Teaching History for the Common Good

Keith C. Barton, Linda S. Levstik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135645137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

In Teaching History for the Common Good, Barton and Levstik present a clear overview of competing ideas among educators, historians, politicians, and the public about the nature and purpose of teaching history, and they evaluate these debates in light of current research on students' historical thinking. In many cases, disagreements about what should be taught to the nation's children and how it should be presented reflect fundamental differences that will not easily be resolved. A central premise of this book, though, is that systematic theory and research can play an important role in such debates by providing evidence of how students think, how their ideas interact with the information they encounter both in school and out, and how these ideas differ across contexts. Such evidence is needed as an alternative to the untested assumptions that plague so many discussions of history education. The authors review research on students' historical thinking and set it in the theoretical context of mediated action --an approach that calls attention to the concrete actions that people undertake, the human agents responsible for such actions, the cultural tools that aid and constrain them, their purposes, and their social contexts. They explain how this theory allows educators to address the breadth of practices, settings, purposes, and tools that influence students' developing understanding of the past, as well as how it provides an alternative to the academic discipline of history as a way of making decisions about teaching and learning the subject in schools. Beyond simply describing the factors that influence students' thinking, Barton and Levstik evaluate their implications for historical understanding and civic engagement. They base these evaluations not on the disciplinary study of history, but on the purpose of social education--preparing students for participation in a pluralist democracy. Their ultimate concern is how history can help citizens engage in collaboration toward the common good. In Teaching History for the Common Good, Barton and Levstik:
*discuss the contribution of theory and research, explain the theory of mediated action and how it guides their analysis, and describe research on children's (and adults') knowledge of and interest in history;
*lay out a vision of pluralist, participatory democracy and its relationship to the humanistic study of history as a basis for evaluating the perspectives on the past that influence students' learning;
*explore four principal "stances" toward history (identification, analysis, moral response, and exhibition), review research on the extent to which children and adolescents understand and accept each of these, and examine how the stances might contribute to--or detract from--participation in a pluralist democracy;
*address six of the principal "tools" of history (narrative structure, stories of individual achievement and motivation, national narratives, inquiry, empathy as perspective-taking, and empathy as caring); and
*review research and conventional wisdom on teachers' knowledge and practice, and argue that for teachers to embrace investigative, multi-perspectival approaches to history they need more than knowledge of content and pedagogy, they need a guiding purpose that can be fulfilled only by these approaches--and preparation for participatory democracy provides such purpose. Teaching History for the Common Good is essential reading for history and social studies professionals, researchers, teacher educators, and students, as well as for policymakers, parents, and members of the general public who are interested in history education or in students' thinking and learning about the subject.

Chapter 1

A Sociocultural Perspective on History Education

Everyone knows what history is until he begins to think about it. After that, nobody knows.

—Alan Griffin¹

No one likes the way history is taught. Conservatives think it’s too multicultural, and multiculturalists think it’s too conservative. Politicians say it doesn’t promote patriotism, and social reformers say it doesn’t promote critical reflection. Advocates of social studies fret that history receives too much emphasis, and history specialists fret that it doesn’t receive enough. Lawmakers argue schools should teach to the test, and schools argue they should teach the way they think best. Researchers criticize teachers for not using primary sources, teachers criticize students for not wanting to learn, and students criticize textbooks for being deadly boring. What a mess.

There’s nothing new about this madness. Debates over the content and method of history education in the United States go back at least 100 years. Sometimes these arguments have been limited to the professional communities of educators, and other times they have spilled over—often loudly—into the public sphere.² Nor are such controversies limited to the United States: Educators, politicians, and everyday citizens throughout the world worry about how history supports or subverts national and ethnic identity, how it increases hatred or promotes reconciliation, and how it props up repressive regimes or mobilizes reform. Teachers in the midst of such debates worry primarily about how to get their hands on better materials.

What’s striking about the current state of history education in the United States, though, is how little it has benefited from the attention devoted to it over the last 20 years. In the 1980s, several books criticized the level of historical knowledge in the country, and these resulted in a variety of efforts to restore, reform, or revitalize history in schools.³ Although the crisis was almost certainly overstated, and although some of the proposed reforms represented a step backward, renewed interest in the subject led to a number of promising developments. In the 1990s, for example, teachers and other educators published several books describing exciting classroom practices—Tom Holt’s Thinking Historically, James Percocco’s A Passion for the Past, David Kobrin’s Beyond the Textbook, and Monica Edinger’s Seeking History, to name just a few. At the same time, new technologies and media dramatically increased the availability of historical materials. These days, teachers can access primary sources, simulations, and lesson plans with an ease the two of us never dreamt of when we began teaching.⁴

