Historical Thinking is Unnatural

As I start to prepare to review for my exam today, after getting ready to teach Children's Literature tonight, this quote from Sam Wineburg keeps going through my head: "In its deepest forms, historical thinking is neither a natural process nor something that springs automatically from psychological development. Its achievement goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think, one of the reasons why it is much easier to learn names, dates, and stories than it is to change the fundamental mental structures we use to grasp the meaning of the past. Mature historical thinking teaches us to go beyond our own images, to go beyond our brief life, and to go beyond the fleeting moment in human history into which we've been born."
From Wineburg, S. (2001). Historical thinking and other unnatural acts: Charting the future of teaching the past. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

This quote pretty much sums it up to me. We need to teach kids how to "do history", not simply memorize facts and regurgitate them back on a multiple choice tests. Students should wrestle with the past and come to their own interpretation of what has occurred. After all, history is interpretative and unlike other disciplines such as science where we can recreate an experiment to see what happened and verify the results, we cannot recreate something in the past. Unlike what people have said, history cannot repeat itself. The events are already over with and cannot be directly observed or repeated. A similar event might occur but it will not be the same as the event before it. Therefore, historians and students of history must interpret the past (history) using the artifacts and sources provided to us.

Dawson (1986) and Wineburg (2001) noted there are four levels of historical conceptualization starting with "just because"--i.e. history happens just because it happens all the way to history is viewed in context. Those two stages in between are as follows: level two: history is viewed as a preexisting puzzle where things fit together in a particular order like puzzle pieces and level three states that history is selective--we teach about who we want to teach about, certain events, as well as leave out certain people, places, events. This notion goes along with the collective memory notion of history or collective narrative where we have one narrative that we teach in the schools and leave out others. This is not doing history. Putting history into its proper context, viewing documents, analyzing sources--that is doing history.

As I continue to delve into these topics for my qualifying exam, this notion of doing history is part of one of my topics, I continue to think back to my high school and middle school experience in history. Did we "do history"? I don't think we did. We listened to lecture, took down notes, and spit back out information on tests. I can see why so many students hate history class.

As one of my undergrads said in her "My Life in Books" assignment this past week, she hates reading about history. It's boring to her. It's just a bunch of facts and nothing more. And from a textbook.  It's in the past. When I read her essay, I about cried.

This is what I think is the problem in so many of our schools. History is presented, in textbook form, to students as a survey course where they spend in grade 8 learning US history from the colonial period to the end of the Civil War and in grade 11 US history starting at reconstruction and going as far as they can into the present. It's skimmed over and viewed as "fact". These things happened, they happened this way, and we are telling you what really happened. Should we take the textbook for face value and not question it? I believe the answer is "NO" and that goes back to the notion of "doing history" versus sitting in a history classroom and partaking in facts. A teacher at a school I worked at covered from essentially the 1950s until 1980s in class using the song "We Didn't Start the Fire" see here .

Students need to learn that the view in the textbook is just that, an established view of a historian/textbook company and not the only view of what happened out there. Think about the Boston Massacre for example. The colonists have one view of what happened, the British another. But if we don't look at both views and interpret and draw our own conclusions of what could have happened, we might only teach one side of the story. I'm not saying though that all facts can be disputed. We know, for fact, that Kennedy was assassinated in Nov. 1963 and MLK, JR and Robert Kennedy in 1968. Those are facts that cannot be disputed. However, examining the documents regarding the assassinations of each of these men can lead to certain interpretations.

Any thoughts out there?

I think I've done enough rambling on for today. Although my rambles have me pumped for my studying for my exam.

As I end this post, I'll leave you with this...to make learning authentic, teachers must provide students the skills and resources necessary to create and interpret history.

Steph