One way teachers can meet others who want to teach differently is at various summer and weekend seminars set up to help history teachers go beyond their textbooks. Some are supported by the Teaching American History program, at ed.gov/programs/teachinghistory/index.html. If your school district has not participated, maybe you can spur it to. Nearby schools of education and history museums may offer these seminars. The Gilder Lehrman Institute, at gilderlehrman.org, offers seminars, lesson plans, documents online, and other aids. Educational Testing Service runs seminars for teachers of APUSH. Often these events come with all expenses paid.
Several national organizations offer the chance to meet other innovative U.S. history teachers face-to-face. The National Council for the Social Studies, socialstudies.org, is reasonably inexpensive; most state chapters are cheaper still. The Organization of American Historians, oah.org, is mainly a group of college professors but tries hard to appeal to high school teachers as well. Visit it the next time it meets nearby. The National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME), nameorg.org, covers much more than history/social studies and emphasizes issues of racial and sexual equity. The National Council for History Education, nche.net, holds semi-annual conferences that draw middle and high school teachers who are serious about teaching history and social studies well.
Teachers can also meet in cyberspace. There are several free discussion groups on the web for teachers of U.S. history. The Humanities Net, h-net. org, hosts more than 100 discussion lists, mostly about history. Specifically for high school U.S. history teachers is h-high-s. Every K–12 teacher of U.S. history should sign up for h-high-s and consider signing up for other lists, such as H-South, H-CivWar, H-Women, or maybe a state list like H-Ohio. On an active list like h-high-s, teachers may receive several emails a day, asking for help teaching a given topic, responding with help to a prior query, telling about a new movie with historical implications, or reviewing a book. H-Net’s book reviews are a particular strength. Not only do they evaluate and critique the book; they also supply an exegesis of it, helping teachers stay current on historical topics they would never have time to research. Even more valuable are the archives. Over time, teachers have asked for help teaching everything from archaeology to the Iraq War. Other teachers have replied with ideas.
Educational Testing Service hosts a discussion list for teachers of APUSH, the Advanced Placement test in U.S. History, but anyone can participate. The discussion is moderated with a heavy hand, so various kinds of comments cannot appear, but the discussants do include many intelligent and enthusiastic U.S. history teachers. Sign on at lyris.collegeboard.com/read/all_forums.
Other history teachers have put up very useful websites for their colleagues to mine for ideas and images. See historyteacher.net, for example. Addresses change, but teachers can find them by typing terms like “American history” or “U.S. history” and “powerpoints,” “lecture notes,” or “class notes” into a search engine. My own website, http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/, has illustrations for U.S. history courses, along with a quiz that students will enjoyably fail.
BRINGING STUDENTS ALONG
How do teachers get students on their side when questioning textbooks? A California high school graduate told me how his U.S. history teacher announced on the first day of class that “this textbook is bunk” and pitched his copy of the huge textbook assigned to his class the length of the room, where it hit the rear wall and crashed to the floor. There it remained for months. “This will be our textbook,” he then proclaimed, holding aloft a copy of Lies My Teacher Told Me. While I enjoyed the story, I do not suggest such pedagogy. First, a course in U.S. history should allow multiple voices, not just his and mine; my book works better in tandem with a textbook than as a substitute. Second, this teacher was obviously no neophyte. He had already worked out with school authorities to provide or have students purchase Lies My Teacher Told Me. He had already proven to be a popular and effective history teacher who knew most students would be on his side from the start, owing to his reputation in the school.
Announcing that the textbook has problems may not be the best approach. Even if students do take on faith that their teacher is right and their book will be wrong, that is just one more example of a top-down educational directive, not different in kind from “learning” the textbook. Moreover, some students will think the teacher is merely being egotistical. “Why should we believe you rather than the four Ph.D.s who wrote this book?” will be their response, stated or unstated.
A 6th-grade U.S. history teacher in Illinois learned this early in the fall semester, when she said to her class that most American presidents before Lincoln were slaveowners. They were outraged—not at the fact, but at the teacher. “No they weren’t, Ms. Walker,” was their response, “or it would be in the book!” They pointed out that their textbook provided four pages about George Washington, six about Thomas Jefferson (including his life in Paris and at Monticello), two on Madison, four on Andrew Jackson, and so forth—and never mentioned their slaveholding. Ms. Walker, quick on her feet, did not stand her ground but used their response as a learning opportunity. “Maybe I’m wrong,” she replied. “How can we find out?” Soon enough two students had signed up for each president with the overnight assignment of learning about their slaveowning practice. The task was easy. The next morning the students reassembled, still upset—but now their outrage was directed against their book, not their teacher. With a little guidance, they ended up writing a class letter to the publisher, denouncing their textbook for omitting important information. Now they had become critical readers, ready to question, not just accept the next thing they read in its pages.
