Suggested Reading

Rethinking the State of History Education

By DANA SOBYRA

Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York University Press, 2000), Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, editors. $55 cloth, $25 paper.

How do we best learn and teach history? By emphasizing national standards? Stressing assessment? Pushing for a thematic rather than a chronologically oriented curriculum? Or none of the above?

Stepping up to answer those questions are some of the leading historians and history-education thinkers, in this new collection of essays. Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History is a compendium of disparate voices: history professors, secondary-school teachers, teacher educators, educational psychologists, and education researchers. But they share a common goal -- to open up the disciplinary and institutional divisions that have stymied efforts to improve history teaching, whether in elementary-school classrooms oruniversity seminars.

The editors acknowledge that historians have made a concerted effort to examine "nearly every practice in which nonhistorians invoke, narrate, or display representations of the past." Scholars have combed through historical fiction and popular films, and have traveled to historical monuments and museum exhibitions. Yet, the editors insist, there remains "a gaping hole in historians' scrutiny of memory practices: the teaching and learning of history in the schools." Plugging that hole is vital, they argue, because schools are "the major site for the construction of collective memory in contemporary society." And, given that reality, "classrooms, not just monuments and commemorations, become the places where the contending voices in the debate over what history means, or should mean, in a democracy come together."

The problem, the editors point out, is that few people in the academic trenches have looked at what's happening in the classroom from a scholarly standpoint. Historians have seen the debate "as one of content ('the battle over the curriculum') and not one that could benefit from empirical research on teaching or learning." This book, published in conjunction with the American Historical Association, sets out to improve that situation.

The opening section examines how social and cultural forces play out in the history classroom. Peter Seixas, an associate professor of curriculum studies at the University of British Columbia, discusses three ways in which teachers can handle conflicting interpretations of historical events. They can take the "collective memory" approach and teach the prevailing "best story," as if that is the way historical events unfolded. They can follow a "disciplinary" approach and present competing versions of historical events, allowing students to reach their own conclusions by using supporting materials. Or teachers can encourage students to take a "postmodern" tack, by focusing on the ways in which different groups construct and preserve certain versions of the past in order to have an impact on the present. Ross E. Dunn, a historian at San Diego State University, wraps up the section with a discussion of three ways to teach world history.

Of course, nothing will improve in the classroom without badly needed reforms to advance good history teaching. Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University, examined the educational backgrounds of history teachers throughout the United States and reports that they came up short. G. Williamson McDiarmid, a professor of educational policy at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, and Peter Vinten-Johansen, an associate professor of history and teacher education at Michigan State University, suggest a novel remedy: a teacher-training program in which the education department and the history department collaborate to provide historical content while "meeting the challenges of teaching."

Academic research, too, can go a long way toward improve history learning, the essay writers maintain. According to Roy Rosenzweig, a professor of history at George Mason University, "people are most detached from the past in the place they most systematically encounter it -- the schools." He suggests that instead of reciting the usual names and dates, teachers connect students to the past "by providing context and comparison and introducing students to different voices and experiences."

The book concludes with essays that highlight methods for improving student performance, including the use of research that focuses on the learning process itself, along with ways to measure the effectiveness of teaching techniques -- like the use of multiple sources and analytical essay assignments -- in improving a student's grasp of history.

The teaching models presented in the book should encourage any historian dedicated to good teaching. "In a field beset by serious problems and uncertainties," the editors write, "they suggest new ways to argue about why history counts and how the real contributions of history learning can be evaluated. They suggest, in fact, a certain degree of ... optimism."