Reflective Thinking, Teaching and Learning

"Am I a professor? Then what will I say today? But if I am a teacher, what will they do today?"
Lendol Calder, 1370

The New Social Studies of the 1960s aimed to transform classrooms that had been conduits for the transmission of knowledge into agents of cultural change. Looking back from the standpoint of 1992, Byron Massialas summarized the prospects of teaching through inquiry.

Through a proper classroom environment and teaching method, students of virtually any age could be involved in reflection and critical thinking. Springboards from any of the traditional social sciences and history could be introduced into the classroom to create interest and reflective thinking about social events.
Massialas, "Retrospect and Prospect," 121

His use of springboard as metaphor for the value of history, sociology, geography, economics, and other disciplines all serving something higher called Social Studies merits more examination than I can give it here.

Although the reform movement began with consideration of social-political contexts and psychological factors affecting students, Massialas tells us, many teachers embracing this reform movement emphasized "the structure of knowledge of the organized disciplines" (121). Historians, for example, failed to see that their disciplinary knowledge and processes were means to another end, a place to start but not the map. History dominated the curriculum that Massialas and his associates sought to transform into Social Studies. They conducted empirical studies of classroom practices that "confirmed the idea that a social-issues, rather than a traditionally chronological, curriculum is more in tune with the demands of modern society" (122).

The New Social Studies Movement ended by the mid-1970s; that is, it ended before I took a course in Social Studies teaching methods from a historian.


Undergraduate Education

O. Gene Clanton espoused some of the ideals of this now defunct reform movement. He advocated inquiry-based teaching of history in his methods class as theory, and his practice seemed to reflect this theory. Clanton had been my professor two years earlier for the second half of the American history survey: U.S. History, 1877 to present. In that class, he structured our classroom practices around what he called an inquiry approach. He divided the class of sixty or so into two groups; his teaching assistant took the other half. We then sat in a circle and talked about the documents--primary sources, mostly texts--that followed each narrative chapter in Richard N. Current, American History: A Survey, vol 2.

Clanton's teaching of history was refreshing and liberating. But it was not the method of inquiry-based reflective thinking and learning espoused by Massialas and his colleagues. Clanton did most of the talking.

In Inquiry in Social Studies (1966), Massialas and C. Benjamin Cox make the point that a discussion technique does not necessarily alter the method of classroom as conduit.

[T]he teacher assumes the role of expositor of knowledge while his students act as recipients. The materials at hand are the sources of knowledge and the major task involved is most easily described as the process of transmitting finished knowledge from source to recipient. The techniques utilized in this transmission, whether lecture, discussion, student reporting, or film projection do not differentiate the method itself. If the intent is to inform students of some already organized system of predetermined knowledge, the method is expository.
Massialas and Cox, 62

Paulo Friere calls this expository method the banking concept of education. The teacher (subject) narrates to passive receptacles or listening objects (students).

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.
Friere, 53

The alternative sought through the New Social Studies was concept based, student centered, and focused on contemporary problems. The teacher was to manage and coordinate, rather than dispense, the construction of knowledge. In my education courses, the professors used the term facilitate.

The materials at hand are at once the sources of promising springboards or hypotheses and the compilations of factual evidence required to support or refute these hypotheses. The students in this case become participants in the process of reorganizing this knowledge around new centers of attention and interest. The learning situation is characterized by the seeking, discovering, reorganizing, and testing of knowledge.
Massialas and Cox, 62

This movement towards inquiry based teaching in social studies ran aground. When I was in college, several history professors dismissed it as a fad of the Sixties. Even so, to the extent that it was part of other educational developments that favored student centered education, it echoes through much of educational theory today, if not the practice of teaching. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that prescriptions for developing reflective thinking in high school and middle school social studies classrooms anticipate recent calls for rethinking the history survey in college classrooms.


Teaching and Learning

Checking e-mail in class is rude and immature, but it is also a predictable response to a worn-out pedagogy that no longer has a place in the history survey.
Lendol Calder, 1360

In his essay, "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey," Lendol Calder seeks ways to empower students as the agents of their own learning. He refers to a label Sam Wineburg used in conversation with him: the attic theory. Wineburg's attic theory of cognition resembles Friere's banking concept, or what Massilas and Cox call expository teaching.

