Rather, my primary goal as a history teacher is to cultivate within my students a certain mode of thinking--historical thinking. In other words, thinking about history, and, on a larger scale, all the information they consume, in the thoughtful and critical way historians do--to understand that all historical narratives are created within a social, cultural, and political context, for some overt or tacit purpose; to comprehend that the way we perceive the world in 2011 is not how the world was perceived in 1911, 1811, or 1711; to see that the set of narratives we call "history" is not something passively transmitted to us by the past, but rather actively constructed in the present.
All this toward the dual ends of being more responsible consumers of information and more compassionate participants in the diverse world in which they live. As Sam Wineburg articulates in his article "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" (Phi Delta Kappan December 2010/January 2011 92 (4): 81-94):
"Mature historical knowing teaches us to .... go beyond our own image, to go beyond our brief life, and to go beyond the fleeting moment in human history into which we've been born. History educates ("leads outward" in the Latin) in the deepest sense. Of the subjects in the secular curriculum, it does the best in teaching us those virtues once reserved for theology -- the virtue of humility in the face of limits to our knowledge and the virtue of awe in the face of the expanse of human history."
(For a more thorough, and quite eye-opening, discussion of the nature of historical thinking, I recommend Dr. Wineburg's book of the same title as the above-cited article, available here).
Such lofty aspirations inspired me as I left my credential program--and they still do--but as I embarked on my first teaching assignment, teaching Ancient Civilizations to sixth graders in a district where test scores have historically been lower than the State of California would like, and in which English is, for most students, a second language, I realized just how lofty these aspirations were.
My students, in general, were so unaccustomed to being asked to think in this way about history--especially about historical topics as removed from their lives in time, culture, and geography as Ancient Egypt and Classical Rome. They entered my classroom expecting a "fill-in-the-blank" sort of social studies class. Even the following year, as I began teaching U.S. history to eighth graders, I found so many of them simply wanting to know "the right answer" so they could write it down and be done with it. Sam Wineburg was absolutely right, it turned out, when he described historical thinking as an "unnatural act." My students were so unaccustomed to being asked to think about identifying and evaluating sources, contextualizing historical information, and constructing their own historical narratives, that most of my efforts that first year seemed to yield little more than confusion and frustration--for both me and the students. For a time, I even all but abandoned my efforts to teach historical thinking, and resigned myself to the tedious textbook-and-workbook curriculum provided by the district. And I was miserable.
It wasn't until the summer after my second year, as I worked for the National History Education Clearinghouse searching out curricula that would foster historical thinking skills in students of all ages, that I realized my mistake: I was focusing too much on where I wanted my students to be, and paying too little attention to where they were. I needed to break this complex and often counterintuitive process of historical thinking into its elemental building blocks, and then introduce those building blocks one or two at a time, rather than all at once.
This week, I had perhaps my most successful experience yet in teaching what I believe is one of the most fundamental building blocks of historical (and higher-level) thinking--the ability to acknowledge more than one point of view as reasonable and potentially valid. We've been studying the westward expansion of the United States during the 19th century, and this week we discussed the Mexican War--a hot button issue among my students, the majority of whom are of Mexican heritage. After reading the textbook's description of the war, a section of James K. Polk's speech asking Congress to declare war, and a statement by a group of Mexican leaders published in 1850 condemning the actions of the United States, I was overjoyed to witness a series of lively, thoughtful discussions among my students over who exactly was to blame for the commencement of hostilities between the two nations in 1846.
I concluded the week by having my students write (heavily scaffolded) essays in which they articulated the two opposing points of view from the historical sources we read, and then stated their own opinions. As part of the scaffolding for the assignment, I provided topic sentences for both body paragraphs--one supporting each point of view--and required students to select pieces of evidence from the textbook and the primary sources that would support each topic sentence. Below is an example of the resulting essays, probably one of the finest:
It wasn't until the summer after my second year, as I worked for the National History Education Clearinghouse searching out curricula that would foster historical thinking skills in students of all ages, that I realized my mistake: I was focusing too much on where I wanted my students to be, and paying too little attention to where they were. I needed to break this complex and often counterintuitive process of historical thinking into its elemental building blocks, and then introduce those building blocks one or two at a time, rather than all at once.
This week, I had perhaps my most successful experience yet in teaching what I believe is one of the most fundamental building blocks of historical (and higher-level) thinking--the ability to acknowledge more than one point of view as reasonable and potentially valid. We've been studying the westward expansion of the United States during the 19th century, and this week we discussed the Mexican War--a hot button issue among my students, the majority of whom are of Mexican heritage. After reading the textbook's description of the war, a section of James K. Polk's speech asking Congress to declare war, and a statement by a group of Mexican leaders published in 1850 condemning the actions of the United States, I was overjoyed to witness a series of lively, thoughtful discussions among my students over who exactly was to blame for the commencement of hostilities between the two nations in 1846.
I concluded the week by having my students write (heavily scaffolded) essays in which they articulated the two opposing points of view from the historical sources we read, and then stated their own opinions. As part of the scaffolding for the assignment, I provided topic sentences for both body paragraphs--one supporting each point of view--and required students to select pieces of evidence from the textbook and the primary sources that would support each topic sentence. Below is an example of the resulting essays, probably one of the finest:
As I graded these essays, I felt I was seeing clear evidence of budding historical thinking, but perhaps even more exciting to me was the engagement with which my students approached the entire process. I feel I've seldom seen such engagement in my classroom since I started teaching, and it feels good.
