Professional Response #2

Jeffrey Hayward
ED 640
Ever since I was a small boy, I have wanted to appear on Jeopardy. I was 7 years old when the Alex
Trebek version came on the air and I watched it with my grandparents every time I was at their house. I
remember watching the kids tournament and thinking how I would beat all of the competitors. Due to
my love of trivia, I have always enjoyed history textbooks. They are typically set up chronologically which
makes them easy to navigate. I learned early on how to find an event or person about which I had a
question. Once I was in the right spot, textbooks provide just enough information to sate my thirst for
knowledge. However, as I progressed in my schooling, I began to see that short snippets of trivia were
not enough to feed my desire for knowledge. Starting with a textbook, I looked to other sources to
expand my understanding of whatever topic I was studying. I needed to see how things came to be and
why they happened. I think that our role as history teachers is to encourage our students make this leap
too. They must move beyond dates and names to become investigators of history and textbooks can
serve as a jumping off point but cannot be the sole resource.
Thinking like a historian is much more than simply reciting dates and names. In fact, if that is all that a
student can do after taking a history class, then we as history teachers have failed in our job. History
should be a multi-faceted picture of an event, a person, or a place or of a series of all three. We should
encourage our students to dig deeper to form their own opinions of the importance or lack thereof of
their object of study. It is a bit of a clich but it is appropriate to say that we are trying to teach our
students to become historical detectives. They should be asking not just who, what, when but also why
and how. In fact, I think they should be asking so what?, a question that should come easily to a bunch
of teenagers.
In order to get our students to the point in which they can make the inquisitive leaps on their own, we
need a jumping off point from which we can engage our students in this type of investigation. I think this
is the role of textbooks. Textbooks are written specifically to be accessible by a large number of
students. The illustrations and text are large and grade-appropriate and provide their historical
narratives in broad strokes that impart the important facts. In my experience, textbooks are organized
chronologically thus they guide the students to naturally view cause and effect within particular time
frames. As was stated in Thinking like a Historian, textbooks are not neutral artifacts but are in fact
secondary sources. The authors may do their best to be neutral but their experiences and biases cannot
help but color their writing. I think students by nature want to accept textbooks as gospel thus pointing
out that they are in fact secondary sources and allowing students to evaluate them as such provides for
a rich lesson opportunity.
If the textbook is the jumping off point, then we must enrich our class with further readings. Textbooks
often fall into the trap of presenting history as statements of fact without reference to how the
historical record was set down or how a specific event might be viewed differently by different people
or cultures. The important role of primary sources is to pull student out of their own milieu and
investigate history from the point of view of those who were living it. Interpreting history often falls into
the trap of presentism or evaluation using the morals and mores of the present day. One cannot
evaluate the actions of people of the past without attempting to understand who the people were and
how they understood their world. In the article, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, Sam
Wineburg talks about students reading A Midwifes Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich which is a diary of a
woman who lived from 1735 to 1812 and worked as a midwife in Massachusetts. His students read
about the midwifes important job and her home life. He then juxtaposed the reading with a diary from
a doctor who was writing 50 years later and disparaging midwives. Using a source like A Midwifes Tale
and juxtaposing allowed the students to interact with the voice of an actual person in the past rather
than through the lens of a secondary source. It allowed the students to make their own conclusions
about what the primary source is saying and place the sources voice in the broader context of the world
in which the source was living and the changing world that was to come. I think that that engagement is
key to a students ability to go beyond what he or she is told and form their own opinions about the
history that they study in class.
I think that some teachers fall into the trap of teaching to or directly from the textbook. It is easy to
simply follow the textbook and have students regurgitate facts in multiple choice tests. If that is all we
are requiring of our students then we are doing them a great disservice. It is more difficult but much
more rigorous and rewarding to teach them to think critically about history. Thus we can use textbooks
to begin this process but we must move beyond with primary sources so that our student can
experience and make judgments on their own.