Results for History Curriculum

Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK

May 14, 2013
Randall Stephens

Readers might find interesting this recent article in the Guardian about history battles.   On the heels of the Niall Ferguson scandal, Labour Education spokesman and historian Tristram Hunt writes: "From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about th
Read the above at the BBC
e future." ("History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought," Guardian, May 12, 2013).

Here's a brief excerpt:

For as [Niall] Ferguson has discovered to his cost, history enjoys a uniquely controversial place within British public life. "There is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history," complained an embattled Michael Gove in a speech last week. "There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don't tend to command much column space in the broadsheets."

Even if academic historians might not like it, politicians are right to involve themselves in the curriculum debate. The importance of history in the shaping of citizenship, developing national identity and exploring the ties that bind in our increasingly disparate, multicultural society demands a democratic input. The problem is that too many of the progressive partisans we need in this struggle are missing from the field.

How different it all was 50 years ago this summer when EP Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class , his seminal account of British social history during the Industrial Revolution. "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand loom weaver, the 'utopian' artist ... from the condescension of posterity," he wrote.>>>
Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK Reviewed by Joseph Landis on May 14, 2013 Rating: 5

Apologia pro Common Core

May 05, 2013
Steven Cromack

The 1983 report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reformstunned Americans. Schools across the country scrambled to design content standards and implement assessments.
Thirty-years later, history seems to be repeating itself. In an effort to improve K-12 education, forty-five states, the District of Columbia, and four territories have adopted and implemented the Common Core State Standards. As of 2013, Texas, Alaska, Virginia, Minnesota, and Nebraska are the five holdouts. Members of the academy and secondary school history teachers should be euphoric about the Common Core, which mandates that middle and high school students actually do the work of historians. This includes, but is not limited to, reading and analyzing primary and secondary sources, as well as synthesizing such information coherently in written assignments. The crux of the Common Core is 21st-century readiness, i.e., putting a verb in a sentence correctly, and being able to read not “good,” but well. 

The standards themselves are not revolutionary. In fact, they simply mandate that teachers actually teach reading and writing. The best teachers have always done this. But at least with the Standards, teachers will be held accountable if they choose to use PowerPoint and the textbook as their sole methods of instruction. 

Members of the academy should be excited, too. With Common Core on the ground in high schools, the next generation of students should be better readers and writers. It is now time to double down and ensure that history undergraduates who plan to be teachers are introduced to the seminal primary source documents of American history so they can be prepared to teach the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Seneca Falls Declaration, among many others, to the upcoming generations.

Finally, Common Core reminds teachers of something that they perhaps take for granted: words are powerful. Whether they rally the troops before battle, convey universal truths, or declare new ideas about government, words are at the center of any society. Ideas can only be expressed through words. Words are like the ka of the Pharaoh, the lifeblood of any civilization. They are the written and spoken laws. They are nomoi (human conventions) and physis (nature). They are a means of grace, salus (healing), and salvation provided by the religions of the world. Words ended slavery and apartheid. Words relocated sovereignty from the King in Parliament to the American people. They toppled the Senātus Populusque Rōmānus and the House of Bourbon.  Words inspired nationalism and broke the yoke of colonialism. Words also sentenced prisoners to execution, inspired terror, and declared purges. 

History is not just the study of past events, but of words and their meaning. The Common Core Standards allow for history teachers to roll up their sleeves and rediscover with their students the words that have shaped our world.
Apologia pro Common Core Apologia pro Common Core Reviewed by Joseph Landis on May 05, 2013 Rating: 5

Visual Learners and Historical Myopia

April 02, 2013
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

On my first day as a brand new assistant professor a student came up to me, introduced himself, and announced, “I am a visual learner.” The class was a reading and writing intensive freshman seminar with a predetermined syllabus. I knew we had a problem, but I had limited agency to remedy the situation. 

This year I decided to see if I could match my long-since graduated student’s need for visual stimulus with my own desire to make students delve deep into the documents that reveal the mental landscape of the past. I integrated video presentations into the middle portion of each three-hour seminar.

The visual interlude fixed one pedagogical problem and revealed another. Although academic historians of colonial America know that all the world was not New England, word has yet to reach the filmmakers. Three Sovereigns for Sarah captures Salem’s witchcraft crisis and Mary Silliman’s War strips the romantic Revolutionary myths away from a tense civil war in Connecticut. When I wished to illuminate my own area of expertise, the colonial mid-Atlantic, I came up short. No film of which I am aware follows Conrad Weiser through Penn’s Woods or brings to life the ascetic world of the Ephrata Cloister. In the realm of video pedagogy,  the years between witches and independence and the geography between Puritans and plantations cease to exist. 

New England’s comparative simplicity garners it a disproportionate amount of attention. The Pilgrims and Paul Revere bookend schoolchildren’s understanding of colonial history, with a brief pause for the horrors of Salem and slavery. Thus our politicians and the voters who elect them imagine a past of Protestant purity marred by slavery and superstition. Historians seek to disabuse students of this dangerous misperception. However, in a visual age, we need the assistance of historical films.

No doubt, my plea to move beyond New England in a blog from Boston seems strange.  I suspect that it requires the Puritans’ descendants to call for an expansion of the past beyond the Hudson. A clarion call from Harvard Square to the monied classes with expensive cameras might just do the trick.
Visual Learners and Historical Myopia Visual Learners and Historical Myopia Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 02, 2013 Rating: 5
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