As it happens, people do not collect facts the way homeowners collect furniture, storing pieces for use at a later time. ... Facts are not like furniture at all; they are more like dry ice, disappearing at room temperature.
Calder, 1361

Calder points out that covering a subject means not only going the length, but also connotes concealment. Historians, he alleges are quite adept at covering up, or "hiding what it means to be good at history" (1363). Like Wineburg in his book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (2001), Calder attempts to identify the peculiar signature of the practice of history. He seeks to introduce to his students six "cognitive habits: questioning, connecting, sourcing, making inferences, considering alternate perspectives, and recognizing limits to one's knowledge" (1364).

Calder's process in his course on American history since 1945 is particularly relevant to Patriots and Peoples (this blog). His course divides into six units; each goes through a three stage process. Film clips are used

to create an environment so rich in information and so charged with interesting problems that students who are inert in the face of lectures and textbooks will be stirred to ask a few historical questions. After the film awakens their capacity for wonder, I then send students out to do what historically minded people do: follow a question that takes them beyond what they already know.
Calder, 1364

In the second stage, the class examines primary documents. Entry to class requires a ticket: a three to five page essay on questions formulated by the student (inspired by the film), and using the documents as evidence. One gets the sense that Calder is looking for questions that are focused on the time and place of the United States in the past half-century or so, rather than broad universal questions of the sort favored by the New Social Studies reformers.

A generalization, in order to have wide applicability, must not refer to a specific event, period, or region. A more reliable and useful generalization would be one which, if formulated as a theory, can apply to all times and places.
Massialas and Cox, 333

After formulating their own questions, and answering them through analysis of prescribed documents, the students are prepared to read the work of professional historians. Calder uses Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States and Paul Johnson, A History of the American People. Johnson's work is stronger, that is, less polemical than Schweikart and Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States.


Theorie und Praxis

As a student in high school and college, I craved the rare opportunities to talk back, to argue with the professor, and to get expert guidance in my own self-directed study of the past and its relevance to the present. On the other hand, I would have felt cheated in a course concerned with the late-nineteenth century if the author of Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men (1969) and Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890-1900 (1991) should have considered it his place to be silent while my peers and I constructed our knowledge from William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech. It was good that the doctor in class was a teacher, but he needed to be a professor, too.

As a teacher, I remember that Clanton's practice did not quite match his theory. Nor does my own practice of PowerPoint based presentations interspersed with focused discussion quite match my theory tersely expressed in the title of Carl Becker's classic article, "Everyman His Own Historian." I follow Clanton in looking for balance between making useful deposits and facilitating student management of their investments.


Works Cited

Becker, Carl. "Everyman His Own Historian." American Historical Review (January 1932): 221-236.

Calder, Lendol. "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey." The Journal of American History (March 2006): 1358-1370.

Clanton, O. Gene. Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1969.

________. Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890-1900. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

Friere, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continum, 1993.

Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998.

Massialas, Byron G. "The 'New Social Studies'--Retrospect and Prospect." The Social Studies (May/June 1992): 120-124.

Massialas, Byron G., and C. Benjamin Cox. Inquiry in Social Studies. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Schweikart, Larry, and Michael Allen. A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror. New York: Sentinel, 2004.

Wineburg, Sam. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States, 1492 - Present. New York: HarperCollins, 1980.

A Firmer Grasp

Historians know more about the events of the past than the people who lived through them.

Naturally, we can see events in proper perspective; we know a period better than the active participants in it because we see its results, and because events disclose their real significance by what they produce, and the products can be seen only by those who come afterward and look back ... even of movements, motive, and incident, we often have a firmer grasp than did the men [and women] that were part of what we study.
Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin, "Introduction," xi*

McLaughlin offers a primer on the sources preferred by historians.

It is commonly said that unconscious sources are the best; that is to say, not chronicles written with express purpose to hand down opinions and knowledge of events to succeeding generations, but materials prepared without reference to future times. ... [A]ny diary, especially one written faithfully for one's own eye without the future reader continually in mind, artificial though it be, is necessarily of great value in letting us see the man [or woman] that writes and in giving us a view of passing events as he [or she] sees them.
McLaughlin, xii

Diaries and other records kept for personal recollection are preferable to those manufactured for posterity. Diaries written for revelation will contain deception, but there is less motivation to deceive oneself.


The Light of Limited Experience

President James K. Polk's diary is particularly useful because it "does not appear to have been written with the expectation that it would be conned by future historians" (xiii). Moreover, Polk was "peculiarly simple in his make-up" (xiii); he was not devious in his writing.

