Anyone Who Has a Significant Interest Outside of the Classroom)," October 19, 2009

Chris Beneke, "Why I Teach Baseball History: A Brief, Self-Serving Manifesto," January 9, 2013
 

For other posts on teaching, check out these essays, forums, and interviews in Historically Speaking.

History Classroom Roundup

Alastair Jamieson, "Germany's Angela Merkel teaches history class on Berlin Wall anniversary," NBC World News, August 13, 2013

German Chancellor Angela Merkel drew on her Communist-era experiences to teach a history class at a school on Tuesday - the 52nd anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Merkel, who is campaigning ahead of next month’s general election, gave a 45-minute lesson as a "substitute teacher" for a 12th-grade class in east Berlin.>>>

Sacha Cordner, "Lawmaker Considering Legislation To Cut Down 'Islam-Bias' In Fla. School Textbooks," WFSU-Tallahassee, August 5, 2013

A Florida lawmaker is considering legislation that would give the public input on the content found in Florida school textbooks. His overall aim is to cut down on what he calls the “Islam-bias” in state schools.

Melbourne Republican Representative Ritch Workman says Prentice Hall’s “World History” book not only puts an inaccurate spin on Islam, it also dedicates a whole chapter to the religion.>>>

Mitch Daniels’ Email Criticizing Howard Zinn Roundup

Chris Beneke
 

Tom LoBianco, “Daniels Looked to Censor Opponents,” The Associated Press, July 16, 2013

“Emails obtained by The Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request show Daniels requested that historian and anti-war activist Howard Zinn's writings be

banned from classrooms and asked for a "cleanup" of college courses. In another exchange, the Republican talks about cutting funding for a program run by a local university professor who was one of his sharpest critics. … The emails are raising eyebrows about Daniels' appointment as president of a major research university just months after critics questioned his lack of academic credentials and his hiring by a board of trustees he appointed.”

The Mitch Daniels email, February 9, 2010

“This terrible anti-American academic finally passed away. The obits and commentaries mentioned that his book ‘A People’s History of the United States’ is ‘the textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.’ It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. … Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before any more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?”

92 Purdue faculty members, “An open letter to Mitch Daniels,” July 22, 2013

“We trust our colleagues to introduce young people to the facts of history, but also to the much more difficult, much more essential practices of critical thinking. We trust our K-12 colleagues to know how and when to present challenges to received knowledge and how to encourage their students to judge such challenges for themselves. And we trust them to decide how and when to use controversial scholarship such as Zinn’s in their classrooms. This kind of academic freedom is essential to all levels of education, whether within a tenure system or not.”

Humanizing History

Steven Cromack

When I teach, I deliberately make an effort to connect big history to the personal lives of my students. At the heart of my world history curriculum are three main ideas:

Walker Evans' photo, "In front of 310 East
Sixty-first Street," 1938. Courtesy
of the Library of Congress.

1. How each individual sees the world matters.
2. Reality is a construction based on an individual’s worldview.
3. It is difficult to reconcile an individual’s interests with those of a society.

It is my hope that as we examine history with these ideas in mind, students can begin to think about their existence on a deeper level; that as they go about their daily lives, they have the skills they need to grapple and engage with their world; and that they will learn to face not only their own beliefs and sense of morality, but also those of others. In immersing oneself in the world, the individual turns information into meaningful enlightenment. For, as John Dewey once wrote, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” 

Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK

Randall Stephens

Readers might find interesting this recent article in the Guardian about history battles.   On the heels of the Niall Ferguson scandal, Labour Education spokesman and historian Tristram Hunt writes: "From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about th

Read the above at the BBC

e future." ("History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought," Guardian, May 12, 2013).

Here's a brief excerpt:

For as [Niall] Ferguson has discovered to his cost, history enjoys a uniquely controversial place within British public life. "There is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history," complained an embattled Michael Gove in a speech last week. "There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don't tend to command much column space in the broadsheets."

Even if academic historians might not like it, politicians are right to involve themselves in the curriculum debate. The importance of history in the shaping of citizenship, developing national identity and exploring the ties that bind in our increasingly disparate, multicultural society demands a democratic input. The problem is that too many of the progressive partisans we need in this struggle are missing from the field.

