Sam Wineburg

Historical thinking and other unnatural acts : charting the future of teaching the past

Introduction: Understanding Historical Understanding Part I: Why Study History? 1. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts 2. The Psychology of Teaching and Learning History Part II: Challenges for the Student 3. On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy 4. Reading Abraham Lincoln: A Case Study in Contextualized Thinking 5. Picturing the Past Part III: Challenges for the Teacher 6. Peering at History Through Different Lenses: The Role of Disciplinary Perspectives in Teaching History 7. Models of Wisdom in the Teaching of History 8. Wrinkles in Time and Place: Using Performance Assessments to Understand the Knowledge of History Teachers Part IV: History as National Memory 9. Lost in Words: Moral Ambiguity in the History Classroom 10. Making (Historical) Sense in the New Millennium

On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy:

In this article I explore what it means to read a historical text. In doing so, I draw on my research with historians and high school students, who thought aloud as they reviewed a set of texts about the American Revolution. I begin by providing an overview of what I learned from historians, sketching in broad strokes an image of the skilled reader of history. Next, I compare this image to what emerged from an analysis of high school students’ responses to these same documents. I then speculate about the source of differences between these two groups, arguing that each group brings to these texts a distinctive epistemological stance, one that shapes and guides the meanings that are derived from text. I end by outlining the implications of this work for how we define reading comprehension and how we define the place of history in the school curriculum.

Historical Thinking and other Unnatural Acts

Debates about national history standards become so fixated on the question of “which history” that a more basic question is neglected: Why study history at all?

Reading Abraham Lincoln : An expert/expert study in the interpretation of historical texts

This study explored how historians with different background knowledge read a series of primary source documents. Two university-based historians thought aloud as they read documents about Abraham Lincoln and the question of slavery, with the broad goal of understanding Lincolns views on race. The first historian brought detailed content knowledge to the documents; the second historian was familiar with some of the themes in the documents but quickly became confused in the details. After much cognitive flailing, the second historian was able to piece together an interpretative structure that brought him by the tasks end to where his more knowledgeable colleague began. Data analysis focused on how, lacking detailed content knowledge, this historian was able to regain his intellectual footing, work through confusion, and resist the urge to simplify. Implications of this work for cognitive analyses in history and education are discussed.

In the Company of Colleagues: An Interim Report on the Development of a Community of Teacher Learners.

Abstract This article reports on a professional development project that sought to establish a community of learners among high school teachers. Teachers from the English and history departments at a large urban high school met twice a month for two-and-a-half years. Project activities included reading and discussing pieces of fiction and history, developing an interdisciplinary humanities curriculum, and video-taping and viewing classroom instruction. Initial findings point to an enhanced collegiality among faculty within and across departments; reduced teacher isolation; and the development of an intellectual community for teachers within the high school. However, teachers at different points in their career trajectory were differentially affected by this project. Based on our preliminary findings, we offer implications for teacher induction and socialization, and on-going professional development.

Wrinkles in Time and Place: Using Performance Assessments to Understand the Knowledge of History Teachers

New forms of assessment are sweeping the country. This article reports findings from one of the first projects to develop and field-test performance-based assessments for teachers, Stanford University’s Teacher Assessment Project. The authors analyze the responses of two high school history teachers on three perfomance assessments of teaching: (a) Evaluation of Student Papers, in which teachers read and responded to a set of student essays; (b) Use of Documentary Materials, in which teachers planned a classroom activity using primary sources; and (c) Textbook Analysis, in which teachers evaluated a selection from a widely used U. S. history textbook. Differences emerged in the teachers’ conceptions of their roles and responsibilities, their images of student ability and motivation, their views on student learning, and their subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge. The authors discuss what performance assessments can tell us about pedagogical knowledge and reasoning, and explore the implications of this work for policy and practice.