[H]e moved straight ahead with unusual directness, following his course unflinchingly, guided by the light of a limited experience and often led by a prejudice or a partisan antipathy which one can fairly easily detect.
McLaughlin, xiii-xiv

Polk, according to McLaughlin, is easy to read and shallow, and was thus incapable of guile.

By nature he was too simple, too plainly lacking in wide sympathy, too narrow in his emotions, too straightly hemmed in by education and practices of life, to become the prey of conflicting impulses.
McLaughlin, xiv

McLaughlin mentions other sources concerned with the period of Polk's presidency, including Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years' View; or, History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850 (1856). But we know what Benton could not know because Polk's diary reveals things about which "benton was sometimes in the dark or was but shrewdly guessing at what we know to be the fact" (xii).

We can see the Polk Administration more clearly than Benton because we have Polk's own account. We can understand Polk's actions better than the President himself because we see their effects, and because we are sophisticated enough to see through his prejudices.



*McLaughlin, Andrew Cunningham. "Introduction" to The Diary of James K. Polk During his Presidency, 1845 to 1849. Milo Milton Quaife, ed. Volume I. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co, 1910.

The Place of Democracy

A third place must be within walking distance from home, a place where one feels valued as more than a faceless consumer, where socializing, loitering and lingering are recognized as social assets, not commercial liabilities, where conversation and camaraderie prevail, where status and pretension have no place and where the hot political issues and the latest football scores gain equal attention.
Roberta Brandes Gratz, New York Times Book Review

A third place, as Ray Oldenberg defines it, may be a tavern or coffee house, a beauty parlor or general store, a diner or soda fountain. All these places where neighbors gather are essential to democratic society.

Instead we have today well planned and orchestrated "town hall" meetings that are fracturing as the disenfranchised--who want exactly the same thing as the most powerful lobbies in Washington DC--speak up out of turn, heckle, and yell, and generally create a disturbance. Ray Oldenberg, author of The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How they Get You Through the Day (1989), might suggest that the eruption of these protests stems from the same trends that gave us the mortgage crisis. Oldenberg's target is magadevelopment projects "promoted erroneously as community revitalizers" (Gratz). One thinks of Applebee's, billed as "your neighborhood bar and grill," and often planned as an integral piece of suburban development projects that "stifle democratic socializing and foster instead separation, isolation and alienation" (Gratz).


Serendipity

I have not read Oldenberg's book, but my memory of this book review has been stirred at least once every year in the past twenty years. Two weeks ago I found my old and tattered copy of "The Saloons of a Free People," New York Times Book Review (24 December 1989), 2. After writing about the taverns of graduate school and discussions of The Journal of John Woolman in a graduate seminar (see "The Greek Chorus"), I unpacked, sorted, and threw away almost the entire contents of an old file of miscellany left over from a rushed packing of things that seemed important at the time during a previous move. In that file were some notes from my reading of Woolman right next to this book review. I found the juxtaposition serendipitous.

The day I read that review remains clear in my mind. My siblings and I had gathered with our children and parents for the Christmas holiday at a time-share condo lent to my mother by one of her co-workers. The condo was on an island in south Puget Sound. We had been told to bring apples because the deer would eat them out of our hands. My youngest brother was able to get one deer to take the apple out of his mouth. I had to leave the gathering for a few hours on Christmas Eve to return my children to their mother in Seattle. On the return trip, I took the Bremerton Ferry back to the west side of the Sound. I recall feeling a sense of tranquility that night as the ferry pulled away from Seattle--tranquility was rare enough in the wake of my divorce to be memorable. On Christmas morning I enjoyed a quiet walk on the beach.

Perhaps this book review caught my eye because the coffee houses and taverns of graduate school were a little slice of paradise. They were not places of tranquility, but conflict. The conflict was much cherished and cemented me to my peers. We lived to argue politics and aesthetics, philosophy and current events. We watched the horrors of the San Francisco earthquake that fall on the television in The Cavern; there we argued about President Bush's invasion of Panama to depose Manuel Noriega, speculating about the significance of Bush's old CIA connections; and we continued our debates from the class where we read William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, selections from Cotton Mather's Magnalia, John Woolman's and Benjamin Franklin's autobiographies, the Declaration of Independence, and other seventeenth and eighteenth century texts.

