Teaching History

William Caferro

• Editore: Wiley-Blackwell
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119147152
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Teaching History

A practical and engaging guide to the art of teaching history Well-grounded in scholarly literature and practical experience, Teaching History offers an instructors' guide for developing and teaching classroom history. Written in the author's engaging (and often humorous) style, the book discusses the challenges teachers encounter, explores effective teaching strategies, and offers insight for managing burgeoning technologies. William Caferro presents an assessment of the current debates on the study of history in a broad historical context and evaluates the changing role of the discipline in our increasingly globalized world. Teaching History reveals that the valuable skills of teaching are highly transferable. It stresses the importance of careful organization as well as the advantages of combining research agendas with teaching agendas. Inspired by the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning movement, the book encourages careful reflection on teaching methods and stresses the importance of applying various approaches to promote active learning. Drawing on the author's experience as an instructor at the high school and university levels, Teaching History:

• Contains an authoritative and humorous look at the profession and the strategies and techniques of teaching history
• Incorporates a review of the current teaching practice in terms of previous methods, examining nineteenth and twentieth century debates and strategies
• Includes a discussion of the use of technology in the history classroom, from the advent of course management (Blackboard) systems to today's digital resources
• Covers techniques for teaching the history of any nation not only American history

Written for graduate and undergraduate students of history teaching and methods, historiography, history skills, and education, Teaching History is a comprehensive book that explores the strategies, challenges, and changes that have occurred in the profession.

1
The Art and Craft of Teaching, or Toward a Philosophy of Teaching

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Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value. (Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values¹)

Pirsig’s famous statement favors praxis over theory. It is of course a theory of its own, and a profound one. It applies well to classroom teaching, especially at the beginning of one’s career.

We want to fix the motorcycle! We stand before the masses (our students) not in search of a philosophy in the first instance, but in search of a practical way forward. There is little time to contemplate the destiny of mankind or the meaning of the universe. Teaching is instinctive, human, and, I would submit, its own obstacle to theoretical inquiry insofar as once the skill is learned, it seems more of a technical or interpersonal one than an intellectual one. Teaching is, as Parker Palmer famously asserted, a triumph of the will and soul.² But it is our motorcycle. We fix it (teach) behind closed doors. In this way, teaching is also, as Palmer asserts, “the most privatized of public professions.”³ Many instructors spend their lives “bound in chains of silence.”⁴

There are nevertheless transcendent issues at play, no matter how much we may wish to ignore them. Indeed, few endeavors have engendered more ardent philosophical discussions than teaching. Allan Bloom in Closing of the American Mind believed that the fate of western democracy lay in balance in American classrooms. He spoke, as his title suggests, pessimistically, blaming the abandonment of the study of western classics on “cultural relativists” and “fans of rock music” whom he cast as enemies of the state.⁵ Gary Nash and his colleagues struggled in their attempt to establish national standards for the study of American history in the 1990s owing to the deeply political nature of the subject matter.⁶

The confluence of these factors perhaps explains why the literature on university teaching often begins with discussions of “anxiety.” Elaine Showalter describes anxiety in her Teaching Literature as the inevitable handmaiden of teaching, even for the most experienced veterans. She tells of vivid dreams before the first day of classes, including one in which she inexplicably skipped class for weeks, only to arrive breathless and illegally parked.⁷ Jane Thompson expressed her fears in a series of fictive postcards to herself and to colleagues that expose self‐doubt and personal insecurity.⁸ Douglas A. Bernstein admits that the “severe” suffering he experienced at the beginning of his career has never left him.⁹

It is easy to relate. We all worry about how we are perceived by others and, more generally, how to deal with the “performative” aspects of the profession. For me, it is not about tortured dreams but lack of them. I do not sleep well before the first day of class. This has been true for 30 years. A high school teacher colleague of mine told me it was a good sign. It showed that I cared. “May you never sleep well before teaching!” At this point in my life I would rather sleep, since there are few things I enjoy more. And many of my colleagues, who care at least as much as I do about teaching, sleep very well before the start of class. They are both effective and well rested on the first day!

