DWill wrote: You're the one who might be wading into history teaching, not me, and I think that's a good thing. I might go nuts with internal debating before I could ever broker this subject with 25 adolescents. Needing to take into account the differences between freshmen and seniors, intellectually, plus the variations of learning styles, literacy, and analytic ability within a grade--I wish you luck and success if you do it. History seems the most difficult of subjects to me. I can understand why teachers want to make it rather cut-and-dried, just the facts, ma'am. I'm not set against that approach entirely, either. How does anyone get into her head the basic outline of what happened, so that she doesn't end up completely clueless telling Jay Leno that Churchill was a great Civil War general?
I admit to a certain trepidation about the human and social side of bringing kids along. But the facts vs. interpretation dilemmas are manageable, said the economics teacher. The idea is to get kids curious about facts based on the larger themes, so that they have their own desire to learn the facts and one is not just using leverage to cram facts in. There should be some balance between embarrassment if they declare that Churchill was a great Civil War general, on one hand, and willingness to learn new facts to fill in the questions they have generated.
The hierarchy of learning objectives (aka Bloom's taxonomy) helps structure how to think about these things. Knowledge, Understanding, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation. Each relies to some extent on the ones below it, and engagement with the higher level activities helps to motivate acquisition at the lower levels. For example, analysis is more fun if there is evaluation at stake. Application of knowledge is interesting in the context of the demands of synthesis, e.g. arrange a puppet show to explain how the world appeared to Joan of Arc.
DWill wrote: With my fuzzy use of the word 'interpretation' I think I had in mind moral interpretation, which BH seems to avoid pretty well since it hardly mentions individuals at all and floats above moral judgment.
Hmm. Interesting. Though Jared Diamond specializes in using cases, whether Cortez or Easter Island, to illustrate his Big History themes. I like to mix in a little moral judgment because students stand in many different relations to that, and the moral implications of Easter Island destroying its civilization by choosing conflict over cooperation are fascinating. Even though we don't know the names of Easter Islanders at the time of the demise, we can fill in character types and understand what roles they might have played in the drama.
DWill wrote:What troubled me most about Zinn was the lack of context, the implication that America's flaws were unusual aberrations in societies and showed America as being worse by comparison. History should be taught comparatively. There, I've got something to stand on (for now).
I agree with you about that flaw. The critical approach tends to believe it is upholding an absolute moral standard, independent of the times or the issues at stake. In doing so, of course, it falls into the trap of claiming moral omniscience, since it pretends to know how the principles involved will play out over the time to come. Will equality turn out to be a pipe dream? Will socialism lead to totalitarian oppression? How can anyone think they know the answers to such questions.
A narrative claiming that Americans were uniquely virtuous in choosing self-government and rejecting domination by nobles is fairly naive, but students should have some idea that what was done in the provinces so far from the British Parliamentary debate was incredibly significant in historical perspective.
DWill wrote:
How about trying on this as a distinction to guide teaching: is history class to be about historiography or history? I'm thinking that in a basic sense historiography increases with the age and intellectual ability of the students. Earlier on it is mostly about what we think we know of the facts.
I think that's right. Children need a basic "lay of the land" feel for what they learn about, based on a rough factual sketch and a few strands of interpretation. I still remember in third grade the enrichment teacher teaching us about Napoleon using the 1812 overture. When she asked what we knew about Napoleon I volunteered that he was sort of like Hitler, and she cautioned us that Napoleon remains a hero to many French people. That's a kind of digestible framework that doesn't get into the horrors of the Holocaust but does give a sense that military defeat and conquest are not the final word, one way or another, about virtue.