Teaching for Historical Literacy

Building Knowledge in the History Classroom

Matthew T. Downey, Kelly A. Long

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317509011
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Education
• Sous-sujet: Teaching Arts & Humanities

Teaching for Historical Literacy combines the elements of historical literacy into a coherent instructional framework for teachers. It identifies the role of historical literacy, analyzes its importance in the evolving educational landscape, and details the action steps necessary for teachers to implement its principles throughout a unit. These steps are drawn from the reflections of real teachers, grounded in educational research, and consistent with the Common Core State Standards. The instructional arc formed by authors Matthew T. Downey and Kelly A. Long takes teachers from start to finish, from managing the prior learning of students to developing their metacognition and creating synthesis at the end of a unit of study. It includes introducing topics by creating a conceptual overview, helping students collect and analyze evidence, and engaging students in multiple kinds of learning, including factual, procedural, conceptual, and metacognitive. This book is a must-have resource for teachers and students of teaching interested in improving their instructional skills, building historical literacy, and being at the forefront of the evolving field of history education.

Part I
Historical Literacy

1
Historical Literacy

History teaching in the schools is not what it used to be. School reform in recent years has altered the routine of classroom teachers everywhere. They face state-imposed curriculum changes, new assessment or testing requirements, and demanding procedures for teacher evaluation. Others spend more time implementing new standards such as the Common Core, mastering the latest classroom technology, and coping with students’ second-language learning issues. While such changes attract the most attention, others are transforming history teaching in more fundamental ways. This book is about some of the undercurrents of change in history teaching and learning often obscured by the storms that roil the surface. They are likely to have a more enduring impact on history education than those that seem more newsworthy and controversial today.

A major rethinking of how best to teach history in schools has been underway for at least two decades. In one sense, it represents the collective response of history teachers and teacher educators to Peter Seixas’ (1996) call for a “new pedagogy for history,” which he hoped “might promote students’ ability to develop meaningful, critical historical understanding” (p. 777). More practically speaking, it is the result of individual teachers and scholars’ efforts to align history teaching with their own changing assumptions about how students learn and how best to engage students in meaningful learning.

In the not too distant past, the history curriculum in place virtually everywhere was content-driven and focused on teaching and learning factual information. To be sure, many, if not most, history classrooms are still teacher centered and textbook focused, with students spending much of their time as passive listeners who occasionally participate in recitation-like discussions. But these classrooms do not represent, as they once did, a nearly uniform lay of the land in history education. New models for history teaching have emerged that look distinctly different from those of the past and that offer teachers clear alternatives to the “traditional” instruction described above. Teachers are relying less on textbooks and more on primary sources, emphasizing historical thinking over rote learning, and integrating literacy instruction.

While the changes underway promote the meaningful, critical historical understanding that Seixas called for, they do not yet add up to a coherent pedagogy. They do not yet represent a paradigm shift for history education. It may even be that paradigm shifts or tipping points are not useful metaphors for change in history education, especially given the way public education is organized in the United States. Despite national standards and reform agendas, most decisions about what to teach and how to do it are made at the state department of education and local school district levels. Change tends to take place in piecemeal fashion. A broad consensus about how best to teach history may be even less likely, as history in the United States has no single, powerful voice to promote and guide curricular or pedagogical change. Instead, history has two professional associations that promote competing standards and curricular guidelines, the National Council for the Social Studies and the National Council for History Education. Change in history classrooms tends to happen one teacher or district or, at most, one state at a time. As we all know, some teachers in a school district or building embrace change while others resist. Even individuals adopt specific reform measures in piecemeal fashion, accepting one while hesitating about another. While one should be cautious about making claims for paradigm shifts, that significant pedagogical changes are underway is clearly evident.

The changes that we describe and the positions we advocate in the following chapters have implications beyond what teachers and students do in history classrooms. The newly emerging pedagogy is also prompting a rethinking of the purpose or rationale for history education. The two are intimately related. A pedagogy that once emphasized committing names, dates, and events to memory, especially key developments in national history, had its purpose. In schools in the United States, it promoted a shared body of information about the alleged manifest destiny of Anglo-Americans at home and abroad. It was a pedagogy well designed to acculturate young people into an expanding industrial society, Americanize immigrants, and provide the glue thought to be needed to hold a heterogeneous society together. A pedagogy that promotes “meaningful, critical historical understanding” is hardly compatible with that approach. Teaching history for citizenship education has more or less taken its place, at least among social studies educators, but is unnecessarily restrictive. While critical historical thinking and understanding surely are civic assets, they have implications for many other aspects of life as well. The parameters for a more encompassing rationale for history education are only beginning to take shape, to which we will return later. First, we must more closely examine the shifting landscape of history education.