The point is, however, that there are many paths to success – a theme that will be stressed throughout this book. It is, as Patricia Nelson Limerick says, “our First Amendment right” to be nervous. And telling professors to relax “just makes us more weird.”¹⁰ And with all due respect to the very fine professors who highlight their anxieties, I for one believe that too much has been written about the subject. The discussions border on self‐indulgence. It is true that we worry, but so too do workers in hospitals, fire stations, legal offices, and many other jobs. Moreover, contemplation of worry does not necessarily help the beginning teacher move forward in the classroom. “Sure I am anxious, but how do I practically succeed?” Anxiety is for them a bourgeois emotion. To the extent that acknowledging our fears helps us manage them, the discussions are useful. But the working person needs more.

The challenge for the teacher in the first instance is to find a means of communicating with the students, who are dealing with their own set of anxieties. We do well to contemplate the worries of students, however arcane and strange their worlds may on the surface seem to us. The approach turns the psychology around. It encourages us to imagine the class from their perspective, which is a relief from our own anxieties.

The notion was made plain to me on my very first day as a teacher in high school. An older colleague watched me (age 22) fidgeting in the faculty room, completely focused on myself, hoping to do well in my first appearance “on stage.” She came over and said “You are aware it is their first day, right Caferro?” I had not given “them” any thought at all, except in terms of how they would view me. The advice really helped. It was in fact the best advice I have ever had. She turned the psychology to where it belonged.

The message is now a mantra. The best way to get the most out of the students is to construct an environment and structures in which they can succeed, in which they want to succeed, and, more generally, are able see clearly the requirements for success. The approach does not assure that you will be perceived as a “great” teacher but it is a first step toward basic competence. It provides an “out” from long self‐involved contemplations of one’s teaching persona. It allows us to get beyond the cult of personality, which is more suited to some people than to others. And it is an important first step toward establishing “student‐centered,” active learning.¹¹

We do indeed bare our souls in front of the class, but it is more effective if we do not do so consciously. The students see our personalities whether we want them to or not. Given that, it seems more efficacious to focus on the motorcycle, as it were – on practical issues such as presentation of the course material and organization of the class engagement of students in critical thought (see Chapter 3). These reveal our relationship with our subject matter and with the immediate task before us. This is teachable. The image of an engaged, organized teacher is a compelling one, and can be as different from one person to another as our personalities. If our personalities inevitably and subconsciously come through, so too does our attitude toward our subject matter. As a student, I admired all my teachers who loved learning, cared deeply about their subject matter and had a clear organizational structure that they adhered to, provoked new ideas and questions, and had basic empathy, expressed in their own unique ways.

A Teaching Philosophy

With all this in mind, the first assignment we give our graduate students in our seminar on pedagogy at Vanderbilt (“Art and Craft of Teaching History”) is to write a philosophy of teaching. The assignment is unpopular. The graduates see it as putting the cart before the horse or, worse, the sort of “touchy feely” task that augurs a long boring semester. But fixing a motorcycle is, as Pirsig makes clear, its own philosophy. We sell the assignment to the students by stressing its practicality. It will be useful when they apply for jobs and later when they go up for promotion. Indeed, one of the positive recent developments in the academy is that job committees often ask candidates to send teaching statements, along with syllabi of prospective courses, for their “job talk.” The job talk used to consist primarily of a lecture on research. It is now divided into a research‐related lecture and a demonstration of teaching, the latter sometimes an informal discussion of teaching in seminar fashion, which amounts to a discussion of teaching philosophy. The teaching demonstration is in many ways more difficult for the candidate than the research lecture. Aspiring professors come into direct contact for the first time with competing ideologies and methodologies. The host history faculty may know nothing of the candidates’ research subfield, but they usually have opinions – and strong ones – about teaching.

In addition to its professional practicality, the exercise is also useful because it encourages self‐reflection. The graduates are forced to think more directly about their objectives and, in some cases, confront the reality that they will indeed stand before a class. The American historian Peter Filene recommends this sort of reflection for all starting professors. He suggests that we answer five fill‐in‐the‐blank questions (“prompts”), including “In class I see myself as (blank)” and “I seek to foster in my students (blank).”¹²

To aid the students in our seminar, we give them the teaching statements of their own professors in the History department – those who graciously allow them to be read. There is, to be sure, irony. The statement of teaching philosophy was in my generation something we did only when we came up for promotion, seven years into our careers (if...