Over the same period, educational researchers have conducted numerous studies of how history is taught and how children make sense of the subject, both in the United States and internationally. As we will discuss throughout this book, these researchers have investigated teachers’ classroom practices and their disciplinary understanding, as well as children’s ideas about time, change, perspective, significance, and evidence.⁵ Outside the field of education, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists have examined “public memory,” “vernacular history,” “social memory,” “commemoration,” and other uses of history among adults.⁶ Still other scholars have contributed thoughtful and penetrating works on the value of history and on continuing conflicts over how the past is represented—Jonathan Zimmerman’s Whose America?, Peter Stearns’ Meaning over Memory, and James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, for example, along with History Wars by Edward Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, and History on Trial by Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn.⁷

However, history is not simply the private obsession of history educators and other scholars, for debates about the past often find their way into media headlines and become the subject of public discussion. The national history standards produced a firestorm of controversy in their day, and smaller, more local battles have resulted in unending arguments about public historical representations.⁸ Displays of the Confederate flag and pictures of Malcolm X, commemoration of Civil War figures, the use of derogatory terms and images of Native Americans as school mascots, and disagreements about whose stories should be told at the Alamo or Little Bighorn—all of these provoke strong feelings about the past among people who have little professional connection to history education.

Debate, discussion, scholarship, research, new technologies, and vivid descriptions of practice—one could be forgiven for thinking that the ferment of the last 2 decades might have led to shared understandings of the nature and purpose of history teaching, or at least a clear picture of where the fault lines lay. Yet although people argue at each other on the topic of history, few have engaged in the kind of collaborative deliberation that might lead to either synthesis or compromise. One could also be forgiven for thinking that classroom practice these days would make use of the range of materials and procedures that are so visible and available, but no. Too few children experience the sort of classrooms we read about in Percocco or Kobrin, Holt or Edinger. One of us, in fact, has a daughter currently enrolled in eighth grade U.S. history, and she analyzes exactly as many primary sources, reads exactly as many works of historical literature, takes part in exactly as many inquiry projects and simulations, and considers exactly as many alternative historical perspectives as her father did nearly 30 years ago: zero. We wish this were an isolated example, but we know that it isn’t.

There are many reasons for the gap between promise and practice, but we believe one of the key factors, as Alan Griffin suggested, is that “everyone knows what history is until he thinks about it.” Despite differing political perspectives or varied disciplinary backgrounds, many people consider the nature and purpose of history—or more to the point, of history teaching—to be entirely self-evident. When those who are interested in the subject begin with simplistic or unquestioned assumptions, discussion with others (who may have their own simplistic or unquestioned ideas) becomes exceedingly difficult. In the pages that follow, we try to provide more productive ways of thinking about history education. The result may be, as Griffin predicted, a situation in which “nobody knows” what history is, but we hope a combination of theory and research will clarify rather than obscure the range of possibilities for teaching and learning history.

Using Theory and Research to Make Sense of History Education

Much of this book is based on research into students’ and teachers’ ideas about history. We are fortunate to be part of a group of educators in North America and Europe who have been conducting empirical studies on the teaching and learning of history for over a decade (and some for much longer than that). At one time, many of us began our papers and presentations by pointing out that “little is known about students’ understanding of history,” but those days are long gone, for today we know a great deal about the topic. However, most of these studies have been individually conceived and implemented, and the findings have been published in a variety of outlets across Europe and North America; as a result, we still lack a comprehensive synthesis and overview of research in this field. Although we cannot review every study on the topic, we’ll describe many of those we consider most revealing and try to show how they provide insight into key characteristics of history education.

We believe research can play a critical role in improving practice. This is not because research tells us what we should do; educational policy and practice will always be bound up with underlying societal values (not to mention issues of power), and empirical studies cannot resolve such questions. However, they can force us to think about the unquestioned assumptions that impede discussion. Arguments about the proper form of history instruction often rely on empirical premises, and although these may seem self-evident, they sometimes have little foundation in reality. To take just one example, a few years ago, in a preservice methods class for teachers, one of us described the “expanding horizons” curriculum that involves the study of state history in fourth grade, U.S. history in fifth, and world history (or cultures) in sixth. A student in the class asked whether this curriculum was followed in other parts of the world, and she was told that in other countries, elementary children learn about their own history, of course, not ours.

