Thanks!

Historiann — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 08:38:11 -0600

Thanks, Leslie, for the plug, and for your interest in this meme. Yay, public history! Please consider attending the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women this summer, June 12-15 in Minneapolis. (Details at berks.umn.edu). We've got lots of public history in the program this time around, and we're hoping to increase contact between academic and public historians (an artificial but sometimes heavily policed divide.)

Historiann.com

Why teach (or know) history

Leslie Madsen Brooks — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:03:48 -0600

This week, I'm finding some of the best writing in the academic blogosphere that I've seen in a long time. See, there's an excellent meme making its way around the academia and education blogosphere: "Why I teach history." The responses on some blogs have been so terrific and, I think, important that I thought I'd offer a round-up here.

New Kid on the Hallway writes,

I also teach history to help students learn that there's more than one way to view the world and that they themselves and their experiences are not the measure of all things. One of the things I've started telling students is that when a source confuses them, that's probably one of the best signs that it's telling us something important about how people in the past are different from people today. Because while I think history requires skills and you can't just "do" history just because you can read a history book, I also don't think history is like nuclear physics; the readings I assign are not usually incomprehensible (my apologies to nuclear physicists). When students are confused by something, 99% of the time it turns out they're not really confused by what the source says; they're just confused about why someone would act that way/think/say such a thing. Et voila - a teachable moment, as the saying goes.

[...]

I firmly believe that to be a responsible, respectful citizen of the world, you have to be able to recognize that not everyone sees the world the way that you do - and that doesn't make them wrong. In fact, they probably have just as good reasons for seeing the world the way they do as you do for seeing the world that you do. So I want students to understand that historically, there have been a lot of ways to organize society and live life that don't look a lot like the modern U.S., and that each of those have been reasonable responses to the circumstances in which those people found themselves. This doesn't mean I require students to accept all ways of living as equally desirable; just because I can understand that there are cultural reasons behind, for instance, female genital mutilation, doesn't mean I accept it as a valid practice. Even though I don't, however, I think you have to understand something in order to change it. Academic freedom is crucial to this - we need to be able to understand even practices we disagree with on their own terms. So we can't just label something "evil" and not try to understand it further.

Squadratomagico weighs in with another very thoughtful post--you should go read all of it--but here's an excerpt:

I love teaching history because I believe it implicitly raises the possibility of counterfactual narratives. I don’t explore counterfactuality in the classroom, but I know some students are thinking about these issues on their own. The ability to imagine alternate social, political, economic, religious, etc. directions within history can, I think, lead to the ability to imagine alternate configurations for current social, political, economic, religious, etc. conditions. The study of history can train the individual to question reality; to question the authority of received cultural (and parental) expectations, hopefully in productive ways. I believe this can be empowering.

Historiann's first response is an interesting and compelling one:

Because I love my country, and know that it is strong enough to reckon honestly with the fact that it hasn’t always lived up to its own ideals, and that that reckoning will only make it better and stronger. Contrary to right-wing propagandists, most professional American historians have devoted their lives to researching and teaching a subject they love. Historiann has always thought that the accusation that the Professoriate were a substantial subset of the hate-America-first crowd was clearly a projection. Only right-wingers appear to enjoy obsessing about people and ideas they hate.

(Historiann appears to be a relative newcomer to the blogosphere, but she's off to a ridiculously strong start. Definitely go check out her blog.)

Tenured Radical also addresses politics:

Because it helps students who feel invisible or inarticulate among other students talk about their own ideas, become part of our community, and take a big step towards becoming engaged intellectuals. At a school like Zenith, this can often mean students from poor families in a population that is mostly made up of very privileged people; conservative students on a liberal campus, who are often reduced to bromides and declarations of belief to be heard at all; students of faith who are operating in an atmosphere that often implicitly or actively de-values religion as not rational, and therefore unworthy; leftist students who can be heard on a liberal campus, but who often have more enthusiasm for the causes they espouse than they have the necessary knowledge about those causes, knowledge that might empower them to take action or get work in politics rather than just tell other people what to think and what to do. For all of these students -- and more -- making the connection between their college education and their life's work as adults can be one of the great contributions that any teacher can make.

Clio Bluestocking likes the polyvocality and distributed learning of a diverse history classroom:

I love that my students bring the world into my classroom. This has been especially true this past semester when I have had classrooms that have been up to 90% immigrant and look 100% different from me. I have no idea where they are coming from, but some gradually reveal themselves through the semester, and I want to foster more of that. For example, I have had students from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Gabon in my African American history classes. Now, imagine that: their predecessors were, over the course of 3 centuries, kidnapped from Africa, taken to America, returned to Africa, and now here these students are, sitting in a classroom in America. I also had a student from Ethiopia and a student from Eritrea in the same world history classroom, and they both explained to me the situation between their two countries. This has meant that I have had to relinquish some of my control over the subject, my role as the “expert” to allow their voices to contribute to the subject. As a teacher, and as a person who gives a damn about the condition of other people in the world, this is a humbling experience. I love that.

Ari Kelman over at another new(ish) blog, Edge of the American West, is also into the whole importance-of-history-to-undergraduates thing (imagine that!):

The idea that I might be able to convince students to care about the past. This one is a longshot, I admit. But there are days when the undergraduates in my courses actually seem to leave my class knowing something about republican ideology in the age of the Revolution, David Walker’s Appeal, Indian Removal, or the birth of the Lost Cause myth. These moments don’t happen as often as I’d like. But they happen frequently enough to keep me going.

Sadly, history isn't being prioritized in the current era of high-stakes testing ushered in by No Child Left Behind. That success in college admissions depends more on doing well on the SAT than in demonstrating some kind of cultural literacy doesn't help, of course. That means some college students get introduced to history in a substantial way for the first time when they're 20 or 21 years old. And, as homeschooling mom Simply Sandy points out, that's ridiculous. If you have young kids at home, be sure they're learning some history.

As for me, why do I (occasionally) teach history, in the guise of museum history, material culture, or other American Studies courses? Because I love the weirdness of history (and especially material culture), and I enjoy trying to make sense of this weirdness with students. I especially like helping students trace contemporary political and cultural concerns to their roots in, say, the 1890s or the 1950s. It's not always easy work, but it is fun.

Bonus: Dr. Crazy offers a perspective on another discipline: "Why Teach Literature."

Why is history important to you? And how are you making sure your own kids get inoculated with it?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks helps university faculty improve their teaching. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toy Box.

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Why teach (or know) history