Inquiry Question: "What happens to students' concepts of "perspective" in history when they use first-person reasoning in historical analysis?"
Part I: IntroductionDuring my tenure of student teaching a line of inquiry has emerged from the combination of my long-term interest in the subjectivity of history, and the immediate conditions of the classrooms in which I have been teaching. My student teaching placement situated me in two dramatically different learning communities in the same large comprehensive neighborhood high school in Philadelphia. I knew from the start that I could not assume the same teaching methods in both contexts, and that as much as I love the study of history, I could not expect my students to arrive with an intrinsic interest in it. I knew that I needed to get to know my students in order to figure out how to teach them—but that this was an enormous task. Thus, I folded an examination of my students’ identities into the inquiry question: it centers on students’ self-knowledge, and how they can leverage that in an academic context.
My inquiry question evolved throughout the year, a generative process that I chronicled throughout the year. (Link to Artifact: A Note on Adapting the Inquiry Question.) When I arrived to the third iteration of the question I decided that the question was sufficient for exploring the teaching and learning going on across my teaching contexts. The inquiry question now reads as follows: "What happens to students' concepts of "perspective" in history when they use first-person reasoning in historical analysis?" My lessons move beyond the textbook to examine how history works using critical literacy tools, project-based units, student-driven inquiry, and peer collaboration. In my teaching of history, there is no capital “H.” Haitian Anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1992) distinguishes between “what happened” in the past (History), and “that which is said to have happened” (history), “both the facts of the matter and a narrative of those facts” (2). He says that the creation of a narrative that describes what happened is necessarily subjective, and will only ever approximate the events as they were, prior to being remembered, narrated, or otherwise interpreted over time. As a teacher of secondary Social Studies, I arrive to the classroom with Trouillot in mind. I aim to leverage the subjectivity of history—its first-hand perspectives, its historians’ perspectives, and the perspectives of its readers and students—with the pedagogical goal of teaching students how to make meaning of the past using the professional tools of historians. I want students to be able to negotiate the multitude of perspectives that they will (and do) encounter—both in their study of the past, and in their examination of the present. If I am successful as a teacher, students leave my classroom believing that what happened in the past cannot be contained in a single narrative. I study history because I love the continuous negotiation between my own perspective and whatever perspective I am reading about, or through. I believe that my students’ study of history will be infinitely more meaningful to them, and exciting, if there is room in my classroom for each student’s individual perspectives. From their unique positions as individuals, I want my students to access history through the fascination, disgust, contradictions, and exhilaration of encountering previously-unknown perspectives on the past. Let’s call this “historical imagination”: the ability to imagine a reality other than the one in which you’re present, and then move around in that imagined realm to discover social, political, and personal dynamics from another’s perspective. Canadian teacher-educator John Fielding (2005) writes, “The first priority in how to teach history effectively is to develop learning strategies that arouse and engage the historical imaginations of our students. How we do that is by providing them with opportunities to do and talk about history. We need to encourage students to take on the role of the historian in a creative and critical way” (2). This work of disambiguating “the role of the historian” and guiding students through the practicable skills necessary to “do history” is my job.
Please see the page, “A Note on the Teaching Contexts” for more information about the various small learning communities and classroom settings where this inquiry took place. |