What students need to know and do
Students need to understand the complexities of supposed historical ‘facts’, such as that narratives and points of view of historians are constrained by what they know about a past. Students need to grasp how historical understandings are based on ‘data’. Some historians may call these data sets ‘facts’, even when they also concede that ‘facts’ are matters of interrogation and interpretation, but they don’t just make things up (Booth, 1997).
Student barriers to learning‘Facts’ never speak for themselves. Students who only learn ‘facts’ engage in ‘surface learning’. The misconception is that the student who collects the most ‘facts’ must also understand them best. Students may become so focussed on learning and expounding ‘facts’ they neglect the process of how to give meaning to the facts they have learned (Calder, 2006a, 2006b).
Our teaching strategiesWe can assist students by displacing their certainties and by telling them that they don’t have to know everything about the topic. Complete coverage is neither possible nor essential. We should re-configure lectures and seminars so that they are no longer a ‘data dump’. The more enduring role for lectures and seminars is to stimulate wonder and to model explicitly the contingent and provisional nature of historical interpretations (Evans, 2007; Hvolbeck, 1993; Wineburg, 2001).
We can also assist students by first exploring student preconceptions about the topic when commencing classroom dialogues about the ‘facts’. Some academics have a deficit model of student learning, choosing to be disdainful about what students don’t know. It is better to build a discussion around what the students may already think they know, even if it is wrong (Ashby, Lee, & Shemilt, 2005; Booth, 1993, 2000).
Ashby, R., Lee, P.J., & Shemilt, D. (2005). Putting principles into practice: Teaching and planning. In M.S. Donovan & J.D. Bransford (Eds.), How students learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom (pp. 79-178). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Booth, A. (1993). Learning history in university: Student views on teaching and assessment. Studies in Higher Education, 18(2), 227-235. doi: 10.1080/03075079312331382389
Booth, A. (1997). Listening to students: Experiences and expectations in the transition to a history degree. Studies in Higher Education, 22(2), 205 -220. doi: 10.1080/03075079712331381044.
Booth, A. (2000). Creating a context to enhance student learning in history. In Booth, A. & Hyland, P. (Eds.), The Practice of University History Teaching (pp. 31-46). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Calder, L. (2006a). Uncoverage: Toward a signature pedagogy for the history survey. Journal of American History, 92(4), 1358-70. doi:10.2307/4485896
Calder, L. (2006b). Uncoverage: Toward a signature pedagogy for the history survey. Retrieved from http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/textbooks/2006/calder/
Evans, E. (2007). Rethinking and improving lecturing in history. Retrieved from https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/br_evans_lecturing_2007xxxx.pdf
Hvolbeck, R.H. (1993). History and humanities: Teaching as destructive of certainty. In. R. Blackley (Ed.), History anew: Innovations in the teaching of history today (pp. 3-9). Long Beach, CA: California State University Press.
Wineburg, S. (2001). Historical thinking and other unnatural acts: Charting the future of teaching the past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
What students need to know and do
Students need to understand the way historians frame the past in constructed ‘periods’, which seldom reflect the past people’s experience of their own times. Explicit engagement with the interpretive choices involved in periodisation enables students eventually to accept that writing history entails the constructing of ‘periods’ of their own devising (Besserman 1996).
Student barriers to learning
Students struggle to understand what constitutes an historical ‘period’. Students tend to think of ‘periods’ uni-dimensionally: i.e., as shaped by one concept, whether it’s politics or war or economic change etc. A ‘period’ usually comprises overlapping and contrasting events and developments. Students may also presume the chronology of events is the same as their causation. This is because they are still thinking about the past in uni-dimensional and mono-conceptual terms (Pace & Pugh, 1996).
Our teaching strategies
Charts, timelines and other visualizations scaffold teacher and student discussion of evidence and events, trends and processes. This approach reduces the possibilities of glossing over influential historical events or of letting important events ‘float’ without chronological context. A timeline allows students to ‘see’ how overlapping and interlocking historical events can co-exist. Very little in history is chronologically clear-cut (Sipress & Voelker, 2011; Stearns, 1987).
Besserman, L.L. (Ed.). (1996). The challenge of periodization: Old paradigms and new perspectives. New York: Routledge.
Pace, D. & Pugh, S. (Eds.), (1996). Studying for history. New York: Harper-Collins.
Sipress, J.M., & Voelker, D.J. (2011). The end of the history survey course: The rise and fall of the coverage model, The Journal of American History, 97(4), 1050-66. doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaq035
Stearns, P.N. (1987). Periodization in world history teaching: Identifying the big changes, The History Teacher, 20(4), 561-80. Retrieved from: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-2745%28198708%2920%3A4%3C561%3APIWHTI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L.