Historians and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
I started reading these articles as I usually do, just ready to soak in all the info and take it as it is. But in trying to do better at analyzing, I took a proverbial step back and tried to decifer what it is these people are writing about. The following are thoughts and questions I'll be looking for answers to as I finish reading this weeks articles.
So at first glance (and the limited scope of looking at just the first few pages of David Pace's piece) it seems that the question here is: How do historians improve the teaching of history?
Now it's what the answer to this question seems to be that has me a little confused, concerned, and a bit baffled. Pace, and some of the other authors from past readings, seem to be approaching this from a ground up method. They realize the teaching of history is bad, it doesn't share the same level of importance as researching history does (and therefore lacks necessary tools), and that improvement is necessary. But at first glance, what with all of their lamenting the lack of research or scholarship on how to teach history, it would seem that Pace and others feel the need to find out how to teach from the very beginning, as it were. What I'm getting at, is that there has been tons of research, scholarship, and what have you in the field of teaching. There's usually a school of Education at every university. People know how to teach. So why don't historians just take some classes on how to teach, then apply history to that?
Well, one rebuttal to my own question is that there must be something different about teaching history than other subjects. And of course there is. (Warning blatant over-generalizations ahead.) For example, history is all subjective (how did people think 1000 years ago) and math is all factual (1+2=3, was true 1000 years ago, now and forever).
So those will be my questions that overshadow my reading: 1) How can historians improve the teaching of history? and 2) Why is teaching history different than teaching any other subject?
Pace on question 1: Look at what the professionals do, versus amateurs.
- Read text with a critical eye.
- Creating historical 'narratives' instead of lists with very little on no connection between items.
- analyze, evaluate, compare, and situate particular texts within their historical context
- In order to get the professional historians on board the bus of better teaching, they would need to feel a part of the process of creating a scholarship of learning and teaching history. That is to say, they won't accept the research and ideas from non-historians.
Pace on question 2:
- "At the core of this entire project is the realization that all academic learning is discipline specific and that genericstrategies for improving teaching are of limited effectiveness. In this view, a discipline such as history represents a unique epistemological and methodological community, whose rules and procedures must be fully understood and made explicit before we can generate rigorous knowledge about teaching and learning in our field." (12) I'm not totally convinced of this yet.
- "need to tailor their reading strategies to the nature of the disciplines that they are studying." (31)
- "The emphasis on the disciplinary nature of learning has also begun to bring pedagogical research and history closer together. As educational researchers have become increasingly convinced that learning is discipline specific... " (40) His not giving any proof of this, it still seems an assumption.
consequences of actions, and to master dozens of other subtle mental operations thatsuccess as individuals and for the very survival of our society" (56).
