It's Critical in the Classroom - January 2023

In class this year I have been driving home the critical thinking work - more so than ever before - and especially focusing on sourcing diverse primary and secondary materials. The point: I want my students to learn that history is a dynamic discipline, I want them to see that historians disagree on things all the time and are forever in debate, and I for sure want to show them that we historians revise our positions when we find new evidence or ask new questions of the historical record. I want my students to arrive at conclusions based on their reading of the evidence and their understanding of the historiography. So I start them out with this sort of thing during their freshman year and by the time they are seniors, they are doing work well beyond their pay grade, so to speak. Indeed - many of my seniors write sophisticated research papers that are far better than anything I ever did in college.

How do I get them to understand all this? First, I provide a wide range of reading materials, stressing viewpoint diversity more than anything else. Second we discuss these materials in the classroom in context, illustrating how viewpoints interact, diverge, and change over time depending on any number of circumstances. What they learn is how to think critically…how to think historically about these materials.

And when they write, I require that they bring these sources and the associated class discussions to the table to support their arguments, acknowledging counter arguments, and for the advanced students, I insist on a nod to the historiography - all of course with properly formatted citations :)

I find that students really struggle with this at first - wishing there was just an “answer” that they could all memorize and regurgitate in a blue book. But in time they get the hang of it, they begin to think through issues and solve historical puzzles - they soon understand the vast complexity of historical change over time. Some of them even discover a love of history in the process. How about that?

Anyway…I’ll be writing more about this in the future - drilling down to illuminate some specifics.

With compliments,

Keith