It seems particularly au courant to refer to publications as timely in introductory chapters, such as this is. History education is always timely and in time, subject to the same politics, contexts, and ideologies that dictate political will. As long as we have a need to teach about the past, we will debate what ought to be taught. According to prevailing fashion, any given curriculum can look to content (e.g., “what happened?”) as the core and foundation of history education or, alternatively, to a way of understanding content, as well as the world we live in (e.g., “why do things happen?”).
The past helps us to understand who we are. History tells stories of lineage, of tribe, of dissidence, of belonging. In the microcosm of state and nation, we have mythologies to cling to and others to dispel.
Perspectives on myth-making and -dispelling are multiple. “Today, we live in a complex civilization which it is necessary to understand to be adjusted to it. Schools are the means by which we accomplish this period of adjustment,” reported the Canadian School Journal, an educational journal published between the 1920s and 1950s, citing William James Cooper, United States Commissioner of Education.1 We make sense of the complexity of living through history, but also through institutions like schools. Curricula, textbooks, and disciplines—history, for instance—are means of finding meaning.
This sentiment was anticipated by Walter Lipmann in Drift and Mastery (1914). “We drift,” Lipmann stated, relating to the progressive age that he believed permeated the first decades of the twentieth century in North America, “unsettled to the very roots of our being.”2 Lipmann lived at a time when humanity was knocking on the door of a great war. Like most wars, this made history and was a result of a way of viewing history. It displayed the most magnificent and atrocious dimensions of what it means to be human. Lipman’s utterance and this introduction are divided by 105 years, yet his words sound alarmingly contemporary.
We live in a modern, unsettled world. We look to the future and, depending on our orientations to the unknown, we see either dystopia and dissent or halcyon days on the horizon. The future promises great things to come, or it is ominous and foreboding.
The past: how is it seen? The answer to the question varies. Read on, we ask.
History education tells us about how we see ourselves and the world or how we see the world and our place in it. We teach the past that fits our orientation to the contexts we live in. These orientations are contested and unmoored. If the past appears fixed and true, and if history curricula purport to teach some truth, be wary. If the contrary is the case, be wary still. How we see the past is not the past, and the past is not history.3
As a school inspector from the Canadian province of Ontario would note in 1934, “movements are not all of the past, but we are in the midst of them today and our senior pupils should be encouraged to read of and know them.”4 Here, we concentrate on the teaching of history, not in one province, but in multiple contexts, national and international. What movements, truths, curriculum theories are taught or contested, and in what ways are these used to bridge what Robert Stamp termed “gap between school and community,” or, the world of the present and the unknown past.5 These thoughts are indicative of the perspective that schools could align more neatly with contemporary life in order to be made into a “miniature of society.”6 In these miniatures, these school spaces, the study of what it means to be human is the telling of stories. A frequent theme is our history. It helps us to define who we are as individuals and as members of collectives.
Scope and Content
This Handbook contextualizes this debate by exploring the history of history education and curriculum history. Further, it considers the current iterations of history and social studies curriculum frameworks at a moment where a paradigm shift is under way, which demand that students “do” history through an inquiry framework based on primary source analysis rather than memorize or learn historical content by other means. Granted, it may not be the first time that this shift has happened.
It has been a long-standing refrain that public schooling is a pendulum.7 The extent to which this metaphor is valid is debatable, as curriculum Historian Herbert Kliebard argues:
This Handbook describes both those currents (the theories that shape curricula) and those conditions that permit a current to rise or to subside (the educational contexts).Curriculum fashions, it has long been noted, are subject to wide pendulum swings. While this metaphor conveys something of the shifting positions that are constantly occurring in the educational world, this phenomenon might best be seen as a stream with several currents, one stranger than others. None ever completely dries up. When the weather and other conditions are right, a weak or insignificant current assumes more force and prominence, only to decline when conditions particularly conducive to its newfound strength no longer prevail.8
It does not tell a story about history education, per se. It permits the reader to find their own context and others, to scrutinize these anew, and to begin another conversation about history education that is informed by various studies from across the globe. These studies describe the ways in which various stakeholders work within and without the parameters permitted by curriculum, space, and time. The extent to which this is a curriculum shift, as noted, depends on the place under examination.
Besides history educators, there are implications here for teacher education. Through what Dan Lortie termed the “apprenticeship of observation,” teacher candidates—future history and social studies teachers—have already learned a great deal about history education before their teacher education programs even begin.9 By virtue of having been students in history and social studies classes for most of their lives, teacher candidates are not blank slates; rather, they have strong beliefs about what history is as a discipline and how it ought to be taught. Because history and social studies curricula around the globe have only recently (in a relative sense) outlined learning objectives that were based on inquiry and on historical thinking, teacher candidates are in a particularly precarious position with respect to history education.
They have somewhere between one and five years of study to relearn the purposes and means of teaching social studies and history. What is more, teacher candidates spend a great deal more time in the schools during practicum than they will learning about the research informing history and social studies education. In these practicum spaces, it is possible that associate teachers and mentors are also asked to relearn or to rethink their sometimes long established teaching habits and practices. Associate teachers are variously contesting, embracing, or being baffled by the new history and social studies curricula. The extent to which we might plot their positions on this spectrum largely depends on their own beliefs about best practices in history education and their own apprenticeships of observation.
John Dewey anticipated teachers’ possible reluctance to swing toward new paradigms for teaching and learning, particularly when they have firmly established beliefs and practices:
The tendency of educational development to proceed by reaction from one thing to another, to adopt for one year, or for a term of seven years, this or that new study or method of teaching, and then as abruptly to swing over to some new educational gospel, is a result which would be impossible if teachers were adequately moved by their own independent intelligence.10
Lee Shulman highlights how long-standing the traditional conception of a divide between practitioners and theoreticians is:
Both the second and third volumes of the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE) Yearbooks thus sought to address the perceived gap between the work of university ...The National Society for the Scientific Study of Education was only a year old when it devoted large portions of both its second Yearbook (1903) and its third (1904) to the topic “The Relation of Theory to Practice in the Education of Teachers.” John Dewey’s contribution, “The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education,” led off the 1904 volume.11