Arbitrating Competing Claims in the Classroom Culture WarsBruce A. VanSledright Displaying occasional touches of surprise at and lament over its viciousness, a number of history educators have contributed articles to this column dealing with the struggle over what and how to teach about the American past. A good share of the controversy to which these commentaries have alluded relates to the turbulence that followed the release of the National Standards for U.S. History in 1994. Since that time, there has been no scarcity of intellectual positions offered on both the nature of the Standards and the classroom culture wars. This controversy raises important questions: How does one arbitrate from among the opinions and positions conveyed? Is one position or case stronger than another? What evidence do the various sides cite in making their arguments about that which should be taught and how? One way to address these questions is to appeal to the burgeoning cottage industry of research on teaching and learning history that has sprouted over the past decade. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, in the four years since the release of the standards, no one associated with them or with the positions taken in this column has made such an appeal. For me, this has been a striking and perplexing omission. Although there is some debate about the purpose educational research serves and how much it can teach us about the world of classrooms, the fact of the matter is that sound research on teaching and learning history helps us make sense of the possibilities and limitations of our educational aims and practices. If the research balances rigor with elegance, it can help us arbitrate the assertions made by various stakeholders in the battles over the classroom culture wars, as well as shed light on the adequacy of the aims and directions of such documents as the History Standards. Consequently, this research has the potential to serve as an antidote to the infectious and often misdirected criticisms of historians and history educators. What follows is a brief overview of some of this research and suggestions as to how, by appealing to it, it can assist in arbitrating competing claims. There is not space here to summarize all or even most of this rigorous work; however, a selected set of references to the research appears at the end of this essay and a detailed bibliography can be found on the web: www.indiana.edu/~oah/nl/99feb. It is appropriate to begin with a consideration of what some of the research tells us about how students learn history--how they become historical thinkers. A number of studies point out that students have significant difficulty acquiring knowledge about the past if it is presented to them as a steady diet of historical details, events, and names, what Tom Holt has termed "other people's facts." Research on students of various ages and grade levels indicates that this difficulty begins in elementary school and persists through college. In a longitudinal study, researchers McKeown and Beck (1990) at the University of Pittsburgh noted that over half of a group of sixth graders had difficulty recalling what they had studied about the American Revolution in fifth grade. The material studied in fifth grade had been presented to the students in a textbook litany of detail-laden events, one set piled atop another. Similarly, in an in-depth, two-part study of twelve Maryland eighth graders who had gone through the typical text-book driven survey treatment of American history from "Native Americans to Reconstruction" in fifth grade, ten of the twelve had significant difficulty remembering much of what they had studied three years earlier (see VanSledright 1995, 1996). Moreover, during an interview session in the same two-part study, one that was devoted to addressing students' understanding of British colonization in North America--a unit they had just finished--an interviewee became so exasperated trying to reconstruct his ideas that he said, "I can't remember; it's all just jumbled in my head!" The problem this research points up is that history was presented to learners as a mass of inert facts to be absorbed by their passive, waiting minds. Neither the historical material itself nor the cognitive processes of students were thought to have dynamic, vigorous features. Studies that have looked closely at historical thinking note that, if students do not have the opportunity to engage the past by doing more than consuming names, dates, and events, they come away impoverished. Some even become hopelessly confused by the information load they are expected to carry. This research points to the importance of inviting students to immerse themselves, not only in the stuff of the past, but also the processes that historians employ to construct an understanding of historical events. Several studies indicate that, by the time they leave high school, students have had few opportunities to explore history by actually investigating it themselves (see the study of high school students' struggle with primary source documents by Stahl, et al. 1996; and expert-historian and novice-high-school-student studies of historical thinking by Wineburg 1991a, 1991b). As they enter college, most young people believe that history is what is contained between the covers of their textbooks and not much more, save for a few stories passed along from home. They lack the inquiry-based capabilities that historical investigators use and educational reports say Americans need if they are to succeed in the information age. On these points, see for example Greene's (1994) work with college students who experienced significant difficulty researching and writing historical accounts. Unless the study of history is mixed with authentic opportunities for investigation and the serious historical analysis of the evidence employed to construct that record, students will struggle to make sense of the myriad details they are asked to learn. Those who make such an argument would be right to draw on this research to claim that, in order to make sense of and understand the substantive content of history, students must have relatively deep experience with the art of historical inquiry, with interpreting historical evidence, and with opportunities to build skill in historical analysis and argumentation. A word about textbooks is also in order. History provided in standard textbooks has been the focus of a number of rigorous studies. Some of the most extensive work in this area has been done by Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown and their students at the University of Pittsburgh (see for example Beck et al. 1995; and Beck et al. 1991). After studying history textbooks word by word and examining their influence on readers, these researchers point out that these textbooks typically convey accounts of the past that are static, objectified, and voiceless. Yet, history is anything but inert, mute, and unbiased. Authors are responsible for the tales they tell on the pages of textbooks; they have helped to construct the images and accounts conveyed. However, seldom do they reveal the subjective nature of their interpretations that shape what they write. Seldom, if at all, do they discuss events in terms of debates over evidence and point of view that historians engage in. Seldom do they note how fragmentary the evidence trail is, acknowledging an open and fluid understanding of the historical record. As a result, students of history develop distorted views of the past and equally distorted