Historical Literacy - Fact vs. Fractured!

For the past decade I have been working with public school teachers engaged in a variety of Teaching American History projects. In some years we targeted elementary teachers. In other years we focused on middle school and high school teachers who had a specific American history class on their teaching schedules. We looked at creating instructional units using the Understanding by Design framework developed by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. (http://books.google.com/books/about/Understanding_by_design.html?id=N2EfKlyUN4QC). In another project we used the Shared Inquiry method created by the Great Books Foundation as a way of addressing primary documents (http://www.greatbooks.org/). In yet another project we concentrated on increasing student reading literacy and comprehension through historical content.

While the particular format or target audience varied and the instructional framework changed, the overall goals were the same. We sought to increase teacher content knowledge, enhance instructional practices and engage students in meaningful tasks and habits of mind surrounding the learning and thinking about history.

In too many classrooms, teaching (and I would say memorizing not learning) history involves the relating and regurgitating of facts with little context or deeper understanding. The old adage claims that elementary teachers teach children, and secondary teachers teach content. The first sometimes results in too thin a treatment of historical content while the second tends to focus on content over student understanding. As a recovering secondary English teacher who traveled a rocky road to achieve some balance between the two, I can attest to the naive nature of the belief that covering a great deal of information equates with rigor.

If anyone should doubt the effectiveness of "covering" content, check out "The World According to Student Bloopers" compiled by Richard Lederer of the St. Paul School (http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~norman/Jokes-file/StudentBloopers.htm). The Internet fact checker site snopes.com indicates that perhaps not all of the bloopers are original with Lederer, but anyone who has spent a considerable amount of time in the public school classroom can recognize some of the misinformation that swirls around in the mental stew of many students. If this fractured vision of history and culture is even remotely the result of time spent covering facts, then I hate to think what history it is that we are doomed to repeat if we do not learn our lessons well!