Rather than telling students that the textbook has problems, teachers can show them. Here’s how one teacher does it. In a corner of her room she has a rectangular laundry basket full of old textbooks on U.S. history. This didn’t cost much: they are the cheapest items in used bookstores.17 Her oldest dates from the 1920s. For less than $50, teachers can amass two, three, or even four dozen textbooks dating from before 1900 to a few years ago. “When things get slow,” she told me, she has her students “go get a book.” She does this for President Herbert Hoover, for example. One student learns that Hoover cared a lot about poor people. He had been in charge of U.S. relief in Belgium after World War I and in Mississippi after the flood of 1927 and was lauded as a true humanitarian. Meanwhile, another student reading a different textbook finds that Hoover, a self-made millionaire, called out the army to evict poor people who were marching on Washington in 1932. Andrew Mellon, his millionaire secretary of the treasury, suggested the government should let the Depression run its course. “Let the slump liquidate itself. Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he said. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system.” A third student reads that Hoover indeed cared deeply about the poor, but his Republican ideology straitjacketed him into concluding that government should play only a minor role; private business and charitable organizations should and could carry the day. Yet a fourth book proclaims that Hoover’s administration was more active in response to the economic woes than any previous one and claims that much of FDR’s New Deal originally came from Hoover’s policies.
What is the class to do? Obviously, it makes no sense to “learn” what one book says; the others are so different. To resolve the matter, students must find out for themselves. They must do history.18
In most districts, teachers cannot abandon textbooks altogether. They probably should not even where they’re allowed to. So long as teachers do not let them dominate their classrooms, textbooks can be important aids. But that is all they can be: aids. Teachers need to help their students see that they can learn more about a given topic than the textbook author knows. Encourage students to mark up their own books with questions and challenges. Freedom to do so is another reason to favor the purchased 300-page paperback over the rented 1,150-page hardbound history textbook. But even rented bo
oks only gain in intellectual value when their margins contain intelligent questions and arguments, so long as the original text remains unmarked. Teachers who cannot bring themselves (or perhaps their librarian or principal) to accept the propriety of writing in rented books can give each student a couple of Post-it notes when assigning a new chapter. Their task is to come up with at least one challenge and one question about the material. Doing so empowers students. No longer are they passive readers. Now they are in implicit dialogue with the author. And now they are reading critically, bringing other knowledge to bear, thinking right in front of the teacher and each other.
Another way to get students to read their textbooks critically is to ask them to critique a topic as a group (or individual) project. For one of the 30–50 trees, students can be asked to read the account of the topic in their textbook and then work together to produce a thorough critique of it. Ultimately this gets shared with the publisher. It’s especially worthwhile to do this early in the school year, to encourage students to read critically from then on. For that reason, and because most textbook accounts of it are so inadequate, this “critique a topic” approach might well be applied to the first settling of the Americas—usually presented as “walking across Beringia.” Many textbooks also handle other early topics particularly poorly, such as the diverse societies Native Americans formed before (and after) the arrival of Europeans and Africans. Each student can select an American Indian group and write its history in compact form. Then they can compare what the textbook says about the group and about Native Americans in general.
Here is yet another way to bring students along, so they become participants in rather than combatants of the 30–50 major topics approach. Early in the school year, when first explaining the approach, invite students to develop their list of, say, the ten most important events or topics that must be included in a competent U.S. history course. First, have each person come up with his/her own list. (This may prove hard for some students. If a student can only come up with two, fine, unless they’re only pretending they can’t do it.) Then, for their favorite item, ask them to come up with a lesson plan by which the class will learn about it.19 The teacher collects all the suggestions, of course. Some ideas may prompt modification of her list or help her teach some of the topics. The exercise ends by putting students into groups of two to four, depending on class size. Each group merges its individual lists into one, deciding as a group which to keep. Finally, each group presents its list to the class, and the class determines its final choices. Put the result in a “time capsule”—a shoebox covered with aluminum foil. At the very end of the year, repeat the exercise. Compare the lists. Did the items actually covered convince students they should have been on their list? Which items on their list do students feel were well learned?
Kindly allow me to close with one final argument against business as usual. A teacher communicates with students for no more than 160 hours in a school year. This is less than 2% of their waking lives in a given year. Teachers want to make a difference in students’ lives. Teachers want them to grow intellectually during the year. Teachers also want students to realize their own dreams, or take a significant step toward doing so. In the case of U.S. history—or civic life, more broadly—teachers may need to help students understand that they can have dreams to realize. Every minute that they spend “going over” the textbook in the usual dreary way is a minute that will not make them better at doing history, to say nothing of transforming their lives. To make an impact, teachers have to engage students’ energies and abilities. Business as usual—going over the textbook—rarely does that.
FOCUSED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Readers who remain unconvinced that our usual overemphasis on twig history is counterproductive should read Sam Wineburg, “Crazy for History,” Journal of American History 90 #4 (2004), 1401–1414.