At least the broad outlines of a new pedagogy of history education are discernible. Teachers have shifted their attention from factual knowledge to be regurgitated on tests to a different order of learning outcomes. They emphasize conceptual learning and thinking grounded in the discipline of history. They are more likely to involve students in authentic historical investigations, engage them in analyzing primary sources, and help them think critically about historical accounts. They are more concerned about disciplinary literacy or whether students can read for understanding, construct documents-based accounts and understand the interpretative nature of history. The new pedagogy also represents history’s piecemeal implementation of the “thinking curriculum” advocated by Lauren B. Resnick and Leopold E. Klopfer (1989). The teachers pursuing it want to know whether their students can think historically, develop conceptual understandings about what happened in the past, and connect what happened to their own lives today. It is not that factual knowledge is unimportant, but that without the context of conceptual understanding such knowledge is meaningless, useless, and fleeting.

Yet, what innovative teachers are doing is not a clean break from the past. Their teaching retains elements of continuity with what came before, as changes invariably do. In the United States, even innovative teachers continue to implement a standard curriculum consisting of national and world history. More ethnic, women’s, and social history have been added over the years, but the traditional curricular framework remains largely in place. That is true elsewhere as well. The history curriculum in Britain, where bold experiments were underway in the 1970s, has returned to an emphasis on national history (National Curriculum for England, 1999, 2007). Jesus Dominguez and Ignacio Pozo (1998) have described generally what is happening as “a balanced approach between traditional content, i.e., historians’ accounts of past facts and events, and procedures or methods concerned both with the interpretation of evidence and the understanding and explanation of past actions and events.” While the resulting curriculum values historical knowledge, it also recognizes that students “need to acquire some familiarity with the skills and methods required to construct that knowledge” (p. 344). The new approach strikes a balance between history content and historical thinking, factual knowledge, and conceptual understanding.

The Cognitive Revolution

The changes taking place in history classrooms are not unique to history instruction. They are history educators’ response to the earlier shift from behaviorist to cognitivist modes of thinking within academic psychology that Howard Gardner (1985) called the Cognitive Revolution. The new cognitivist view of learning assumed that knowledge is not transmitted intact from teacher or text to learner, but is something the learner must actively construct. The new emphasis on cognitive processes has had far-ranging implications for teaching and learning in the schools, first in mathematics, science, and reading instruction (Royer, 2005), and later in history (Wineburg, 2000). Among the Cognitive Revolution’s major contributions to content area instruction is the idea that academic knowledge and thinking are discipline specific. “No longer are the disciplines perceived as shells that encase domain-general processes,” Sam Wineburg and Pamela Grossman (2001) note. “Rather, there is an awareness that mathematics, biology, history, physics, and the other subjects of the school curriculum are distinctive ways of thinking and talking” (p. 480). Gardner (1999) described disciplines as the different lenses through which biologists, mathematicians, or historians view and make sense of the world. Consequently, for students to be knowledgeable in any subject area, they must know how those who work in that area think as well as understand the subject-matter content that is the product of that thinking. The challenge is to introduce students to disciplined ways of thinking without expecting them to become junior biologists, mathematicians, or historians. “Our goal,” Gardner continued, “should not be to telescope graduate training but rather to give students access to the ‘intellectual heart’ or ‘experiential soul’ of a discipline. Education succeeds if it furnishes students with a sense of how the world appears to individuals sporting quite different kinds of glasses” (p. 157). We need to outfit students with these disciplinary lenses, he concluded, to give them a better view of the world in which they live.

Historical Literacy

The pedagogical changes that are the focus of this book have the potential to help students see themselves and the world in which they live more clearly. For them to do so, we must help them become historically literate. What does that mean? Although the term “historical literacy” has been used in history education circles for at least three decades, its meaning has shifted over time. It was the title of an earlier book, Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American Education (1989), edited by Paul Gagnon and the Bradley Commission. Neither the editor nor his contributors bothered to define the term, likely assuming that readers would recognize its allusion to the title of E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy (1987), a then best-seller that emphasized core knowledge that all American citizens should know. While the term was briefly associated with the notion of core historical knowledge (Ahonen, 2005; Partington, 1994; Zinsser, 1995), it soon lost that ideologically tinted connotation.