views on how accounts of the past are researched, interpreted, and argued. Beck, McKeown, and Worthy (1995) attempted to mediate some of these distortions by recrafting several textbook passages to include the author's voice and broaden interpretive perspective, thus diminishing the sense of an absent author and the appearance of a flat, monolithic understanding. Improved text comprehension and deeper historical understanding occurred among the young students on whom they tested their rewritten versions. Advocates who seek to address such concerns by recommending that history be studied through multiple eyewitness accounts and primary source documents (where voice plays a clear role), and alternative accounts available through history tradebooks, in addition to experiences with traditional textbooks, can cite this line of research to add support to their positions. A third body of research deals with what is usually taught in American history courses. Many have seen this as a key issue in the 1994 release of the standards and the source of much subsequent controversy in the classroom culture wars. What does research on the subject teach? First, several studies note that the traditional celebratory tale of nation building which tends to focus on the military, economic, and political achievements (exploits, as you prefer) of largely white, male American heroes still has great staying power and currency in the minds and hearts of both teachers and students of American history. A good example of such a study is the work of O'Connor (1991), who asked 24 college students to write an essay on the "origin of the United States." Of the 24, 23 crafted stories of the celebratory, progressive tale of oppressed Europeans who came to the New World, obtained their freedom, and by sheer will and Manifest Destiny went on to create the most powerful nation on earth. However, recent research indicates that students of color (particularly African American students) can find this tale suspicious because it simply does not square with their experience, nor with what they have encountered away from school and away from the teachers and textbooks that often uncritically repeat it. One set of studies in particular (Epstein 1997, in press) indicate that students of color can come to develop a form of double consciousness about their country's past. Some actually demonstrate a growing cynicism because they believe that they are being deceived in school. This hardly seems a consequence we would intentionally seek in educating American children. Other studies echo these concerns. For example, one in-depth study (Seixas 1993) of the historical understandings constructed by twelve history students from multiculturally diverse high schools, found that their family histories were often out of sync with the history taught at school. This was especially pronounced among the students of color. The study concludes by noting the problematic cultural costs associated with the failure to give attention to such asynchronous histories. Concerted efforts to construct standards and teach history in ways that present more balanced, multiculturally textured accounts of the American past are justifiable in light of such research. By ignoring the research, we unwittingly perpetuate the celebratory approach to American achievement, while in the process, alienating those who bring a more complex and differentiated understanding of history to the classroom. The research on and about teaching and learning history has much to offer in addressing these important issues. It cannot completely quiet the often overly-simplistic political arguments that animate the classroom culture wars, but it can go some distance in separating hollow wish lists and naked partisanship from defensible history education goals and practices. My fervent hope is that those of us involved in classroom and curricular debates begin using the growing body of research for this purpose.
Works Cited Beck, Isabel, Margaret McKeown, and Jo Worthy. 1995. "Giving Text a Voice Can Improve Students' Understanding." Reading Research Quarterly 30: 220-238. Beck, Isabel, Margaret McKeown, Gale Sinatra, and Jane Loxterman. 1991. "Revising Social Studies Text From a Text-Processing Perspective: Evidence of Improved Comprehensibility." Reading Research Quarterly 26: 251-276. Epstein, Terrie. (in press). "Deconstructing Differences in African American and European American Adolescents' Perspectives on United States History." Curriculum Inquiry. ------. 1997. "Sociocultural Approaches to Young People's Historical Understanding." Social Education 58: 41-44. Greene, Stuart. 1994. "The Problems of Learning to Think Like a Historian: Writing History in The Culture of The Classroom." Educational Psychologist 29: 89- 96. McKeown, Margaret, and Isabel Beck. 1990. "The Assessment and Characterization of Young Learners' Knowledge of a Topic in History." American Educational Research Journal 27: 688-726. O'Connor, Karen. 1991. "Narrative Form and Historical Representation: A Study Of American College Students' Historical Narratives." Paper presented at the Conference for Pedagogic Text and Content Analysis, Harnosand, Sweden. Seixas, Peter. 1993. "Historical Understanding Among Adolescents in a Multicultural Setting." Curriculum Inquiry, 23: 301-327. Stahl, Steven, Cyndie Hynd, Bruce Britton, Mary McNish, and Dennis Bosquet. 1996. "What Happens When Students Read Multiple Source Documents in History?" Reading Research Quarterly 31: 430-456. VanSledright, Bruce. 1996. Studying Colonization in Eighth Grade: What Can It Teach Us About The Learning Context Of Current Reforms? Theory and Research in Social Education 24: 107-145. ------. 1995. "'I Don't Remember--The Ideas Are All Jumbled in My Head': Eighth Graders' Reconstructions of Colonial American History." Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 10: 317-345. Wineburg, Samuel. 1991a. "On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes On the Breach Between School And Academy." American Educational Research Journal 28: 495-519. ------. 1991b. "Historical Problem Solving: A Study of the Cognitive Processes Used in the Evaluation of Documentary and Pictorial Evidence." Journal of Educational Psychology 83: 73-87.
Other Related Research Studies Barton, Keith. 1998. "'You'd Be Wanting To Know About The Past': Social Contexts and Children's Historical Understanding In Northern Ireland and The United States." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, April. ------. 1997. "'I Just Kinda Know": Elementary Students' Ideas About Historical Evidence." Theory and Research in Social Education 24: 407-430. Brophy, Jere, and Bruce VanSledright. 1997. Teaching and Learning History in Elementary Schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Levstik, Linda. 1993. "Building a Sense Of History In The First-Grade Classroom." Pp. 1-31 in Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 4, ed. J. Brophy. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. VanSledright, Bruce. 1997. "And Santayana Lives On: Students' Views On the Purposes For Studying American History." Journal of Curriculum Studies 29: 529-557. Wiley, Jennifer, and James Voss. 1996. The Effects of "Playing Historian" on Learning in History. Applied Cognitive Psychology 10: 63-72.
Bruce A. VanSledright teaches in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Maryland, College Park For additional material on this subject, see www.indiana.edu/~oah/nl/99feb/Oahbibl.htm |
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