2006
Taking Seriously the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Section Introduction
Gary J. Kornblith & Carol Lasser Article
Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey
Lendol Calder Article
Ways of Seeing: An Introduction
Michael Coventry, Peter Felten, David Jaffee, Cecilia O’Leary, and
Tracey Weis, with Susannah McGowan Article
Thinking Visually as Historians: Incorporating Visual Methods
David Jaffee Article
Confronting Prior Visual Knowledge, Beliefs, and Habits: “Seeing”
beyond the Surface
Peter Felten Article
What’s the Problem? Connecting Scholarship, Interpretation, and
Evidence in Telling Stories about Race and Slavery
Tracey Weis Article
Moving beyond "the Essay": Evaluating Historical Analysis and
Argument in Multimedia Presentations
Michael Coventry Article
Connecting to the Public: Using New Media to Engage Students in
the Iterative Process of History
Cecila O’Leary Article
Ways of Seeing: A Conclusion
Michael Coventry, Peter Felten, David Jaffee, Cecilia O’Leary, and
Tracey Weis, with Susannah McGowan Article
"Beyond Best Practices": Taking Seriously the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser
Contributing Editors, Textbooks and Teaching
Section Introduction
How do we teach American history? And what do our students learn? In this year's
"Textbooks and Teaching" section, we present reports from the field, exploring what
happens when historians self-consciously study their classroom practices. Inspired by
Ernest L. Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered, proponents of this kind of rigorous analysis
of pedagogy refer to it as "the scholarship of teaching and learning."1 When we first approached
this subject, we must admit, we had reservations: Would we be moving into
the domain of education departments and teacher certification programs that addressed
such issues as the relative merits of various classroom technologies, effective construction
of multiple-choice tests, and the mysteries of rubric creation, all to serve us better in our
quest for efficient "content delivery"? Would we be presented with mind-crushing correlations
between student assessment scores and proportions of lecture/discussion observed
for various courses at distinct levels of the curriculum? Would we see lesson plans for
successful classes presented like recipes in a "best practices" cookbook? Were historians
being asked to "dumb down" their specialties in order to don the guise of entertainers
who could reach students more accustomed to amusement than to serious intellectual
inquiry? To our relief our skepticism proved misplaced. The work presented below is analytically
sophisticated, well grounded in empirical research, and provocative. It demands
that we engage questions not just about the merits of particular pedagogies, but about
our central purposes as academics who both study and teach the American past.
Above all, the scholars whose work appears in this section taught us that exploring
teaching and learning in history requires that we consider our goals before we turn to
evaluating our methods. What are we trying to teach? What do we want students to know
after they have completed a history course, and for how long do we wish them to retain
that knowledge? Contributors to this section recognize and register the familiar concern
with the lack of historical knowledge today's students manifest, but rather than simply
trying to fill empty vessels with incontestable, abstracted, and correct facts, they seek to
help students develop an appreciation for history as the practice of interpretation and narration,
based in the systematic analysis of evidence. In this way, they argue, students learn
both content and what to do with it. In other words, these practitioners illuminate strategies
for teaching historical thinking, not a long list of names and dates or even a short
list of lessons of history. These case studies are rich with discussions of the components that constitute our disciplinary mode of analysis: posing historical questions; evaluating
contested interpretations; interrogating and contextualizing sources; using evidence to
create a narrative; revising established narratives in light of new findings. The best historians
use these skills unselfconsciously; they are part of our cast of mind. But how do we
teach these skills to our students so that they will think like historians, not just memorize
the thoughts of their teachers? The scholarship of teaching and learning, then, not only
encourages us to bring our skills as researchers into our work as teachers; it also asks us
to articulate the core substance and significance of our distinctive expertise as historians.
Perhaps, as T. S. Eliot has said, "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we
started and know the place for the first time."2 Teaching history may yet be reconnected
with doing history.
The section that follows has two components. It begins with Lendol Calder's article on
how he has radically restructured that most traditional of courses, the American history
survey, in light of the scholarship of teaching and learning. Calder, who teaches history at
Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, was a 1999 Fellow in the Pew Scholars Program
at the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). The
second article is a collaborative essay by five historians who have worked together since
2000 on the Visible Knowledge Project (VKP): Michael Coventry of Georgetown University;
Peter Felten of Elon University; David Jaffee of the City College of New York and
the Graduate Center, City University of New York; Cecilia O'Leary of California State
University, Monterey Bay; and Tracey Weis of Millersville University. Directed by Randy
Bass of Georgetown University and co-directed by Bret Eynon of LaGuardia Community
College, the VKP "aims to improve the quality of college and university teaching through
a focus on both student learning and faculty development in technology-enhanced environments."
3 As the authors explain, questions of teaching and learning quickly became
central to their thinking about how to engage their students in using visuals and new media
to develop a sophisticated approach to history. Bringing new forms of evidence and
analysis into their history classrooms helped them not only to promote the cognitive processes
they sought to foster in novice learners but also to understand better the methods
we use as historians in our research and writing for others in the profession. We expect
that JAH readers, whether novice, skeptic, or expert in the scholarship of teaching and
learning, will find these reports from the field stimulating and provocative as they seek to
convey more effectively to their students, and to the larger public of which they are a part,
what it is we do when we do American history.
Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser are professors of history at Oberlin College.