Every middle school or high school U.S. history classroom needs a selection of high school history textbooks other than the textbook provided to every student. Some should be old. Then “the textbook” cannot be considered gospel.
A host of websites can help keep teachers and students from overrelying on textbooks. A metasite, Best of History, besthistorysites.net, lists some. Two government sites, the Library of Congress (loc.gov) and National Archives (archives.gov), have thousands of photographs, documents, and other aids.
History Matters, historymatters.gmu.edu, is aimed at teachers of the U.S. history survey course and contains many resources, including a discussion forum, a place where other teachers have posted lesson plans, and a list of more than a thousand history websites, reviewed and annotated. Teachers should also sign up for History News Network (hnn.us/), connected with GMU, which twice weekly delivers via email a batch of stories showing history in the news.
Avram Barlowe, Teaching American History: An Inquiry Approach (NYC: Teachers College Press, 2004), contains suggestions for getting students to go beyond textbook accounts of the Revolutionary War period.
CHAPTER 2
Expecting Excellence
WHENEVER TEACHERS COMMUNICATE with their students, they are conveying expectations to them. What are those expectations? In every subject, from kindergarten through 12th grade, there are gaps in performance between “haves” and “have-nots” (white students compared to blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans; rich compared to poor). Students of color do somewhat worse than white students in mathematics. The same is true for children of poor parents, compared to those from affluent families. In English, the gap widens. It grows largest by far in history. African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn it especially poorly.1
Why is this? Surely history is not harder than trigonometry! Than Faulkner!
One reason for these gaps stems from teacher expectations. Most children of affluent white families give off an aura of competence and confidence that prompts most teachers to infer that they can do the work. Usually they can do it.2 But so can others—kids from poorer families, nonwhite children, recent immigrants who are not so proficient in English. Before these nonelite students can do well, however, they have to believe they can. Sometimes, before that can happen, their teacher has to believe they can.
RACIAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS AFFECT TEACHER EXPECTATIONS
Several social processes conspire to cause many teachers to conclude that most nonelite students cannot do outstanding work. First among these is how the children present themselves. Sociologists Dale Harvey and Gerald Slatin showed photographs of children to teachers. Nine children were white, nine black. A prior panel of teachers had judged three photos of each race lower class, three middle class, and three upper class, solely on the basis of their appearance.3 Then they asked some 96 elementary school teachers to agree or disagree with eight statements about these 18 photographs, such as, “Read a good many books independently” or “Has been diagnosed as emotionally unstable.” Like these examples, some of the statements were positive, some negative.4 They took care to give the teachers the option to say that they could not predict which children might perform in a certain way based solely on a photo. Harvey and Slatin also asked the teachers to rank the children’s IQs as high, medium, or low.5
Initially, Harvey and Slatin were concerned “that teachers would be reluctant to make either positive or negative judgments about children on the basis of their photographs alone.” They need not have worried. Based solely on one picture of each person, teachers eagerly applied the eight positive and negative statements to the children, although they showed some reluctance to apply negative statements to white kids, even “lower-class” white kids. Without objecting, they classified student IQs as high, medium, or low. Experienced teachers were even more willing to categorize children on the basis of a photograph than were new teachers.6
We call this the “file folder phenomenon.” We all do it, all the time. Someone asks a question after a public lecture, then perseveres with a followup, and we c
rane our necks to get a view of her—to learn her race, age, perhaps her ethnic group, and to divine what we can from her appearance. Until we get to know someone, they are their categories: female, 40ish, possibly Latino, frumpy, to continue our example. All too often, we never get beyond the categories. The teachers in this research never got to know the students they ranked—perhaps a good thing, because when the rankings were tabulated, the results were heartbreaking. Without exception, children whose photographs had previously been judged “lower class” were ranked less inclined to do anything good—like read a book independently—and more inclined to do something bad—like get in trouble with the law. IQ (as guessed by teachers) also correlated strongly and positively with social class. Race mattered, too. Regardless of social class, “white children were more often expected to succeed and black children were more often expected to fail.”7
These teachers were not unusual. Nor were they bad people, consciously working to maintain America’s racial and socioeconomic hierarchy in the next generation. The researchers had asked them to participate in a study of “the ability of people to make accurate estimates of the characteristics and performance capabilities of others on the basis of first impressions.” They complied. Like all of us, they had a sense for the “right order,” the way things should be, or at least the way they usually are. Unfortunately, the way things usually are is unfair to poor people; unfair to racial minorities (especially African Americans); unfair to children who don’t read, write, and speak well in English; and in some subject areas, unfair to females or to males. The process can be circular. Anthropologist John Ogbu found that some black students in Shaker Heights, Ohio, cited general societal unfairness and specific teachers’ biases to rationalize bad grades, even when they failed to do their work well. In turn, poor performance convinces some teachers to expect less next year from students who look like those who performed badly this year.8
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History Page 7