Imagine a history class where students are told a fictional story about three young men of color, much like themselves, who are walking down a street late at night. One of the young men is in a particularly bad mood because his girlfriend broke up with him that morning, heaping criticism and anger on him. He had no idea how bad things were between them, and now he's in no mood to accept harassment when his friends meet him after his night shift at a local restaurant. When the white police officers who stop the young men make a racial comment, the young man responds in kind. The results are bruises, a night spent in the police station, and very worried mothers for at least two of the young men.
In our work with two schools in Providence, Rhode Island, we have used this kind of emotionally charged story to concretely present an abstraction that's at the heart of why each student should want to be his or her own historian. The young men in the story and the students in our classes have their own understanding of what occurred. But it's the police officers' written account—their case report—that controls what happens to the three young men. Students come to see that letting someone else be your “historian” always gives that person significant power over you. We invite students to grab the power of the historian for themselves rather than rely on the anonymous authors of a textbook.
What's Really Learned
What most students study in school should more accurately be termed historiography: arguments and conclusions about the past by historians and teachers. Students are asked to accept, and then digest, the perspectives, conclusions, and prior assimilations of their teachers and various authors. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with learning from this kind of accumulated knowledge, disciplined expertise, and thoughtfulness. Asking students to master historiography rather than to decipher raw history is a calmer and more certain approach; it avoids an overwhelming sense of chaos.
But it also means that students almost never get to “learn” history according to their own perspectives and values. The traditional way of studying history doesn't feel authentic to many students because they rarely perform the historian's tasks: defining essential questions, sorting through available source materials, determining topics, drawing conclusions, and presenting them persuasively. Is it any wonder so few students actually understand how much history matters?
Making the study of history an authentic experience means giving young people the same control over definition and interpretation that professional historians have always claimed for themselves. We're not just encouraging students to label their beliefs as historical interpretations. To work as historians, students need to accept, and master, an impressive array of complicated skills and attitudes.
To begin with, they need to understand primary materials, some of which are archaic. They must determine what evidence is appropriate to validate historical generalizations. Students require a working sense of the importance of the passage of time. They also need organizational skills, written and oral presentation skills, and the ability to work collaboratively.
Is all of this feasible? Can ordinary students from diverse home and academic backgrounds work successfully as student historians? To answer that question, we can report the results from our collaborative projects.
How We Taught
The schools we've taught in vary considerably. At Central High School, the students are predominantly young people of color, including recent immigrants and many from economically impoverished backgrounds. There is a high daily absentee and dropout rate, and English is a second language for many of the students. Classical High School is more than 60 percent white. An academic entrance exam is required for admission and over 90 percent of its graduates go on to four-year colleges.
After several years of experimenting with units in these schools—“The Beliefs of Western Religions,” “The Age of Discovery,” “The Renaissance,” “The Industrial Revolution,” “Civil Rights and Race Relations,” and “The United States Fights Wars,” among others—we've discovered that turning a classroom into a community of student historians requires certain procedures, no matter what the topic. Our work begins with lessons designed to introduce the subject, involve the students, and emphasize why it's important that they take more control over the history they're learning.
It's our experience that students generally enjoy working with primary sources, but they're only involved consistently in their work (to the point of losing track of time and working through the bell) if we help them see connections between the historical material and their own lives. “Why should I care?” is a paramount question, and it's the reason why we use stories such as the one related in the introduction.
In addition to a general orientation, each unit also needs an involving introduction to the specific topic. “Civil Rights and Race Relations” is such a current issue that one might assume it requires little teacher help to get students involved. However, we've found that this topic needs as much structured activity as any other subject because it can be overwhelmingly upsetting. In one class studying this issue, we asked students to imagine themselves arriving at their school prom. We painted as vivid a picture as possible, and asked students to explore their values and perspectives by writing privately about a variety of situations. How they would feel if they saw a black man dancing with an Asian woman? Or two beautiful women in low-cut gowns dancing like mad together? Or two cute guys doing the same? What about a Latino and Asian couple?
After the private writing, students were asked which group was most discriminated against at their school. The discussion went on to discuss neighborhoods, the city as a whole, the nation, and, finally, how we know what we know. The result of these exercises was a new willingness to learn about race relations, as well as a fuller understanding of why we need a disciplined approach when investigating the history of controversial subjects. Without that awareness, students might not have moved beyond pre-existing beliefs, no matter what sources they read.
A Classroom of Historians
After introduction and involvement, the students work as historians. Depending on the unit, they select various primary source documents that interest them or work with a packet of sources their group has chosen. Even a class that has had experience with primary materials still needs a teacher's help in organizing and structuring their work. We start by reducing a complicated array of skills to three precepts: historians must have accurate information, they have to use that information in drawing conclusions, and they can't abuse the information they have by ignoring or contradicting it.