After the holiday with my family, I met up with Daggy and Wang in Seattle's U-District for a two day drive south to San Francisco, where the three of us were joining thousands of history professors and graduate students at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Because the United States was at war, I draped a US flag over the back seat of my Dodge Aries. This patriotic icon enlivened the discussions with Daggy (a German student studying here) and Wang (from China and hoping to remain in the US after graduate school). "I just don't understand you Americans and your flag," Daggy stated more than once.

I bought some books at the conference, and a bunch more when the spring semester started in January. The review of Oldenberg's book got filed away so I would not forget it. Yesterday, I finally ordered the book for $2 plus shipping from one of those megadiscount stores with warehouses in Seattle, Atlanta, Portland. The book may prove dated after these twenty years, but I plan to read The Great Good Place.


Un-American Activities

I think town hall meetings are as American as apple pie. ... They [protesters] had a right to express themselves. I wished that we'd have had a little bit more opportunity to discuss things before they started to boo. But they're all kind of performance art and they're all kind of opportunities of guerrilla theater to affect political issues and to make an impression, and I felt like it was a good discourse.
Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN), Quoted in "In the Crosshairs of Un-American Town Hall Protests"

Thanks to a poor choice of words by San Francisco's Representative in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in USA Today, the focus of health care reform has degenerated into polls and pundits concerned with the merits of protest. FOX News host Greta Van Susteren led off her interview of Representative Cohen with a question that has nothing to do with health care. She asked about the protests rather than the bill. When he managed to squeeze in some comments regarding the substance of the bill, and the protesters objections to things that are not in it, she asked whether he had read the whole text. Then, she interrupted his answer.

There was an anti-government individual who is an activist who circulated petitions on the e-mail to encourage people to come and to be concerned about some of the myths, the ideas that Congress had opted out, which is not true, that abortion was part of this, which is not true, that there would be -- seniors would be hurt by a diminution in health care, which is not true, that there would be euthanasia, which is not true. But all these things were used to get people out and people came there with those things in mind. And that's what they wanted to cheer and jeer about.
Cohen, "Crosshairs"

Van Susteren asked about the text's length, whether the Congressman had read it, and seemed disappointed that he had. She shifted to his understanding--revealing her own difficulties with a complex bill--so she could interject her argument that laws should be simple and short.

You know, smart people can write things so the rest of us can understand it. And here's the problem. If it is so complicated, the people down the road who are going to have to implement it, you know, that's going to be even a bigger nightmare and they're not going to get it right unless you guys write a bill that's very plain and very easy to understand so we can all understand it. I actually believe you can if you want to.
Greta Van Susteren, "Crosshairs"

Cohen was prepared and hit back with another talking point of the Right: activist judges. If a bill eschews technical language, it empowers the courts to interpret the imprecision of simple language. That's not something Van Susteren and her colleagues at FOX News want to endorse.

That might be how it plays in coffee houses too.

Polk: The Diary of a President

As is true for perhaps ten percent of my books, I know neither when nor how I acquired Polk: The Diary of a President, 1845-1849 (1968 [1929]), edited by Allan Nevins. It has been on my shelf for quite a few years, perhaps since graduate school. Aside from providing an index that I glanced at once or twice to confirm some fact, its purpose on my shelf has served principally as an abode for the congregation of dust.

Earlier this week I pulled it down with intent of reading it through. It begins with a report of a meeting that took place 26 August 1845.

The President again called up the Oregon question. He remarked that he had at different times communicated to the several members of the Cabinet, the settled decision to which his mind had come. He proceeded briefly to repeat his decision, in substance as follows, viz., that Mr. Bucanan's note in reply to Mr. Pakenham should assert and enforce our right to the whole Oregon territory from 42° to 54° 40’ North Latitude; that he should distinctly state that the proposition which had been made to compromise on the 49th paralel of North Latitude had been made, first in deference to what had been done by our predecessors, and second with anxious desire to preserve peace between the two countries.
Polk, 1-2

Before I get to the questions that drew me towards this diary--questions concerned, in part, with Pacific Northwest history, including the oft-repeated error that "Fifty-four Forty or Fight" was Polk's campaign slogan,*--I stumble upon the voice. Why is Polk writing in the third person? Did he write the meeting summary, or did he have a secretary keep notes of the meeting that he later transcribed into his diary?

Allan Nevins' notes to the text do not address these questions.