How different it all was 50 years ago this summer when EP Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class , his seminal account of British social history during the Industrial Revolution. "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand loom weaver, the 'utopian' artist ... from the condescension of posterity," he wrote.>>>

Apologia pro Common Core

Steven Cromack

The 1983 report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform stunned Americans. Schools across the country scrambled to design content standards and implement assessments.

Thirty-years later, history seems to be repeating itself. In an effort to improve K-12 education, forty-five states, the District of Columbia, and four territories have adopted and implemented the Common Core State Standards. As of 2013, Texas, Alaska, Virginia, Minnesota, and Nebraska are the five holdouts. Members of the academy and secondary school history teachers should be euphoric about the Common Core, which mandates that middle and high school students actually do the work of historians. This includes, but is not limited to, reading and analyzing primary and secondary sources, as well as synthesizing such information coherently in written assignments. The crux of the Common Core is 21st-century readiness, i.e., putting a verb in a sentence correctly, and being able to read not “good,” but well. 

The standards themselves are not revolutionary. In fact, they simply mandate that teachers actually teach reading and writing. The best teachers have always done this. But at least with the Standards, teachers will be held accountable if they choose to use PowerPoint and the textbook as their sole methods of instruction. 

Why History Students Should Love Big Data

Eric Schultz

Spring 1976. Wilson Hall, Brown University. The late, great Professor William McLoughlin has just informed his 85 students in “American Social and Intellectual History” that they are to write their first paper. All he has given us is the title: “The Age of Jefferson and Adams.” We groan. Then he adds: “Keep it to three pages or less. Double-spaced.” We smile. Three pages? How hard can that be?

“If you make the margins too wide,” McLoughlin adds, “I’ll mark you down a grade.”

Needless to say, nobody got an A on that paper, or so the good professor informed us. There may have been a B or two. Not me. It was all I could do to contain my flowery opening paragraph to a single page. Some of us recovered slightly in round two, wherein we committed “The Age of Lincoln and Calhoun” to three, double-spaced pages. Some retreated to organic chemistry and other more reasonable challenges.

Little did I know, but I had just been introduced to Big Data—though it would take 35 years to earn that name. Take an endless, insurmountable, seemingly disconnected pile of information, separate the grain from the chaff (or, as my engineering buddies would say, the signal from the noise), and tell a concise, compelling story about what it all means.

Visual Learners and Historical Myopia

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

On my first day as a brand new assistant professor a student came up to me, introduced himself, and announced, “I am a visual learner.” The class was a reading and writing intensive freshman seminar with a predetermined syllabus. I knew we had a problem, but I had limited agency to remedy the situation. 

This year I decided to see if I could match my long-since graduated student’s need for visual stimulus with my own desire to make students delve deep into the documents that reveal the mental landscape of the past. I integrated video presentations into the middle portion of each three-hour seminar.

The visual interlude fixed one pedagogical problem and revealed another. Although academic historians of colonial America know that all the world was not New England, word has yet to reach the filmmakers. Three Sovereigns for Sarah captures Salem’s witchcraft crisis and Mary Silliman’s War strips the romantic Revolutionary myths away from a tense civil war in Connecticut. When I wished to illuminate my own area of expertise, the colonial mid-Atlantic, I came up short. No film of which I am aware follows Conrad Weiser through Penn’s Woods or brings to life the ascetic world of the Ephrata Cloister. In the realm of video pedagogy,  the years between witches and independence and the geography between Puritans and plantations cease to exist. 

Are You A “Rigorous” Teacher?

Steven Cromack

“Rigorous” is one of the most commonly used words in education these days. In their profiles, many schools—public, private, parochial, charter, institutions of higher learning—claim to be “rigorous.” Teachers and professors claim to be or have a reputation for being “rigorous.” But what on Earth does that word actually mean? What does it mean to be a “rigorous” teacher?

 

In Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools (Jossey-Bass, 2006) Tony Wagner et al. explore whether rigor is about content or teaching, or both. They conclude that there are common elements between content and instruction, but ultimately, the definitions of rigor are ambiguous. While each educator must make sense of rigor for himself or herself, Change Leadership suggests ways to help teachers understand rigor better. Rigor is not “simply about students being given more or harder work. Rigor is about what students are able to do as a result of the lesson.” The state of Virginia requires students to memorize ninety-two natural elements. But, what good is such information if the students do not understand the scientific method behind Mendeleev’s Periodic Table? In contrast, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts do not earn merit badges through memorization and test taking. Instead, they need to develop a plan and execute it, and the end result is a hands-on service project, the sum of everything they have learned.

