Updated Spring 2018
Teaching writing is an integral part of teaching history. We use writing to help our students learn, to help them develop and refine their thinking through written dialogue with us as teachers, with their peers, and with the larger community. We use writing to help our students communicate their ideas and develop a sense that communicating and sharing ideas beyond a small coterie is important.
Historians privilege the written word as our primary vehicle to access the past, and we find as much value in scrawled graffiti as we do in official legal documents. Given the range of sources we read to understand the past, we need to also expand the range of ways we encourage our students to write—and thus think and learn—about the past.
My primary goals are to teach students how to evaluate information and to communicate effectively through the written word. Since I am a historian, I also want to help my students understand how the events of the past have shaped the present. In my opinion, the best way to achieve these goals is to teach students how to think as historians. Many people think that history is simply the memorization of names, dates, and other assorted facts. In reality, historians spend our time evaluating disparate sources from the past and trying to create a cohesive picture of the past based on these sources. Our understanding of the past is constantly evolving as we acquire new information, whether this new information consists of newly discovered sources, or old sources interpreted in new ways.
This philosophy guides my approach to teaching history in the classroom. Historians read and write, and this is what I ask my students to do. We may have a particular data set of information that we examine in a course. However, my emphasis is to have students read and write about this data set to create an understanding of the past that is unique to each student. I introduce students to the basic skills, methods, and conventions used by historians. For each historical period we examine in class, we begin by gathering and interpreting data from primary sources. At the beginning of class, most students expect that our historical documents need to be official: newspaper reports, or law codes, for example. While I do assign samples from these genres, I want my students to see the rich variety of sources available to historians, and how we can find valuable information in any document. For example, we read the “Ballad of Mulan” from Song China to investigate the intersection of the culture of steppe nomads and traditional Chinese values. We watch the James Bond movie, Goldfinger to analyze masculine and feminine gender roles in the early Cold War era, while also considering how communists are portrayed and the types of threats they represent. For every primary source that we read, I ask students to describe four things that they notice in a text. These descriptions can be simple, such as noticing that the communists mostly wear gray in Goldfinger, or that one of Bond’s love interests is named “Pussy Galore.” Everything in a text has meaning because it reflects the culture that produced the text.
In addition to presenting students with different genres of sources, I also want them to recognize the different ways humans have written over the millennia. Whenever possible, I provide an image of the original text, or if the original text does not survive, the closest surviving analog. Students tend to think that documents written in the past were intended for posterity. However, when they see cuneiform clay cylinders, and realize that the text was embedded within a temple wall and not visible to humans, or the random notes preserved on birchbark from Roman border forts, it causes them to think about intended audience in ways that transcriptions on a modern page do not. To drive the point home, I often ask if they think of their classroom notes as something for people in the future to read. While most laugh at this question, when I point out that students’ notes from any era are incredibly important for helping us to understand the history of education, they realize that there is no such thing as an unimportant text, whether it is meant for posterity or not.
As we begin interpreting documents, I provide students with guiding questions to help them recognize what they see in the document and to encourage them to set aside preconceived notions. For example, when I ask students to read “Proclamation of a Day of Thanksgiving” from seventeenth-century Massachusetts, I ask them to focus on how the natives are presented, and exactly why the colonists are thankful. I ask them what surprised them most. Asking these types of questions helps students read more carefully, so that they notice that this particular proclamation is thankful for victory over the “Heathen Natives,” and does not represent the Thanksgiving narrative they were expecting. This exercise leads to a fruitful discussion of how historians view the past versus how cultural memory is constructed. Students begin to recognize that there are many different ways to use the past in our present.
As students become more comfortable collecting data from texts, I have them begin constructing historical arguments. This is one of the most challenging skills to teach. I want students to understand the rules of the historical argument while encouraging them to develop their own unique arguments. I use a combination of explicit prompts to help students think about patterns in their data and group activities so that they can share their ideas. Small group activities also make it easier for me to listen to student conversations so that I can step in to provide guidance where necessary. Sometimes, students make observations that take them in too many different directions. In that case, I ask them which observation they find most interesting, and if they can find similar data in the text. Sometimes students need validation that they are on the right track, and then they are able to fully develop their ideas. Watching students develop their own ideas about the past based on the data sets available to them is one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching.
