Blogs > Cliopatria > Fun and Teaching, Together

Dec 26, 2004

Fun and Teaching, Together


by Cliopatria


Most of you probably weren't listening to much NPR yesterday, so you probably missed these:

  • The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form, or OEDILF [via NPR's Weekend Edition] is an all volunteer project to produce definitions for nearly every word in the English language in the form of a limerick. Goofy? Of course. But in a few decades someone will be writing histories of this project, because it will take, the founder calculates, between 25 and 200 years to complete; they are up to words which begin with"at" now. Think there's nothing for an historian to contribute? Check out the definitions for Attila the Hun.
  • A collection of some of the worst resumes ever made public [via Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me!]. The Hall of Fame is" can't read it aloud without falling off my chair" funny. Many of the errors are merely unfortunate typos ("AWARDS/ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Dum major with my high school band.") but some represent real logical conundrums (Note: Loyalty is a difficult issue, apparently:"COVER LETTER: I am extremely loyal to my present firm, so please don't let them know I'm looking to change jobs." and"POLITICAL AFFILIATIONS: I am a loyal member of the Democratic and Republican parties.")
More seriously, I'd also like to draw attention to pedagogic discussions, starting with two pseudonymous female academics
  • Another Damned Medievalist got her grades in and found they were lower than usual. Something to do with having clearly stated standards and students' failing to understand that history is not just"one damned thing after another."
  • Dr. History [Good pseudonyms are going fast] meditates on student evaluations and the psychological challenge they pose faculty. In comments she asked"I wonder if prison guards get evaluated from the prisoners? Not that I'm comparing the two jobs..." to which I replied,"More to the point, what would prisons be like if prisoners' evaluations of guards mattered?" Think about it.
  • Dr. History includes a link to this fantastic article on the validity of student evaluation of faculty, which contains the best argument for their validity I've ever seen (they do match up statistically with tests of learning accomplishment, but only about as well as they match up with things that don't matter, like attractiveness, vocal intonation, etc) and data suggesting that they are still considerably more valid than faculty peer evaluation, which doesn't surprise me as much as I thought it would. We need more comprehensive and nuanced ways of evaluating teachers, kind of like the way we evaluate sources....
Or perhaps we need to entirely rethink this teaching thing. David Pace's article [AHA membership required] in the current AHR,"The Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," is a fantastic survey of the literature on historical pedagogy. What impresses me most about it is that it fills a huge gap in the usual blatherings about new teaching methods by actually addressing history as a discipline with specific challenges and modes. Of course there are huge gaps in the literature, as well, particularly a dearth of college-level studies and a clear understanding of what"thinking like an historian" and"doing history" really means. The other thing that impressed me about the article was the healthy skepticism with which Pace addressed the issue of immersion in and redirection of efforts towards deepening this"scholarship of teaching and learning" (if you haven't heard this tidbit of jargon, practice saying it a few dozen times, because it will buzz through your campus soon, probably when the accreditors roll around) without significant institutional support. But his ultimate conclusion is that historians have to pay attention because it will, in the end, make us better teachers -- which is kind of important to most of us -- and thus be a benefit to us as historians. It is a great challenge, but
"This transformation of both the audience and the nature of history has made teaching in an academic setting more difficult, and yet we continue to send historians into the classroom without the intellectual tools needed to accomplish this task. ... The creation and dissemination of better tools for responding to the challenges of teaching history today could allow us to apply the intellectual skills that we have honed so carefully to the solution of the very real problems that we face in the classroom and that the nation as a whole faces on a larger scale. If we fail to respond to this challenge, we may condemn ourselves and our profession to impotence and irrelevance. ... The success or failure of students in our courses really matters. In such an environment we must ask why it is acceptable for historians to pursue their vocation in total ignorance of what is known about the field, when we would utterly condemn such conduct by other professionals. Why is the classroom a place for the uncritical perpetuation of folk traditions when the operating room is not?"
I am not convinced, reading this article, that we have yet the definitions of problem and viable solutions necessary. But I am convinced that we should be working harder on the pedagogical side, and would ask our tenured colleagues and administrators to strongly support pedagogical development as a component of tenure-worthy historical work.


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More Comments:

Jonathan Dresner - 12/29/2004

You might consider taking advantage of the AHA's desire to branch out of traditional panels and make it a workshop.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/29/2004

David, You're welcome to blog on the article at Cliopatria if you wish.
Just a word about getting a panel accepted at the AHA convention in Philadelphia: I've served on program committees and I suspect that a proposal sponsored by a particular department and featuring its personnel, even primarily, might have a tough go of it in the program committee. You've got a better shot at it if the proposal features teachers in a variety of institutions.

Jonathan Dresner - 12/29/2004

I take mild exception to being lumped as an "unreal history teacher" but what's more important is that you've been "around" other teachers in an environment in which you talk about and share pedagogic practice, instead of just moaning about students and administrators and planning sabbaticals. One of my chief complaints about the academy is the distinct lack of real conversation and exchange about pedagogy.

Frankly, the AHA panel is about as bad a forum as it gets for what you're trying to accomplish, though if you want to spend your time "telling profs how to get the job done" it's fine. That kind of "you don't know what you're doing" talk directed at people who spend years in the classroom is pretty self-defeating: all of us could use improvement, and some theoretical rigor, but most of the historians (and other faculty) whom I think of as good teachers constantly adjust and refine their teaching practices in response to experience and readings.

I think we all should be experts, in the same sense that we're experts in a lot of teaching subject fields which we don't do our research in. That we're "amateurs" as Pace puts it, doesn't mean that we aren't having any success. It just means that there's a level of discipline to which we have not yet aspired.

David Lion Salmanson - 12/29/2004

I haven't had the chance to read the article yet but I may have to ask Ralph to let me blog on it. Now that I've been around real history teachers for a few years, I'm getting much better at it and I understand why too. But let's face it, for the most part college and university "teachers" don't have much of a clue about what works and what doesn't and are way too proud to come ask the experts. Ever been to a "Teaching History at the high school level" panel at a History conference. It is usually a bunch of profs railing against social studies or the AP curriculas (as if their survey courses were better, if they even teach surveys). Rarely are their good history teachers up there telling profs how to get the job done.

Disclaimer: My department is trying to put together a panel on Teaching the Nation at the high school level for AHA Philly. If we get in, we will have to put up or shut up.

Jonathan Dresner - 12/27/2004

I've never said that student feedback wasn't important (and it would be very interesting to see prisoner-oriented prison reform, along the lines of student-centered university programs), but that the hamhanded, single-minded, simplistic use of it in evaluating faculty is corrosive.

Oscar Chamberlain - 12/27/2004

Actually, and perhaps you were suggesting this, prisoner evaluation of pirson guards might be very useful. It would, at minimum, provide information from a perspective that could not be obtained in any other way.

That is why student evluations should be here to stay, not because they should be the be-all and end-all or the evluation of a faculty member but because they provide a perspective otherwise unavailable.