A Research Exercise with the Watergate Tapes

James O’Toole*

Richard Nixon press conference, November 17, 1973

The recent announcement that the famous 18-minute gap on the Watergate tape recordings may in fact be recoverable gives me the chance to share some experience I’ve had with using the tapes in teaching. Several times over the years, I have put together an exercise in the criticism and use of sources that asks students to assess three distinct sources, each of which purports to tell exactly what happened at a specific historical moment. (I have used this mostly in graduate research seminars, but it also works with undergraduates if you give them a little more guidance and background.)

Teaching Emancipation

Aaron Astor

With the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and the ongoing popularity of the Lincoln movie, which focuses on passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives, it seems as relevant as ever to talk about how we teach emancipation to undergraduates today.  When I broach the subject in my 19th Century US History course I begin by asking the class a simple question:

Who freed the slaves?

The answers are predictable. First is usually “Lincoln.” And then “the Union Army,” followed by “Congress” and/or “the 13th Amendment.”  A particularly astute student will say, “the slaves freed themselves.” 

The answer, I quickly tell them, is that all of these things are true. But as quickly becomes apparent, I tend to emphasize the latter interpretation—self-emancipation—over the others.   After all, scholarship on emancipation in the last 30 years has focused more and more on the myriad ways in which slaves undermined the bonds of mastery, broke for Union lines at places like Fortress Monroe, attained contraband status in Union army camps, served in the Federal army as soldiers, and made a revolutionary bid for freedom and citizenship in a unique moment when the white power structure was rent by civil war.   I have contributed to that scholarly trend myself with my work on the border states of Kentucky and Missouri, where the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply, and slave agency—by male and female alike—proved especially critical in the emancipation process.

Bend, Don’t Break

Jonathan Rees

Fred Watson, "Bookstack," 1992, Northumbria
University, Newcastle, UK. Photo by Randall Stephens.

“Students WILL NOT, and absolutely refuse, to read anything. Give the assignment, and they just ignore it, even if there's a quiz on the reading.”
.
- David Bordwell, film historian, University of Wisconsin Madison (via Roger Ebert)

Anyone who has taught in a college classroom over the last five or ten years can feel Professor Bordwell’s pain.  While I imagine the English professors must have it the worst (how can you teach novels if nobody has read the novel?), practically all the historians I know fret constantly about student reading because their discipline is also a literary art.  While it is possible to teach historical facts through lecturing or even just showing films, there is simply no other way for students to learn how to do history themselves except by reading book-length works by great historians.

So what is to be done?  I’ve already suggested that killing the traditional history textbook and replacing it with a smaller number of primary sources on this very blog.  That decision was, in part, a concession to the new realities of student life.  However, I don’t want to leave the impression that I support dumbing down the history curriculum in order prevent mass failure.  I’m of the school that professors should bend, but not break when it comes to reading because no matter what some commission in Tallahassee might think, the liberal arts really are very useful in life.  On the most basic level, graduates will never be able to work in any world of ideas if they can’t read well because that’s how ideas are conveyed.  Therefore, humanities professors faced with non-reading students have to teach their recalcitrant readers the kinds of reading skills that they’ve never learned.

Roundup: The History Classroom

.
Janet Bagnall, "Teaching Sovereignty in Quebec Classrooms," The Gazette, November 6, 2012

. . . . Éric Lamoureux, 45, a history teacher at Vanier College, instructs students who have already had several years of Quebec history classes in high school. Students’ reaction to another course on Quebec history, complete with discussion of the two independence referendums, is “Oh, no, not that again,” he said. “Yet I teach a course on Montreal history and it’s full to the rafters.”>>>

Nicholas Ferroni, "Using Music in the Classroom to Educate, Engage and Promote Understanding," Huffington Post, November 8, 2012

