The Challenge of Rethinking History Education

by Bruce Vansledright

Every few years in the United States, history teachers go through what some believe is an embarrassing national ritual. A representative group of students sit down to take a standardized U.S. history test, and the results show varied success. Sizable percentages of students score at or below a "basic" understanding of the country's history. Pundits seize on these results to argue that not only are students woefully ignorant about history, but history teachers are simply not doing an adequate job teaching historical facts. The overly common practice of teaching history as a series of dates, memorizing the textbook, and taking notes on teachers' lectures ensues.In stark contrast, social studies educators like Bruce A. VanSledright argue instead for a more inquiry-oriented approach to history teaching and learning that fosters a sense of citizenship through the critical skills of historical investigation. Detailed case studies of exemplar teachers are included in this timely book to make visible, in an easily comprehensible way, the thought processes of skilled teachers. Each case is then unpacked further to clearly address the question of what history teachers need to know to teach in an investigative way. The Challenge of Rethinking History Education is a must read for anyone looking for a guide to both the theory and practice of what it means to teach historical thinking, to engage in investigative practice with students, and to increase students' capacity to critically read and assess the nature of the complex culture in which they live.

226 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 30, 2010

Reviews

[Matthias]

How should book reviewers proceed? To better understand this question, let's consider two book reviewers, Alice and Bob. For Alice, book reviewing is mostly about content, whether the experience of reviewing that content is pleasing, and whether it gets her anything useful. Bob takes a much deeper and circuitous - but ultimately, he would argue, more rewarding - approach, and asks probing questions about what book practitioners know what they know, and seeks to emulate that in his own practice. Moreover, Bob wants to pass along that knowledge to book learners who might be reading his reviews. How would Alice and her colleague Bob proceed, for instance, with this book?

Alice - who, like Bob, is preparing to teach high school history and is looking for how to go about it - finds this book deeply appealing. Like Bob, throughout her teacher preparation program, she has heard a number of hymns of praise to constructivist pedagogy in history education - both for political reasons (as it aligns with democratic, humanist ideals that see each person as capable of constructing knowledge), practical ones (students will be able to look up names and dates on their phone, but there is no (trustworthy) app they can use to read a document critically for them), and those related to pure academic inquiry (the constructivist approach throws students into an approach that more closely mirrors the work done by practicing historians.) Moreover, if there's a gap that Alice finds in this indoctrination - besides the lack of opposing views, a gap that was filled when she took one perusal through Teach Like A Champion and recoiled in disgust - it's in a lack of clear models. She was assigned one reading that suggested that the idea of learning teacher "techniques" at all was oppressive and anti-human! ("On one hand," she says, as if to no one, "I can guess where they're coming from, especially with the popularity of toolboxes like Teach Like A Champion; but on the other hand, fuck you - give me something for my tiny brain to implement!")

Alice is thus pleased to see a book that is so interested in illustrating constructivist, Sam Wineburg-style history education in such concrete terms. Here is what she was waiting for someone to give her - a toolbox, but not one stuffed with torture implements. Course planning, lesson preparation, selection of primary documents, assessment, classroom management of student discussions, responding to student feedback - all are addressed in prose that is readable or even, by professional-development-text standards, downright gripping. If Alice was her own person, rather than an avatar for one side of the thought of a reviewer who had sworn off star ratings, she might give this book five stars.

Bob is more troubled. Like Alice, Bob is sympathetic to the Wineburg school, and recognizes the need for concrete help in implementing it. However, Bob also recognizes that these things that make the book appealing to his proclivities in particular also mean he might be missing some of its flaws, might be tempted to love it more than it deserves. What stands out to Bob is the book's own methodology. The book follows a teacher - Mr. Becker, briefly accompanied by a Ms. Todd (Gallant) and Mr. Brinton (Goofus) early on - as he goes through the ropes of implementing a DBQ-heavy, constructivist course in American history, in particular zooming in on a section he leads on Indian removal. Although in Bob's recollection he can't recall it every being stated explicitly, he is pretty sure that Mr. Becker, like his colleagues Ms. Todd and Mr. Brinton, are fabrications of Dr. VanSledright.

Because Bob is critically reflective, this prompts a number of questions, possibly disturbing ones. What does it mean for Dr. VanSledright to present these teaching techniques in the form of a fabricated (???) narrative? Although Mr. Becker faces challenges from students - indifferent ones, grade-scrounging ones, above all reluctant ones grown too familiar to lecture-based narrative - Bob wonders if all of this goes down a bit too pat and smoothly. If we are informed that Ms. Todd is a less experienced teacher than Mr. Brinton, a less talented storyteller, spends less time on facts, and yet her students outperform him on the standardized test of history knowledge, how backed up is this by the evidence? It's perhaps in a footnote somewhere, but is it responsible to convey things through the notoriously more memorable method of a vivid example than real evidence? Or (Bob muses, trying as ever to be even-handed) is vividness exactly what he'll need as a teacher. Don't the chapters that don't consist of invented narrative, the ones on theory and policy recommendations, feel a little thin in comparison? (And why the rhetorical choice to frame them this way, rather than narrating Mr. Brinton writing a letter to the heads of state lisensure boards and local teacher preparation programs?) And what about the fact that this is conveying through narrative a polemic against narrative? Is this rank hypocrisy, or a tradition of deliberate irony going back to Plato?

Since Bob is an avatar for the side of the present reviewer who grew dissatisfied with star rating, he would also decline to offer one - "for after all," Bob would say, to further bolster this position, "there are only so many things a fictional character should convince anyone of."

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a history major back in the dim past, and a family genealogist who learned that doing “real” history led to suggestions that the received story isn’t the only way to view the past, I truly appreciate the points that Vansledright makes in this book. His thoughts provide a structure for what I have attempted to provide to my students as I teach an Elementary Social Studies methods course in our Teacher Preparation Program, namely that they must DO history, rather than just attempt to absorb history. Invariably my students tell me that History was the most boring course they remembered in their K-12 experience. I work very hard to help them see that the discipline of history and critical historical thinking is indeed very engaging and even exciting, and is necessary in the 21st Century. Unfortunately, the mindset transformation required to make this happen nationwide is daunting at the least. I appreciate Vansledright’s optimism and suggestions in that regard but I struggle to buy into them. The main reason I gave this text 4 stars instead of 5, however, was the poor editing I noted throughout the text.

[Adam Gutschenritter · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I liked most about this book is that it opened up the mind of someone who teaches like I would like to and allows me access to his process. This will allow me to refine and alter my own process to become an even better teacher.