That “of course” turned out to be misguided. Although assertions like this are common, it is not true that children invariably study the history of their own countries, at least not in the ways we take for granted in the United States. After 6 months of research on teaching and learning history in Northern Ireland, for example, it became clear that elementary students there do not study the history of “their own” country, because there is no consensus over which country is theirs, and studying the history of either Ireland or Great Britain—or Northern Ireland’s position within them—would be too controversial. As a result, elementary students analyze the structure of historical societies that have little connection to modern-day Northern Ireland, and this influences how they make sense of historical change and causation, as well as how they think about the purpose of learning history—topics to be dealt with in greater detail in chapters 7 and 8. Research such as this cannot provide direct guidance for educators in the United States, but it can alert us to a range of possibilities and their potential consequences. In the following chapters, we will describe a number of studies—both our own and those of our colleagues—that reveal aspects of historical teaching and learning that are not immediately apparent, and that may help us think more deeply about history education.⁹

However, our goal is not just to lay out the results of this work and hope someone finds it useful. Indeed, one of our primary concerns is that research in the field has not been as helpful as it might have been, in part because those who are interested in history education—parents, teachers, researchers, policymakers, public historians, and others—have no shared understanding of the meaning or goals of instruction in the subject. Without some consensus on these broad issues—or at least a shared vocabulary for comparing different perspectives—research on students’ thinking will have little impact on classroom practice, and debates about the content of the curriculum will continue to take the form of unproductive tirades in which proponents of one perspective or another scold their opponents (often imaginary ones) for their ignorance or treachery. Such “history wars” are unlikely to improve educational practice, because they provide no common ground for engagement among those with differing perspectives.

Most scholars who have written about history education recognize that there are different ways of approaching the past, but they often collapse these into simple dichotomies. These include distinctions between history and heritage, history and the past, professional history and amateur history, analytic history and collective memory, and that pair of old favorites, the use of history and the abuse of history. There are two problems with these distinctions. First, those who propose them often identify one approach as “real” history (usually synonymous with their image of the academic discipline) and dismiss the other as inadequate, inauthentic, or merely “popular.”¹⁰ Having rejected any history that differs from that which they prefer, they proceed to trash schools, the media, and the public for failing to live up to their ideal of authenticity. This makes for jolly good haranguing, but it provides little basis for public discourse. In fact, it undermines such discussion, because it fails to recognize the legitimacy of differing perspectives. Those who believe history should promote patriotism or group pride, for example, characterize arguments for disciplinary history as irrelevant prattle from academic “experts”; they do not accept the authority of such scholars, and they do not take their ideas seriously—except as a convenient target of ridicule. Teachers and other educational practitioners might be more likely to acknowledge this kind of academic expertise, but they will not be motivated by arguments that dismiss the majority of their practices as not constituting real history. Rather than promoting discussion of the nature and purpose of history education, then, invidious distinctions between academic and popular uses of the past shut down debate and leave us with little to talk about.

A second problem with these dichotomies is that they are too simplistic. Our world would be an uncomplicated one indeed if there were only two perspectives on history. As we discuss later in this chapter and throughout the book, we can easily identify at least four different historical practices that are important in schools; each of these can be oriented toward any of three distinct purposes and make use of six different cultural “tools.” Four practices, multiplied by three purposes, compounded by six tools—this results in 72 different ways of making sense of the past, and we’ve limited ourselves to those found in schools and with an adequate research base! If we were to include all the uses of history found within popular culture, political discourse, local communities, and the academic discipline (no unified undertaking itself), we would find even more. Collapsing this diversity into simple oppositions like “history versus heritage” obscures more than it reveals.¹¹

What is needed, then, is some way of talking about history education that does not oversimplify the range of approaches found in schools and society, and that does not set up an untenable and unproductive distinction between real history and everything else. That is what we aim to do in this book, by linking theory, research, and practice in a way that clarifies distinctions among differing perspectives without dismissing some as inherently illegitimate or inferior. In doing so, we hope to provide a way of thinking about history education that promotes dialogue rather than forestalling it. This is not to say we consider all approaches to history education equally valuable, but as will become clear in the next chapter, our judgments are grounded in assumptions about the contribution of history to democratic society rather than in mimicry of academic discourse. Rather than claiming that this perspective is a timeless and universal one, or that it inheres in the very nature of historical thought, we acknowledge that it derives from a particular vision of what history education might become in our own society and in our own time. We recognize that others may disagree with this vision, and our conceptual scheme should help clarify such disagreements rather than obscure them.

Throughout this book, we use sociocultural analysis as a way of organizing our discussion. Sociocult...