Undergraduate Competency for History Students

Dana Hamlin

The History Section of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of the American Library Association, recently announced that the association's Board of Directors approved a set of information literacy guidelines and competencies for undergraduate history students. A project more than four years in the making, these guidelines were developed by a committee of reference and instruction librarians, the majority of whom are subject specialists in history.

One of the members of the committee writes in an email sent to various history- and library-related listservs: "it is [the committee's] hope that the Guidelines will be used by librarians, archivists, and teaching faculty to guide teaching and learning throughout the undergraduate curriculum." Indeed, the introduction to the guidelines states that the document is intended to "provide a framework for faculty and librarians to assess [students' historical research] skills" and to "aid faculty in designing research methods classes, assignments, and projects," among other goals.

As someone who is part of the library/archives world and who has never taught history, I'm really curious about what the readers of this blog think about these guidelines. Are they helpful? Does a set of guidelines like this already exist in the teaching sector? Do you think this document has the potential to aid collaboration between history faculty and librarians?

"They say in the novel . . .": What Students Think about History Books and the Authors Who Write Them

Randall Stephens

Every semester I encounter, to paraphrase Oliver Sacks, the student who mistook his history book for a novel. A novel is a work of fiction. How many times do history professors have to explain the difference?

What is a Novel?

Why would a student think that a history book, say Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction, qualifies as a "novel"? (Hint: It has nothing to do with postmodernism or new historicism.) Students don't mistake cricket for baseball or a minivan for a sports car. They are familiar with those, though. Maybe the average undergraduate thinks that if a book has a title and an author--and if it's not a phonebook, cookbook, or a dictionary--then it must be a novel. Perhaps he or she has read The Grapes of Wrath or Don Quixote or Island of the Blue Dolphins. The memory of reading those novels--with so many pages, and with an author's name on the cover--forms how the student thinks of a "book." A history book looks like a novel, smells like a novel, ergo it must be a novel.

What is an Author?

Another common misunderstanding: Students struggle with the idea of history being anything other than a natural force or a collection of unmediated facts. In my experience, quite a few students in history surveys have a very hard time thinking about how works of history--not textbooks--are produced by individuals who have a particular point of view and who develop an argument. I've often found that when students write a review of a book, they will not seem to grasp that there is an author and a thesis behind all that text on the pages they have read. So, summaries will make no reference to the author, as if the facts of history fell from the sky like meteors. Maybe this is why students have pronoun problems: "It says in the book . . ." "They say on page 25 . . ." Do students imagine that all books are like textbooks, written by anonymous committees? "They" sit around a table and figure out how to tell it as it actually happened. Or, "it" bubbles up from the deep and creates history. That might be reading too much into it.

As if Historians Wrote History Books in a Particular Context

Perhaps the average, or below average, student in a history class should be encouraged to think more about how historians or journalists write their books. It might seem like a kindergarten exercise, but . . . A history professor could describe how a historian like Nancy Cott came to write The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 in 1977. She could then explore with the students the social context of the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of the new social history, and then look at how the field of women's history and gender studies in later years added to what Cott wrote about. (Heather's post on historiography ably gets into these issues.)

I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with these matters. True, I might have to push this boulder up a hill, myth of sisyphus-style, for as long as I am in the classroom. But, if I can change how a few students conceive of the world, it might be worth it.

What Do Undergrads Know about History?

Randall Stephens

Some years back I taught an American history survey, 1877-present, at a Florida community college. In an exam one of the students wrote an essay in which he/she placed the American Civil War in the early 20th century. I was shocked. Was I that bad of a teacher? Did incoming students not know the basic chronology of American history? Was this student just particularly thick? Was the state of historical thinking worse than in previous generations?

Several years ago my colleague Joe Lucas interviewed Sam Wineburg in Historically Speaking. Wineburg, author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple University Press, 2001), had been studying history education for some time. Has knowledge about the past declined among high school and college students? asked Lucas. "There is something almost comical about a group of adults wringing their hands, yearning for a time that never was," replied Wineburg about the supposed declension.

Regardless of whether students understand less about the past now than, say, they did in 1963, history professors are faced with a problem of figuring out just what a student does or does not know. (I've been thinking about organizing a Historically Speaking forum based around the question: "What Do Undergraduates Know about History?")

History professors enter the classroom every fall and spring, often wondering what they can assume their students know or don't know about history. Will the typical freshman have any knowledge of the basic chronology of western or American history? Do they have any ideas about what made the Roman Empire important? Would they know, approximately, when Rome thrived? (Perhaps they carry with them some general Sunday School knowledge about that or have seen Gladiator.)

What about American history? Would the typical student know who fought the U.S. in the war of 1812? What about the reasons for that war? Could an incoming major or non-major describe what was happening in the U.S. between 1877 and 1917? Could they say anything about what transpired in the American colonies between 1690 and 1740?

I've come to the conclusion that I should assume that most students know little upon entering the class on the first day. But, there are variables here. Depending on where one teaches, the students will know more or less. Perhaps those who scored higher on SATs and ACTs will also come pre-equipped with basic historical knowledge. Students who had good high school history experiences probably also fare better.

It helps to pause and think about this now and then. It's always wise to stop and meditate on your pupils' historical perspective before launching into that intricate lecture on the roots of 18th-century republicanism.