. . . . Educators have been using music to effectively educate for as long as there has been music. Many of us were fortunate to have those unconventional and edgy teachers (mine were Mr. Caliguire and Mr. "Weez," and I can't thank them enough), who played the iconic protest songs from the anti-war movement of the '60s and '70s, and then we analyzed and discussed the lyrics. This was one of my favorite activities and it helped me understand the nation and its differing political views better than any textbook or lecture ever could. This, however, is not the method of using music in the classroom to which I am referring. The method of using music that I will be discussing can be applied to all subject areas and used to engage all learners.>>>

Lara Harmon, "Teaching with Food," Teachinghistory.org blog, October 15, 2012

We need food to live, but don't always think about where food that comes from. We carry foods and foodways with us as we immigrate, emigrate, or migrate. We share food and celebrate with it. Every bite we eat has a long history involving geography, trade, science, technology, global contact, and more.>>>

James M. Lang, "Teaching What You Don't Know," Chronicle of Higher Ed, October 22, 2012

. . . . I can confirm that easily enough from my own dozen years of teaching at a liberal-arts college. Although my background is in 20th-century British literature, I regularly have to dip back into the 19th century for my survey course on British literature. With almost no formal training in rhetoric, I count "Argument and Persuasion" among my standard course offerings. Every member of my department could make similar claims.>>>

Teaching History to Undergrads: An Interview with Sam Wineburg

Randall Stephens

Sam Wineburg is a professor in the School of Education at Stanford University and director of the Stanford History Education Group.  He has written and taught widely on historical consciousness, questions of identity and history in recent America, and the uses of the past.  He's the author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple University Press, 2001); Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School Classrooms (TC Press, 2011), with Daisy Martin and Chauncey Monte-Sano; and editor of Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (NYU Press, 2000) with Peter N. Stearns and Peter Seixas. (In 2006 Joe Lucas interviewed Wineburg in Historically Speaking.)  

Below I ask Wineburg about one of his courses and the challenges of history education.

Randall Stephens: What made you decide to teach a course on "Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States & the Quest for Historical Truth"?

Sam Wineburg: When I moved to Stanford from the University of Washington in 2002, I began to encounter very bright students in our Masters of Teaching program who were highly critical of their high school history books, but who reserved a sacred place for Zinn's A People's History. It had been years since I read the book, so I went to the bookstore, purchased the latest edition and started to read. The first thing that popped out at me was that despite the fact that the book had been in print for over two decades no new scholarship had been incorporated in Zinn's narrative. Chapters on the Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, the Cold War and everything prior to 1980 were frozen in amber. It was as if, once you came to your historical conclusions, you never had to rethink your position in light of new scholarship—such as the opening up of the Soviet archives and the light these documents shed on spies in America, or the tell-all exposes of the Emperor Hirohito's inner coterie and how these memoirs changed our ideas about how close (actually, how distant) the Japanese were to surrender before Hiroshima. The more I started to dig the more I started to realize how useful A People's History would be pedagogically, particularly for students who conceptualize the past in stark binaries of true and false. 

Stephens: Why have historians had such varying views of Zinn's bestselling work?

Wineburg: I think most historians agree that the book is pretty weak as a piece of historical scholarship. The most favorable review of the book was by Eric Foner, who when he published his review in 1980, was fairly close to Zinn politically. But even Foner's review spelled out serious reservations. Since then, Michael Kazin, the editor of Dissent and a historian with impeccable leftist credentials, gave A People's History a good thrashing in a review published in 2004. It seems to me that the most ardent fans of the book come not from the community of professional historians, but from the ranks of high school teachers, Hollywood personalities, and Amazon.com reviewers.

Kill Your Textbook

Jonathan Rees

In light of the interview I did with NPR a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d try to explain a little more here about why I stopped assigning a U.S. history survey textbook.  Since the decision to assign anything is almost always the teacher’s or the professor’s alone, this post is primarily aimed at my fellow educators.  However, as this decision has a tremendous effect on everyone else in the classroom too, I hope history students (or maybe just former history students) will chime in below with comments.

Before I made the switch to a no-textbook survey class, I was assigning a different textbook every year or two for about five or six years.  What made me unhappy with them wasn’t the quality of the scholarship.  Every one of them was solid in that department.  What made me unhappy with them was the alignment between what was in them and my lectures.  I came to believe that they were all teaching against me rather than with me.