This text was published in 1929 as an abridgment of the four volume edition edited by Milo Milton Quaife (1910). My copy is a 1968 paperback reprint. Google has digitized Stanford University library's copy of volume I of Quaife's edition. The editor's preface offers some help in the first sentence: "The considerations which induced Polk to keep a diary are sufficiently set forth by the President himself in the entry for August 26, 1846" (vii). The entry for that date is in volume II, but Nevins reproduced it.

Twelve months ago this day, a very important conversation took place in Cabinet between myself and Mr. Buchanan on the Oregon question. This conversation was of so important a character, that I deemed it proper on the same evening to reduce the substance of it to writing for the purpose of retaining it more distinctly in my memory. This I did on separate sheets. It was this circumstance which first suggested to me the idea, if not the necessity, of keeping a journal or diary of events and transactions which might occur during my Presidency.
Polk, 141.

Polk at least claims to have done the writing.

Citations

Nevins, Allan, ed. Polk: The Diary of a President, 1845-1849. New York: Capricorn Books, 1968 [1929]. Cited as Polk.

Quaife, Milo Milton, ed. The Diary of James K. Polk During his Presidency, 1845 to 1849, Volume I. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co, 1910.


Notes

*The phrase, "Fifty-four Forty or Fight," originated with Senator William Allen (Ohio), who later served as that state's governor. I have yet to see primary evidence indicating that the slogan was deployed in the campaign of 1844, although it clearly was prominent in the newspapers by 1846. In the mid-1980s, when I taught Washington State History in my student teaching, I checked several secondary sources to contest the claim in the students' textbook that the phrase was Polk's campaign slogan. I observed then that secondary sources more closely grounded in primary sources did not put forth this notion, but that tertiary sources rooted in secondary works often did. Thirty years of occasional examination of the issue has not altered that initial assessment. The most trustworthy secondary sources claim that Polk's campaign slogan was "reoccupation of Oregon and re-annexation of Texas," which is the language found in the Democratic Party Platform of 1844.

Resolved, That our title to the whole of the Territory of Oregon is clear and unquestionable; that no portion of the same ought to be ceded to England or any other power, and that the reoccupation of Oregon and the re-annexation of Texas at the earliest practicable period are great American measures, which this Convention recommends to the cordial support of the Democracy of the Union.
Democratic Party Platform of 1844, The American Presidency Project

Blogging and Academia

Wait--You think people actually read the archives of blogs? I think most readers think of a blog as being only as good as its most recent post.
GayProf at "Does blogging hurt or help an academic career?" Historiann

I hope people read blog archives, or I'm wasting my time. Except that I'm not.

On the one hand, my blog is designed around its archive. I'm slowly working through an old, classic, ideologically oriented survey of American history--A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn--alongside a much newer, ideologically motivated, and almost entirely ignored within academia, survey of American history--A Patriot's History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. If and when I ever finish these two books, Patriots and Peoples will have become a comprehensive resource for students of American history.

My blog started as a notebook, and it serves that purpose. The more I write, the easier writing becomes. My academic writing had become almost non-existent due to more than a decade of part-time teaching supported, in part, with income from an entirely non-academic avocation. However, being the way I am, even that has an academic aspect. One of my high school friends was complaining about that--or laughing at me--after he asked a question about the history of chess the other night, and then said, "don't answer that." "James can never say yes or no, but must give us a lecture," Brett noted. This personality quirk observed by the kid that used to poke me in the back with his pencil in George Chalich's U.S. History class more than thirty years ago reveals that my long-windedness to make a simple point is not a consequence of graduate school, but its cause.

I started blogging because any writing stimulates more writing, especially when that writing attracts one or two readers. If I'm not writing, I get depressed.

I'm not struggling with the tenure and promotion questions, and the place of blogging within, that is the focus of much of the conversation at Center of Gravitas and Historiann. My career in academia is hanging by a thread, and proceeds course to course, each with a separate contract. If I get good teaching evaluations, another contract comes along. Fail once, and I'm slinging tacos at some fast food outlet in your town. Adjuncts don't have the pleasure of worrying over blogging in the annual review. Even so, the issues Historiann and GayProf raise about blogging and academic work are central to both. Both of their blogs reveal the scholar's mind even in stories of fishing trips or Facebook. Not that such writing necessarily meets the terms of service or scholarship as understood by university promotion and review committees. But the tremendous output of both these bloggers merits some consideration as a worthy endeavor for professors. Other blogs, such as Larry Cebula's Northwest History, appear central in their focus and content to the author's professional work. The possibility that such a blog could be credited in promotion decisions should be kept open. Not all blogging is the same.