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Deutscher Nation" Date: Wednesday, 23 May 2007 Re: Susan Boettcher's review of the HRR exhibit: the teaching of history I would like to thank Susan Boettcher for her lively and insightful review of the HRR exhibit. Her comments bring up some interesting points about exhibits and museums, and the teaching of history to a larger public, including undergraduates. It is possible to take away some of Boettcher's implicit and explicit conclusions in her review of the HRR exhibit that speak to a key part of our profession, teaching survey courses. I recently read Lendol Calder's March 2006 "Journal of American History" article on the idea of "uncovering" history as opposed to trying to _cover_ as much history as we possibly can when teaching large survey courses to undergraduates. Calder has experimented with a "less is more" model and, lo and behold, his students end up doing just fine on standardized exams. As Calder and other scholars (cf. Sam Wineberg "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" "Phi Delta Kappan" 1999) have noted, historians tend to ignore what cognitive scientists keep telling us: really big lecture courses where students do little but take notes are counter-productive _if_ the aim is to teach students something that might last past the next exam. The brain cannot and does not store a bunch of facts that can be accessed once "learned." Argue with me if you like about how you learned history that way and thus it is the best way for all our students to learn history; but before doing so poke around a bit in the work by scholars such as Ulrich Neisser on memory and cognition. It would seem that the HRR exhibit is an example of "more history is too much (especially without context)." What a shame that eye-catching objects of material culture (some of what Boettcher cleverly terms "eye-candy") received almost no analysis in the exhibit. Viewers who have no explanations of what purpose objects served, how they were made, what items they belonged with, etc., come away with the fun but pedagogically useless feeling of having been to a really chic flea market. Perhaps Professor Calder's "less is more" approach for survey classes of centuries of world history might be a useful guide for museum curators and exhibit directors - and instructors at whatever level of education. Indeed, some museums have effectively employed such a model, such as the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. To give one example: learning about the origin of clogs - a political and socio-cultural development in shoe fashion - was worth the trip, and this "lesson" was based on three shoes, a painting, and a brief explanation. When we teach history in survey courses to undergraduates - whether five hundred years of world history in a semester or a hundred years of Germany history - what is most important? Do we need a standard narrative to tie it together? Should it be chronological? One extreme chronological narrative would be the HRR exhibit's approach that narrates a logical progression to the EU; other possibilities include (drawing from my own and colleagues' examples in history departments around the U.S.) the evolution of the social contract, the evolution of church control over the body to state control, a "guns and God" approach that foregrounds that institution is in charge of organizing nations and states; a "top ten events" list that organizes history around major turning points. But there are even more possibilities, even if our undergraduates push us to follow the well-worn path of what war happened under whose reign, even if it seems more expedient to use PowerPoint slides that put up the "must-know" dates and people in lecture classes with staggering numbers of impatient listeners wondering what will be on the test. E.H. Carr questioned the notion that history is a collection of objective facts that can be memorized and learned in his 1961 book _What is History?_; more recently, historians from Richard Evans (_In Defense of History_, 1990) and the 1991 dialogue between Bernard Bailyn and Edward Latham (published in 1994, _On the Teaching and Learning of History_) demonstrate that we remain engaged in exciting, controversial, productive conversation about what history is, why it is important, and how to teach it. Yet these kinds of debates, even if we talk about them with our students, do not actively inform how many of us teach history (or, due to the nature of the beasts of standardized tests and structure of courses and resources available, must teach history). So we must ask of course: is an innovative narrative (such as explaining the role of dance in keeping the aristocracy at Louis XIV's court so busy learning the newest complicated dance steps that he had more time and energy to increase his power - thank you to my dance and history double majors for uncovering that part of history for me) of history really history? Many of my colleagues and students in the U.S. and abroad will answer with a resounding "no": if students are not reading chapters about "real" history - do I need to spell out that I am referring to military, diplomatic, and political events from a top-down approach? - then they do not have the necessary "scaffolding" to go to the next level. My own answer is a qualified yes. I did not come to the history profession through grand narratives; I consider myself lucky to have been a student in classes that were theme-based and did not focus on chronology per se. And I perhaps understood Ranke's "wie es eigentlich gewesen" too broadly for some tastes, worrying about all sorts of historical agents who still do not appear in most history texts or, at most, receive one week of attention in a semester. I have always viewed the history profession as one where the often messy practice of "doing history" should take precedence over reviewing names and dates. I have also believed that teaching history to undergraduates by helping them understand the discipline as one of constant dialogue with the past and other historians is the best way to help them make sense of and thus master the role of those names and dates in our discussions (and, yes, on tests). And I have promised them that the skills they learn in learning how to "do history" (question, analyze, write, argue, present, question again) are ones helpful to them regardless of their future professions - a promise that I hope is part of any discipline's raison d'être. One of the first poems I read as a German major by Bertolt Brecht asked where the masons went off to on the evening they finished building the Great Wall of China, and whether or not Caesar had at least a cook with him in his conquests. My own explorations of history have been framed by such sentiments. (See http://www.kerber-net.de/literatur/deutsch/prosa/brecht/fragarb.htm) To return to an important point of Boettcher's museum review: I wish the exhibit had done more to convey visually that these objects are not just representative of what their creators thought about the themes of emperorship and courtly culture, but that their very methods of production, presentation, preservation and usage also tells us something about their relevance. What if we used this question to frame our teaching of history, thereby offering students something they can take away with them long after they have sold their books back to the bookstore? What if, instead of covering LOTSA HISTORY in a semester, we helped students (following Calder) uncover the answers to Boettcher's plea for context? We could then help students frame questions about "some" history, such as, say, asking for a different answer about who built the Great Wall of China besides Qin Shi Huang. Where did those workers go on that last evening? Did they celebrate with their families? Benita Blessing Ohio University, Dept. of History blessing@ohio.edu
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