What does that mean?  Well, like I wrote in my original post here on this subject a few months ago, anyone teaching the post-1877 US survey class has a lot of ground to cover.  With a limited amount of time and lots of history worth discussing, something is inevitably going to be left out.  Textbook writers have it a little easier.  They can include more material in print than I’ll ever get to during a 14-week course.  Yet it seemed to me that the relationship between what I was teaching and the material that appeared in whichever textbook I was using was getting further out of whack with each passing year. 

Of course, there were inevitable areas of overlap.  I teach the New Deal.  There’s a New Deal chapter in every textbook.  But I had started teaching the New Deal more as a series of themes rather than a long list of programs, which made having students read about programs that I no longer taught seem like a waste of their time.  And then there’s the material that I’ve been teaching for years that nobody seemed to cover well.  Take the 1960s, for example.  I think it’s important to teach the counterculture, but even the best survey textbooks treat Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey with kid gloves, assuming they bother to cover them at all.

Then there’s the elephant sitting in the corner of every introductory history classroom:  the fact that so many students don’t read the assigned textbook no matter what.  Sure, I always imagined that the best students could use it as a kind of encyclopedia, looking up the terms that they don’t really know, but that was a pretty expensive study aid that I was making them buy.  Ultimately, I was reading (albeit very quickly) so many textbooks in so few years that I lost interest in ever reading another one again.  Be honest with yourself now:  Do you read every new edition of your chosen history survey textbook?  Have you ever read even one edition cover-to-cover yourself?  If I wasn’t willing to read the textbook I assigned, how could I in good conscience make my students read it too?

Overcome with pedagogical despair, I wrote a post on my blog critiquing modern textbooks without having a really good solution to the problem.  That’s when a colleague of mine at our sister institution (who you may know as Historiann) left a comment suggesting that I adopt her approach and assign no survey textbook at all.  I remember exactly what first flashed through my mind as soon as I read her comment:  “You can do that?” 

Yes, you can.  As the secondary school teacher from Alaska suggested towards the end of my time on Talk of the Nation, there are plenty of principals out there who might look askance at high school teachers who tried innovating in this manner.  Perhaps there are some department chairmen out there who might frown upon contingent faculty who tried doing something that’s still rather novel.  People with tenure, however, have no good excuse.  You really can teach a rigorous American history course without a textbook, and speaking personally I’ve never been happier.

Please understand that it’s not as if I’ve chucked all assigned reading out the window.  I’ve replaced my textbook with edited primary sources.  Also, as always, I assign three other short books on a rotating basis covering subjects that I’ll explore in greater depth during class time.  I think of this arrangement as the equivalent of the Sugar Act of 1764.  Like the British Empire, I’ve lowered the reading tariff, but now it’s much more strictly enforced through things like ID quizzes and requirements for details on my essay exams.  Since the documents I select now correspond perfectly to what I cover in lecture, I’m also sending the unmistakable signal that this is the history that students have to know.

I don’t want to teach from a textbook.  I want to assign readings that reinforce the way I teach already.  Equally importantly, by killing my textbook I’ve killed the kind of coverage pressures that I discussed on NPR.  This not only gives me more time to teach the history that I want to teach, it gives me more time to teach skills like writing and reading that my students often desperately need in order to succeed throughout their college careers and beyond.

Unfortunately, the kinds of commercial demands that James Loewen famously described so memorably almost twenty years ago now still make it impossible for commercial textbooks to enable the kind of flexibility that history teachers should demand.  However, thanks to the vast array of primary sources that are now available to history teachers all over the world, it’s really easy to assemble textbook substitutes online or to use document banks assembled by publishers of all kinds.  This way, we can all teach what we want, not what they want – but only if we’re willing to break with the past and take the first step in a new pedagogical direction.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  He blogs about education technology, labor and American history at More or Less Bunk.  He is also a course editor and consultant for Milestone Documents.  His book, Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life: A Brief Introduction, will be released in September by M.E. Sharpe.

When Is It Time to Stop Teaching Something?

Jonathan Rees

Those of us who teach the second half of the American survey course face a problem that only recent historians ever seem to face: our period keeps expanding.  Until there’s some kind of mass meeting where all we historians decide to move the dividing line in a two-course US survey sequence from 1865 or 1877 to 1900 or something, what counts as 1877 to the Present will only get larger.  This poses some problems for those of us who’d like to keep our courses current.

