International Review of History Education

International Review of History Education, Volume 3

Alaric Dickinson, Peter Gordon, Peter Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134723171
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

The third volume in this international review takes "raising standards" as its central theme. Raising standards is no simple matter, either conceptually or empirically, whatever politicians might think. If it is to happen, it must draw on research and practical experience from other countries.

1

Standards for Historical Thinking:
History Education Reform in Oakland, California

Peter Seixas

Much of the recent literature on pedagogical reform is built on notions of teaching for thinking or teaching for understanding.¹ Much of the recent research on history education reflects this theoretical framework, in its investigations of students, student teachers and teachers.² Based on a longer tradition of British work, these studies have in common a disciplinary conception of history. That is, they see knowing the past as a set of problems, the discipline of history as a set of practices with which to approach those problems, and the teaching of history as the development of children’s competencies in those practices. The nature of historical thinking thus lies at the centre of the research, whether the focus is individual students or teachers, or the larger units of classrooms or departments.³

Early history standards initiatives in North America were framed less on this disciplinary conception of historical thinking, than on a set of history topics to be covered;⁴ thus there has been a serious gap between the history standards movement and history education research. The Oakland Unified School District, in California, is one of the first North American jurisdictions to build its standards around historical thinking. As will become apparent in what follows, Oakland benefited from extraordinarily capable leadership at the district level. But the strength of that leadership was, in great measure, its ability to mobilize a committed cadre of teachers to carry the reform efforts forward. The problem those teachers faced was not only to effect changes in their own thinking and teaching, but to be able to communicate those changes – through a standards document – to other teachers in a way that was clear, powerful and persuasive. Fully understanding that they could not achieve change on the basis of a standards document alone, those who shaped the local reform programme developed initiatives on four additional fronts: an assessment programme, professional development, materials selection and development, and research.⁵

I participated in the district efforts as a highly interested outsider. Having presented several workshops to Oakland teachers, I initiated research both to document and to assist the change process, which I understood as directly aligned with reforms I had advocated over the preceding years. My role as researcher was thus both enhanced and complicated by my role as participant, consultant and advocate.⁶ I observed and tape-recorded meetings, collected documents and tape-recorded individual, semi-structured interviews with district officials. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 (of 15) members of the District Standards Committee and collected questionnaires from 12.

It is too early to assess the impact of this programme either on teachers throughout the district or on their students. If the committee ultimately succeeds in generating a fundamental shift in how history education is conducted in Oakland – that is, in how teachers and students think about history – it will also have succeeded in providing a model for other jurisdictions hoping for similar reforms. If it does not (and this is still an open question) there is still much to learn from the process they have been through.

Historical knowledge is problematic: none of the ways in which we know the past provides a straightforward, uncontestable access to the truth.⁷ Yet, in schools, historical accounts are most frequently presented as unproblematic sources of factual information. In this setting, the ‘problem of historical knowledge’ is too often understood simply as a problem of committing facts to memory, or, at best, separating ‘biased’ expressions of opinion from the true facts.⁸

Historical thinking consists of the practices necessary to confront the problem of knowledge about the past. There are many ways of conceptualizing the components of these practices. In discussing their own justification for using notions of ‘evidence’ and ‘cause’ to investigate children’s historical thinking, Lee et al., note:

We can split strands into sub-strands indefinitely, and what is a sub-strand as opposed to a strand? Why not start with children’s notions of agency, rather than treat those ideas as part of their conception of cause? In the end we must accept that, just as a historical reconstruction is in fact a construction, so any hermeneutic effort can only produce something justifiable, not the only interpretation.⁹

They go on to note the limitations on the utility of any model of historical thinking. ‘We can only hope to map tropisms which hold under current social, cultural and educational circumstances... If teachers take a model seriously, its life may be even shorter.”¹⁰ The measure of any scheme of historical thinking includes utility in not only mapping students’ ideas, but also in communicating with teachers and curriculum workers who will use the scheme.¹¹ The teachers responsible for the Oakland School District’s history standards based them on a notion of historical thinking consisting of five elements: chronology, evidence, diversity/multiple perspectives, interpretation and significance. How did they arrive at this, and what does it mean?