In time, the term “historical literacy” was adopted and redefined by history education reformers. It has largely come to represent a set of student competencies and instructional outcomes associated with the pedagogy that we briefly outlined above. Tony Taylor (2003) used it as the covering term for a variety of learning outcomes, including knowledge of historical concepts, knowing how to connect historical learning to life outside the school, and the ability to engage effectively in public debate. For Jeffrey Nokes (2013), historical literacies are the strategies and skills that historians use to construct meaning from texts and other sources. Others have used the term to emphasize conceptual historical knowledge as well as an understanding of the discipline of history (Lee, 2007; Mandell & Malone, 2008; Metzger, 2007; Rodrigo, 1994). To the above outcomes, Peter Lee (2011) has added a set of dispositions that includes respect for evidence, willingness to follow where it leads despite one’s preconceptions, and respecting people in the past as human beings. The term also is used to define the larger goals of history education (Lee, 2011; Perfetti, Britt, & Georgi, 1995). History educators, Lee (2011) noted, need “a sense of what history education should add up to. We need a concept of historical literacy to enable us to tell others, and perhaps more importantly to remind ourselves, what is central to history education” (p. 64). It is primarily in this goals-oriented sense that we use the term in the title of this book and in the chapters that follow. The goals of historical literacy merit a brief introduction here, although we will revisit them periodically throughout the book.

In the first place, to be historically literate, a person must be knowledgeable about the past. Our American Heritage Dictionary defines the word “literate” as “knowledgeable, educated” (adjective) and being “a well-informed, educated person” (noun), as well as being able to read and write. While factual content has often assumed the guise of historical knowledge, it is only the raw material from which historical understanding is constructed. Historical knowledge is what people make of those facts. It also is, Perfetti, Britt, and Georgi (1995) argue, more than learning stories about the past. Knowing a narrative is merely the minimum standard for judging whether a student is competent in history. They stress that, “Beyond this minimum, we look to a higher standard—historical literacy” (p. 4). In other words, knowledge that qualifies a person as historically literate is coherent, conceptual, and meaningful knowledge about the past that is grounded in the critical use of evidence. “We assume that historical literacy … is a reasonable goal for high-school students, and certainly for college students” (p. 5). It also is a reasonable goal for elementary students, when outcomes are adjusted to the appropriate age level.

The goal of historical literacy includes helping students become literate about the discipline as well as the subject matter of history. Students should understand at increasingly more sophisticated levels that historical knowledge is not a body of facts waiting to be memorized. It consists of understandings about the past that they must construct from various sources of information. A historically literate person who encounters a primary source understands that the document is a fragment from the past. It may or may not mean that the source is useful evidence in making an argument about what happened and why. It does mean that historical learning is not a passive process. Historical literacy requires an active engagement with facts, the goal being a conceptual understanding about the past and about how the past is related to the present. To build historical knowledge, students must also know what historical texts are, and how and why they are created. A historically literate person knows that a history book or television documentary is someone’s interpretation and not the whole truth about the past and nothing but the truth.

Historical literacy also can be defined in the traditional sense of a person being able to read and write. In this respect, the goal of historical literacy is to enable students to read history texts critically, to write thoughtfully, and to engage in meaningful discussions about the past. Like teachers in many subject areas, history teachers have come to recognize the importance of integrating content and reading instruction. The old adage that “every teacher is a teacher of reading” (Manzo, Manzo, & Thomas, 2004, p. 7) is more applicable than ever. Teachers’ concern about literacy is partly an artifact of our times, when students typically read and write less, struggle to make up for fewer childhood encounters with print, and frequently speak a language at home that is different from the language of the school. For the history classroom, it also reflects the central role that texts play in history instruction.

History is the most text-rich subject in the school curriculum, except for literature and language arts. Much of what history students learn comes from textbooks, supplementary readings, primary sources, and teacher handouts. However, history texts pose a distinctive set of challenges, especially for younger students. As Jean Fritz (1982) wrote about her first ...