Common Belief and the Cultural Curriculum: An Intergenerational Study of Historical Consciousness:

How is historical knowledge transmitted across generations? What is the role of schooling in that transmission? The authors address these questions by reporting on a thirty-month longitudinal study into how home, school, and larger society served as contexts for the development of historical consciousness among adolescents. Fifteen families drawn from three different school communities participated. By adopting an intergenerational approach, the authors sought to understand how the defining moments of one generation—its “lived history”—becomes the “available history” to the next. In this article, the authors focus on what parents and children shared about one of the most formative historical events in parents’ lives: the Vietnam War. Drawing on notions of collective memory, as articulated by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the authors sought to understand which stories, archived in historical memory and available to the disciplinary community, are remembered and used by those beyond its borders. In contrast, which stories are no longer widely shared, eclipsed by time’s passage and unable to cross the bridge separating generation from generation? The authors conclude by discussing the forces that act to historicize today’s youth and suggest how educators might marshal these forces—rather than spurning or simply ignoring them—to advance young people’s historical understanding.

Comparative Understanding of School Subjects: Past, Present, and Future:

Research has elevated the proposition of knowledge’s domain specificity from a working hypothesis to a de facto truth. The assumption of domain specificity structures handbooks, organizes branches of funding agencies, and provides headings for conference proceedings. Leading researchers often focus on a single slice of the school day despite the possibility that such segments swirl into a blur for children. The authors examine the domain-specific landscape, beginning with the recent past, when domain generality, not domain specificity, reigned supreme. They then examine the transition to domain-specific approaches. Next, they offer an alternative to both positions, a stance they call the comparative understanding of school subjects. A comparative understanding trains attention on how the same children understand multiple subjects in the curriculum. The authors argue that this approach represents a promising path for conceptualizing research on children, schooling, and thinking by raising new questions about children’s understandings.

Teaching the Skill of Contextualizing in History.

Contextualization, the act of placing events in a proper context, allows teachers to weave a rich, dynamic portrait of a historical period for their students. As teachers strive to identify enduring themes and patterns, they must teach students to appreciate the particular policies, institutions, worldviews, and circumstances that shape a given moment in time. However, contextualized historical thinking runs counter to the narratives and frameworks that many students bring to class. Not only have many young people internalized timeless, psychologized notions of why people behaved as they did in the past, but they have also absorbed powerful stories through popular culture. Challenging long-standing historical frameworks takes time, and educators must give students multiple opportunities to practice and apply their new knowledge and skills. In this article, the authors describe three activities that help students think contextually as they read historical documents: (1) providing background knowledge, (2) asking guiding questions, and (3) explicitly modeling contextualized thinking.

“Famous Americans”: The Changing Pantheon of American Heroes

Meeting at the Wabash Avenue Young Men’s Christian Association on Chicago’s South Side on September 9, 1915, four African American men laid the foundation for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (asnlh), the first scholarly society promoting black culture and history in America. The force behind that initiative was Carter G. Woodson, the only black of slave parentage to earn a history Ph.D. from Harvard University. A tireless institution builder, Woodson not only kept the asnlh afloat through years of financial uncertainty, but also established the Journal of Negro History in 1916 and served as its editor until his death in 1950. Woodson authored and edited scores of publications—scholarly monographs, textbooks, pamphlets, newsletters, circulars, and reports—all aimed at spreading knowledge about blacks’ contributions to American history. Yet, even more than his prodigious list of publications, the initiative for which Woodson is best known was inspired by a trend in the 1920s when civic organizations would devote weeks of the calendar to promote special causes, such as Boy Scout Week, Clean-Up Week, or Good Health Week. In 1926, Woodson designated the week in February that included the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (February 12) and Frederick Douglass (February 14) as “Negro History Week.”1 Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, black America celebrated Negro History Week with speeches, parades, and educational events. But not until the 1960s did white America take much notice. During the 1940s and 1950s, mainstream textbooks virtually ignored black Americans except in their faceless guise as slaves. “Blacks were never treated as a group at all,” wrote Frances FitzGerald. “They were quite literally invisible.” Textbook