When I started teaching during the late-1990s, 1989 (with the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that) was a natural time to stop.  A few years ago, I rearranged my entire survey course in order to make it up to September 11, 2001, without actually covering it as everyone I was teaching still remembered it perfectly.  Well, those days have changed.  Listening to my students talk, I realized it was time to recall the events of that day and at least a few of the ones following it because they were barely cognizant of what was happening at that time yet have been living in its shadow ever since.

Besides needing to make room for the near present, I’ve been trying to update some of my other lectures from further back in light of recent scholarship.  When I first started talking about the 1970s, it was all Watergate all the time.  After all, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened was the first book on that decade to come out after it ended.  Jefferson Cowie has absolutely torpedoed that stereotype forever.  I’ve also tried to include some of the absolutely amazing material that’s been written about the rise of conservatism in recent years by people like Kim Phillips-Fein and Bethany Moreton.

My problem, therefore, has not been what to include in the new lectures I’ve been writing.  My problem has been what to cut out.  Cover new ground in any depth and something has to go.  Since I’ve also tried to redesign my course to include less lecturing, some of these cuts have been quite painful.

For example, I used to work for Stanley Kutler.  If you know Stan, you know that he was the first academic historian to write a book about Watergate.  When you get Stan to talk about Nixon, he won’t stop.  Therefore, I picked up an enormous amount of information about Watergate almost by osmosis.  I’ve cut my Watergate coverage down from a lecture all its own to about ten minutes.  It just doesn’t seem as important as it once did, anyway. 

Another subject from the survey class I used to cover in much greater detail is the New Deal.  That was two lectures:  First New Deal in the first one, Second New Deal in the second.  The Depression got a lecture all its own.  It still does, but I’ve got the New Deal down to one lecture by simply admitting to myself that the long string of Alphabet Soup programs that history teachers have been teaching since about the time that Roosevelt died is actually rather boring.  I now cover the programs that I think were crucial (NIRA, Social Security, NLRA, and a couple of others) and let my students read about most of the rest.

Similarly, I used to have one lecture for the Populists and another lecture for the Progressives.  Maybe that’s because I was taught by so many political historians as an undergraduate and graduate student, but I’d rather be talking about scholarship that dates from after I was born, thank you very much.  If I enjoy it, I think they’ll enjoy it more.  Just because you learned it is no reason that you have to cover the exact same material that your professors did. 

Ultimately, I think the question of coverage is the key here.  As Lendol Calder has been saying for years, our survey courses do not have to turn us all into walking encyclopedias.  (In fact, if we do our jobs right many of your students will come back for more in upper-level courses.)  Since covering everything will get even harder as time marches on, perhaps its best to change your approach before defeat becomes inevitable.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  He blogs mostly about technological and academic labor matters at More or Less Bunk, but still writes about history there every once in a while.

Grades Are In!!!!

Heather Cox Richardson

This is what teachers feel like when the semester finally drags to an end:

Good luck to all of our graduates. We hope you learned as much from us as we did from you.

Norway Doorway, pt 5: Sean Taylor on Reacting to the Past

Randall Stephens

One of the more enjoyable things about my Fulbright experience in Norway has been getting to know other American Fulbrighters and to hear about the work they are doing. Martin Fisk (Oregon State University, University of Bergen) is studying bacterial life "deep in the Earth and their impact on the rocks in which they are found. This research could contribute to solutions

of a number of environmental problems and help to identify evidence of past life on Mars." He's one of the researchers who is taking part in a future Mars Rover mission. Others are studying climate science, literature, drama, public art, the nature of genocide, and much, much more.

The historian Sean Taylor--a Fulbright scholar at the University of Agder in Kristiansand--is associate professor of history at Minnesota State University Moorhead. His research focuses on colonial, revolutionary, and early national America. While in Norway he is working on a dynamic new pedagogy that is changing the way we draw students into debates about history. Called Reacting to the Past, this history game offers students the chance to engage history on a more direct level.

The Reacting to Past website at Barnard College describes it as follows:

Reacting to the Past (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills.

In the video embedded here I speak to Taylor about his use of this pedagogy and how it has worked in his classroom. He also speaks to me about Barnard College's role in developing curriculum and hosting events. And finally Taylor tells me a little about how he'd like to use Reacting in the classroom in Norway.