The teachers provide accurate information in a data base of varied historical documents excerpted for use at the high school level. It's up to the students to make sure that all of the statements, generalizations, and conclusions in their written histories or oral presentations are derived from that information. Nothing they say can ignore or contradict information they know.
Teacher-created frameworks and structures are especially needed for this kind of work because students take responsibility for some of the confusing and open-ended tasks. For “The United States Fights Wars,” we give students a Master List of 39 documents with descriptive titles (for example, “General Jackson Calls for Black Volunteers [1814]” or “The Anglo-Saxon Mission [1885]”). The documents are organized into categories—such as “What Our Leaders Said” and “The Role of Newspapers”—and given letters and numbers that indicate specific wars. We also supply worksheets to help students organize the information they select from their documents.
The worksheets have space to note important people and places mentioned in each source, difficult words, the name of the speakers, and overall context. We want to provide enough structure so that students can face ambiguity without giving up in frustration, but there's always a compromise involved. Any organization of the students' work by someone else—including a teacher's selection of documents—influences and limits their right to define and interpret according to their perspective. The worksheets are sometimes given undeserved prominence by students used to more traditional ways of learning history. They act as if the worksheets, rather than the history that will be based on them, are the final product to be shown to the teacher.
- Does your history tell what happened? Was there change? If so, describe it.
- Is what you say—the conclusions you and your partners reach—based on the information in the documents you used?
- Is what you say consistent with the information in the documents you use?
The students always work collaboratively in small groups, and therein lies another task. Collaboration is a skill to be taught and practiced. All group members must have a necessary role, and they are responsible as individuals and as a group. Once the class learns to work collaboratively, all students (including those whose primary language is not English) can use complicated source materials to draw conclusions.
Teachers do a lot of coaching, prompting, organizing, and encouraging with this approach. We have found that, in general, problems are best faced when they surface rather than in separate, discrete lessons. For example, after a group has read several documents and is puzzling over what to do next, we encourage them to brainstorm for common themes that connect the documents they've read. We've also found that asking a series of negative (or even absurd) questions about what can be learned from a source helps some students focus. If most of the class is facing a common problem, we might stop the collaborative group work and ask the class as a whole to solve the problem.
Once group members agree on their conclusions and how their documents illustrate and support their theme, they begin outlining and writing the history they've created, or planning how to teach the rest of the class what they've learned, depending upon the unit. When classes in each of the schools work simultaneously from the same data base, they visit each other to compare their findings and discuss their perspectives.
What The Students Said
Many students have told us that they like working in a group in our classes, rather than individually. They also enjoy reading the documents (which they often call their “stories”). One student told us how great it was to think without some teacher immediately telling him he was right or wrong. Students also enjoy getting help from other students.
Several expressed in their own words an awareness of what we'd call the socially constructed nature of history. They also wrote—again, in their own words—that seeing the importance of who created history helped them understand the intellectual responsibilities of young adults in a democratic community. They expressed a growing confidence in their ability to master new challenges and a more active empathy with events of the past.
What the Teachers Learned
Based on our experiences, we believe teachers must take the initiative to get kids involved. Students generally are captivated by working with documents, no matter what the specific topic, but their intrinsic interest in the material and their sense of power at being historians is not enough to maintain intense concentration for an entire class. We had to find ways to help students see how the history, whatever the subject, relates to who they are and who they're becoming.
We found that less academically able kids often did better as student historians. In one U.S. History Advanced Placement class, most students brainstormed hypotheses before looking at the documents. Only after they reached a consensus did they search for primary sources to support their pre-existing opinions. As a result, many of their sources had to be stretched and twisted to fit. Students in classes designated as a lower academic level often showed creativity and originality. Their histories were unique because they reflected particular life experiences, but they were also historically valid. The students grabbed the historian's right to make interpretations, and they strictly followed the historian's proscription that “stories” must be derived from, and not contradict, available primary sources.
Much of our in-class work as teachers was helping kids struggle with what was so new to them. Most of our student historians were used to taking notes on teacher presentations and readings teachers assigned, and it required considerable class time before they understood what our projects required. After all, their reading assignments now lacked specific questions—or answers. No theme existed except the one their group created. They had to say how they knew what they knew, relying on information they'd uncovered themselves. Teacher patience, support, and continuing optimism about how things would turn out was always necessary.
We acknowledge that learning history by doing history is not an approach that should be adopted by all teachers, or practiced in all schools, or continued every day for an entire school year. A certain teaching temperament is essential, or the curriculum will backfire. Further, some teachers and parents will resist the student-as-historian approach. And as long as standardized tests are used for school placements, job selection, and college admissions, the core of the traditional history canon must be covered.
Still, creating a classroom of student historians is a more authentic approach to learning. Students learn to respect the rich diversity of individuals who make up—and who have made up—their community. Asking students to be historians means they all face a demanding and personalized history curriculum.