Just as historians learn by doing within a community of historians, I ask my students to learn by doing within the classroom community. Digital collaboration tools have made this practice much easier to achieve. I have my students collect data collaboratively, using the digital annotation tool Hypothes.is. As students work together to annotate assigned primary sources, they make meaning out of texts from the past and engage with their fellow students. Their ideas about the past develop increasing complexity as they write about their observations and interpretations of the text in conversation with their fellow students. This exercise really helps students recognize how different perspectives can lead to different valid historical interpretations and a far more nuanced understanding of the past than can be created from a single perspective.
Thinking as a historian is not easy. Students need to be simultaneously comfortable with complexity and ambiguity. Students will ask “how do we know?” Sometimes the answer requires a synthesis of all course material we have learned to that point. Sometimes the answer is simply our best guess based on really scanty evidence. The reality is that there are many things we do not yet know about the past. There are even more things that we cannot know, simply because so many sources have not survived into the present. Every time students create data sets based on primary sources, I ask them to think about the limits of their data, and to develop questions that cannot be answered based on what they currently know. In some cases, their questions can lead to further research. In other cases, their questions have to remain unanswerable, and understanding the fragmentary nature of the historical record helps students grapple with their tolerance of ambiguity. Becoming comfortable with ambiguity is perhaps the scariest aspect of my courses for my students. I have to create an atmosphere of trust so that they believe me when I tell them that I will not penalize them for their answers, as long as they arrived at their answers by using the skills and methods of the historian. Those students who are able to take a leap of faith and try to develop their own ideas tell me that they find the experience incredibly rewarding. They experience the thrill of persisting through a difficult task, of trying something new, and of creating an idea that they know is completely unique to themselves.
While it is easy to see if students know how to apply the historical process in creating their arguments, it is more difficult to assess their understanding of complexity or their comfort with ambiguity. I rely on reflective writing as both a learning tool and an assessment tool. As students engage in metacognition through writing, they gain insights into their own biases and how those biases influence their views of the past. They start to recognize how our current present is contingent upon the past: not just the events of yesterday or last year, but events that occurred hundreds of years before they were born in other parts of the world. Reflective writing also allows me to gauge the pacing of course delivery by showing me students’ strengths and weaknesses, their understanding and their “muddiest points.”
In addition to our study of the past, historians are concerned about the relevance of the discipline in the present. We need only look at Jim Grossman’s call for historians to engage in public debate about the use of history or at or recent threads discussed on the AHA forum such as “The Writing of History – Creative Nonfiction and a Narrative Style.” As a profession, we need to encourage the delivery of our ideas in new modes of discourse that are accessible to the interested public and allow us to hear the voices of those typically disenfranchised by the academy. One of my assignments requires my students to develop a Public Service Announcement using the media of their choice to communicate why they think history is important. This assignment allows my students to choose their message, medium, and target audience, encouraging them to think about the relevance of history to their life and their community. One of the student-developed messages that recurs most frequently is to advocate for a different way of teaching history in the K-12 system: one that emphasizes primary sources and historical thinking over rote memorization of names and dates. Other messages urge people to be more critical consumers of cultural memories, or to understand the contingent nature of our current cultural beliefs and institutions.
Ultimately, as a teacher, I want every single one of my students to see education as a liberating experience, not simply a means to an end, but as something that has inherent value in and of itself. I want them all to find the ideas and modes of thinking and communicating that they find exciting and fulfilling. My task is to create an environment that nurtures intellectual curiosity, supports students when they fail at specific tasks, holds them accountable for their learning, and rewards them for persistence and improvement. I set high standards that I know are achievable and provide students the time and support for them to reach these standards.