Norway Doorway, pt 2: Getting Students Interested in Historical Questions

Randall Stephens

I'm giving a talk on Wednesday to high school teachers in Trysil, Norway, which happens to be the largest ski destination in the country. Poor me. I'll be focusing in on how we might best engage students in historical, political, and cultural debates. That's always a tough task, especially if students arrive on the first day with absolutely no interest in the topic.

As a guide I plan to use a course I teach on America in the 1960s. (Admittedly, it's a bit easier to generate interest here. Would be more difficult if the class was about Medieval court records or Byzantine statesmanship.) Larger guiding questions, I've found, work well in a class like this. I want students to better understand change over time, the connection of the past to the present, and the debates that rage over American history. Here are some of the questions that help direct the 60s course:

Can we sum up an entire decade? Can we make coherent generalizations about America in the 1960s?

In what ways was America in 1969 different from America in 1959?

How is America in 2012 different from America in the 1960s?

What explains the degree of activism—anti-war movements, the black freedom struggle, the New Right, liberation movements—of the decade?

How did American politics and culture have a world impact in the 1960s?

How have the debates and key issues of that decade continued to shape American culture? (Hint: culture wars.)

To describe how best to make use of these sorts of questions—and more micro ones as well—I'm going to draw on some material from the National History Education Clearinghouse (NHEC). (This is a stretch for me. I don't typically cotton to endless pedagogy talk.) The NHEC website includes some great material on "Inquiry Lessons," which:

introduce students to the "doing" of history. Through using evidence to investigate historical questions, students are given the opportunity to see that history is not just a collection of facts, but rather a rigorously constructed set of arguments. As students encounter new and in some cases contradictory evidence, they are asked to reconsider their initial views, learning that interpretations of the past can change based on the available historical evidence.

The idea is to choose a historical question that can then be examined in detail with primary and secondary sources. Other questions might follow that will help students think about the sources. How do the documents relate to one another? How can one judge the relative value of one source against another? The evidence can go well beyond written materials. In the case of the 1960s one could use posters, video clips, music, photographs, and more.

I'm looking forward to my first interactive session with teachers. And I'm hoping that we'll have a good discussion about what works best to draw students into the debates. Maybe I'll get some skiing in as well.

iPad for Higher Ed Roundup

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Steve Kolowich, "Relaunching the iPad: Apple drops new iPad apps for digital textbook creation and distribution," Inside Higher Ed, January 20, 2012

NEW YORK CITY -- Apple made its much-anticipated move on the education technology industry on Thursday, announcing a revamped version of its iTunes U platform that could challenge traditional learning management

systems. It also unveiled new tools for creating and distributing low-cost digital textbooks that could speed the pace of e-text adoption.>>>

Dan Miller, "Analysis: Apple's e-textbook push earns mixed grades," Macworld.com, Jan 19, 2012

Ask people in educational publishing about Apple’s foray into e-textbooks, and you’ll hear a consistent message: It’s good for all of us—and good luck to Apple.

It’s good for e-textbooks in general because “Every time Apple enters a market, that market gets attention,” as Dan Rosensweig, CEO of textbook-rental firm Chegg, puts it. Widespread availability of e-textbooks on the iPad could help alert a lot of students, teachers, and parents who didn’t know otherwise that such things exist.>>>

Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows, "Apple to bolster iPad's educational content," San Francisco Chronicle, January 19, 2012

. . . . Apple also wants to empower "self-publishers" to create new kinds of teaching tools, said the people. Teachers could use it to design materials for that week's lesson. Scientists, historians and other authors could publish professional-looking content without a deal with a publisher.>>>

Jeffrey R. Young, "Apple's New E-Textbook Platform Enters an Already Crowded Field," Chronicle of Higher Ed, January 19, 2012

Apple made a splashy entrance into the digital-textbook market on Thursday at an event here at the Guggenheim Museum, but its new build-your-own-textbook tool is likely to lead to more fragmentation in the market rather than becoming a dominant new model.>>>

Larry Abramson, "Apple Carves Inroads In Educational Publishing," NPR, January 19, 2012

Apple today launched a big initiative to update an old standby, the school textbook. In a splashy announcement, the company released new tools to help publishers create digital content for students. As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, Apple is trying to capitalize on enthusiasm for the iPad in schools and colleges.>>>