Setting Standards in Oakland

The Oakland Unified School District is the sixth largest in the state of California. The map of Oakland has a hole in it, where the separate, high-income, predominantly white district of Piedmont runs its own schools. Oakland has 53,000 students, 52 per cent of whom are African-American, 21 per cent Hispanic and 18 per cent Asian American. Thirty-two per cent are classified as Limited English Proficient (LEP) students. Eleven per cent of the students were suspended during the 1996/97 school year. The average grade for college preparation courses in grades 7 to 12, is D+.¹² It is the only district in California with a majority of African-American students. A five-week teachers’ strike in 1996 left a legacy of mistrust. Oakland enjoyed the spotlight of the national press in 1991, for controversy over its history textbook adoption decisions, and in 1996/97 over its policy on ‘ebonies’.¹³ Teachers do not see it as an easy district in which to work.

In California history—social science is defined as a school subject, K-12, by the History Social Science Framework.’¹⁴ The framework provides both broad goals across the curriculum and course outlines for each grade level. Among the goals is a strand of ‘historical literacy’, which includes historical empathy, time and chronology, cause and effect, continuity and change, a recognition of ‘history as common memory with political implications’ and the importance of belief systems such as ‘religion and philosophy’.¹⁵ The four to ten pages of narrative for each course contain a range of kinds of statements, including substantive historical interpretation (‘Jacksonian democracy should be analyzed in terms of the continuing expansion of opportunities for the common person’),¹⁶ as well as pedagogical advice (‘students should be encouraged to view historical events empathetically’).’¹⁷ More prescriptive state standards are currently under development.¹⁸

In 1991 Alice Kawazoe was recruited to establish a new Department of Curriculum and Staff Development for the district. She accepted on condition that she could appoint some key people to rethink the way school subjects were taught in Oakland. Her list included Shelly Weintraub. Weintraub had majored in history at the University of California at Berkeley, and had earned an MA in education at San Francisco State University, working on students’ persuasive writing in social studies. She had taught in Oakland for 15 years, at both junior high and high school levels. As head of history-social science for Oakland, Weintraub cultivated an expanding core of history teachers between 1991 and 1996, through the development of curriculum materials and ‘historiography’ study groups led by local historians.¹⁹ She was, in effect, laying the groundwork for the standards (Kawazoe interview, 16 October 1997; Weintraub interview, 8 November 1997).

In October 1996 Weintraub invited 15 teachers (K-12) to begin work on history standards for Oakland. All but three had taught in the district for more than ten years. Racially, they included African-American, European American, Japanese American and Latina teachers. Almost all of them had been involved in one or another of Weintraub’s earlier projects, either the historiography groups, the development of the history kits or the Bay Area Writing Project. One of them, Stan Pesick, was in the final stages of writing a Stanford University doctoral dissertation on teaching and learning history.

The Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP) had an impact not only by forging links between English and history, but because of its attention to students’ historical writing. As part of the BAWP, Renee Swayne had developed a unit around interpreting artifacts. Carole Pancho developed units on ‘the forgotten heroes of history’. One unit on cowboys ‘looked at black cowboys, women cowboys, and cowgirls in history and just how to develop that into units for primary students, tying in literature and writing’ (Pancho interview, 16 October 1997). Grace Murozawa recalled the BAWP work as providing a framework for thinking about curriculum frameworks in general. Elizabeth Lay had a strong background in literature, writing and history, including an undergraduate degree in American Studies, and experience in both the California Literature Project and a professional development programme on the American West sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She too referred to the BAWP as a formative experience (Lay interview, 8 November 1997). Judy Yeager said simply: ‘I tell people I’ve been BAWP’d’ (Yeager interview, 7 November 1997).

