Ways of Seeing: Evidence and Learning in the History Classroom

In a recent essay, David Pace decried the “chasm” between current practices in research and those in teaching in our profession. For more than a century, historians have worked together to build a research enterprise “infused with a commitment to rigor and collective responsibility.” Yet the discipline's approach to teaching could hardly differ more. Because we generally teach in isolation, behind doors that keep our students in and our colleagues out, a significant gap exists, in both orientation and practice, between our research and our teaching. We tend to frame problems in our research as exciting opportunities, and we often seek out colleagues to discuss our work. When it comes to teaching, however, we see problems as disreputable, something to be hidden, rather than as invitations to further the knowledge of a community of practitioners through discussion and scholarship.1 Over the past decade, an increasing number of academics, including many historians, have explored the scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl) as one way to bridge the chasm by giving the same careful, methodical attention to problems in teaching as to problems in research. As in other forms of scholarship, knowledge claims in sotl must be embedded in a body of knowledge, open to peer review, and accessible for exchange with and use by disciplinary colleagues. In sotl for history, then, professional historians consider the questions about student learning that matter to them and apply standards of historical scholarship to tackle those questions. Their lines of inquiry often begin with questions about classroom practice—“How can I help students understand and use primary documents better?”—but return to issues fundamental to teaching and learning historical knowledge. The fundamental questions are varied, but historians engaged in sotl have concentrated on two broad lines of inquiry: “What do students bring to the history classroom that may have a major impact on their learning?” and “What mental operations and procedures must students master in order to think historically?”2