Weintraub knew from the outset that the Oakland standards needed first to be explicit about a conception of historical thinking. Without this, teachers could follow the topics laid out in the document, but bypass the complex challenges posed by genuine historical knowledge. Secondly, the document needed to tie that conception to the substantive historical topics of the curriculum. She invited me to present a conception of historical thinking to the committee in a one-day workshop in October, 1996. Wanting the participants to understand variations in conceptions of historical thinking, I provided copies of the British National Curriculum and the US National Standards’ section on historical thinking in addition to my own scheme of six elements of historical thinking.²⁰ The Committee met several times during 1996–97. They used my conception, those articulated in the British and US documents, as well as the framework, in order to construct a research-based conception of historical thinking which would be (a) appropriate for the Oakland School District and (b) possible to communicate to teachers who would not have been as thoroughly immersed in the discussions as had the committee. It was not a simple task.

By the beginning of a three-day work session in June 1997, as a result of extensive discussion, they had devised a set of four historical thinking standards: chronological/geographic thinking, evidence, diversity/ multiple perspectives and significance. ‘Chronological thinking’ enabled them to underscore the importance of contextual information as crucial for any exercise in historical thinking: here they could put the chronology of important events that would give students an overarching organizing framework when they thought about the past. ‘Geographic’ was added to recognize the importance of students understanding the spatial dimension of past events.

‘Diversity/multiple perspectives’ was a crucial addition. Politically, it was a way of signalling that history for the Oakland schools was going to build in viewpoints of those who were subjected to power as well as those who exercised it, and more specifically, that African-American viewpoints would be explicitly recognized throughout the curriculum. Under this standard, they also placed ‘empathy’ and ‘moral judgment’. ‘Analysis’, ‘causation’ and ‘interpretation’ were all subsumed under the final standard, ‘significance’.

As the committee members approached the construction of the document, they wanted to get across a notion of historical thinking and to tie it to curricular topics laid out in the state framework and standards at each grade level; and they wanted to approach these topics by way of large, synthesizing, thought-provoking and grade-appropriate questions which would frame individual units. Moreover, they needed to produce a manageable, usable document. Juggling all these requirements would prove extremely challenging. The committee divided into small groups, by grade level. By the end of the three days, they had made different amounts of progress, though none had finished the task. By the end of the summer, they sent their work to Weintraub, who reviewed it with Stan Pesick and Alice Kawazoe.

When the committee reconvened in mid-October, Weintraub did not mince her words: she explained that much of the work the teachers had done since the last meeting was not usable. ‘I looked at [the submissions] and thought, “Shoot! If it’s this hard for really good people to do, maybe we’ve got a problem here’” (committee meeting, 15 October 1997). She and Alice Kawazoe had identified a major difficulty the teachers were having: they had problems bringing together the topics defined by the draft state standards with the historical thinking concepts which the committee had refined over the past year (field notes, discussion with Weintraub, 14 October 1997).

Part of the difficulty was conceptualizing what they did when they taught. One teacher surmised:

What we’re trying to do here is decide first what we’re talking about. And then do it. And maybe the problem is, and I would be the first to admit it, that I rarely do that. You know, I get up and I do my craft and then decide this is what I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Introduction: Raising Standards
• 1. Standards for Historical Thinking: History Education Reform in Oakland, California
• 2. Expecting High Standards from Inner-City Students: Challenges and Possibilities
• 3. A Contemporary Past: History Textbooks as Sites of National Memory
• 4. Historical and International Dimensions of History Education: The Work of the Committee of Seven
• 5. Children’s Historical Thinking within a Museum Environment: An Overall Picture of a Longitudinal Study
• 6. Children’s Ideas about Historical Explanation
• 7. Significance in History: Students’ Ideas in England and Spain
• 8. Development of Historical Explanation in Children, Adolescents and Adults
• 9. The Development of History Teaching Curricula in China
• 10. The Future of the Past: A Brief Account of the Australian National Inquiry into School History, 1999–2000
• 11. Signs of the Times: The State of History Education in the UK – Review of Issues in History Teaching, Edited by J. Arthur and R. Phillips
• Notes on Contributors
• References
• Index