History in the Classroom

How to teach history, what I'm teaching this semester, and the back and forth of COVID-19 closures and openings...

With a new academic year around the corner, I decided to give Sam Wineburg’s recent book, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), a read. Because Singapore Management University does not have a history major, I have been especially attentive to thinking about why these students should be taking my history courses, and what these history courses should seek to accomplish.

Wineburg is a professor of education at Stanford, and the book features plenty of insights about what makes the teaching of history such a complicated enterprise and how we (specifically Americans, but also people all over the world) have a misguided idea of how and what students should be learning.

As Wineburg explains, people have been grumbling about how students don’t know basic historical facts since at least as far back as the early 1900s. For instance, the first large-scale test on historical facts was conducted in the USA in 1917, and, well, students flunked. They conflated Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, they were able to identify 1492 but not 1776, and so on and so forth. Even college students only managed to score a meager 49 percent (so, a big fat F).

But Wineburg goes on to provide a brief overview of the origins and purposes of these kinds of tests, and explains how they have been designed to fail students and don’t actually do a good job in testing historical knowledge (or, even more important, historical thinking—more on that later). As he explains:

A sober look at a century of history testing provides no evidence for the ‘gradual disintegration of cultural memory’ or a ‘growing historical ignorance.’ The only thing growing is our amnesia of past ignorance. Test results over the last hundred years point to a peculiar American neurosis: each generation’s obsession with testing its young only to discover—and rediscover—their ‘shameful’ ignorance. The consistency of results across generations casts doubt on a presumed golden age of fact retention. Appeals to it are more the stuff of national lore and wistful nostalgia for a time that never was than claims that can be anchored in the documentary record.

Now, Wineburg is kind of preaching to the choir. I’ve long held the view that learning history should not be the absorption of dates and facts. To put it crudely, that’s either antiquarianism or the inculcation of (very flawed) national narratives to foster (very flawed) civic culture—the kind of history one often encounters in elementary and secondary schools. Also, as the title of Wineburg’s book makes clear, facts and dates are easily accessible through resources like Wikipedia, so students don’t really need us for that.

That being said, I do believe that “thinking historically” entails being able to historicize events, individuals, institutions, etc. Now that word, “historicize,” is jargon amongst historians, but even we aren’t quite in agreement about what it means. On my end, I take a pretty simple definition—it means rendering the strange familiar and the familiar strange through a diachronic (temporal) framework.

So, on the one hand, I want students to be able to contextualize and make sense of seemingly weird stuff from the past without judging it based on assumptions we carry from the present (render the strange familiar). On the other hand, I want students to understand that we did not end up where we are because of a predetermined logic of history (render the familiar strange).¹ This is why I include “ID questions” in my exams, where students are required to identify, contextualize, and discuss the significance of particular events, individuals, technologies, etc.

For instance, in my Outbreak: Pandemics and Epidemics in the Modern World course, I might ask them to discuss the term “Danse Macabre,” and an ideal answer would look something like this:

The Danse Macabre was a genre of artistic allegory that emerged in Europe during the Middle Ages. It usually depicted a personification of death (often a skeleton) dancing alongside people from all walks of life—the message being that death was the common denominator for all humans. One of the contributing factors for the emergence of the “Danse Macabre” genre was the devastating Plague that spread across Eurasia in the mid-1300s. Known as the Black Death, it was caused by the Yersinia Pestis bacterium that traveled with rodents and fleas that made their way along the Mongol trade routes. The Black Death’s mortality rate reached as high as 60 percent, and in just a few years it killed up to 50 million people in Europe. The Danse Macabre is significant because it expresses the psychological, social, and one could even say existential devastation caused by the Black Death, which, unlike many other infectious diseases, had an unusual impact on healthy young men and women. In the face of such widespread death, Europeans were at a loss for meaning on earth and turned toward the spiritual realm, so it makes sense that they explored this idea that death invited all to dance, regardless of their station in life.

Notice how the answer provides some basic facts about the term (identifies), moves on to the more complicated intellectual task of situating those facts in relation to other phenomena (contextualizes), and closes with the even more sophisticated move of offering an interpretation of why all of it matters (significance). Jeremy Adelman, who taught me this pedagogical technique when I served as his teaching assistant at Princeton University, calls it “narrative mapping,” and I’ve become quite fond of using it in the classroom.

But this only takes us so far. After all, ID questions in an exam can end up only testing a student’s ability to synthesize the mass of information they get from lectures and/or textbooks (not a small feat, but also not enough for my standards). In other words, this kind of exercise can easily end up reproducing the misguided idea that teachers are supposed to “deposit” knowledge into the students’ brains, and then test whether students retained that knowledge (what the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire criticized as the “banking concept of education” in his classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed).

No, I don’t think it is important for students to memorize when and where the Broad Street Pump cholera outbreak happened (London; 1854) or who created the first commercially successful synthetic dye (William Henry Perkins; mauve). They can Google that, as I often do myself. What I want them to practice is the “narrative mapping” technique I discussed above, because it will serve them well when they are determining the trustworthiness of a news story, reading contracts, writing memos, and all that other important stuff we need to do to get through life as informed citizens.

And, just as important, I want students to understand that “historical thinking” also entails the creation of knowledge. I’ll have more to say about this in the next newsletter, when I’ll give you some insight on how I work on empowering students to do so by assigning curated case studies that try to emulate on a smaller scale what the historian tries to do with all her sources. I’ll also return to Wineburg’s book to discuss why the famous “Bloom’s Taxonomy” is such a limiting way of thinking about learning. Stay tuned!

What I’m teaching this semester…

I am teaching two courses this semester, and am including descriptions and links to their syllabi in case you’re interesting in knowing what my students at SMU will be engaging with in the following months. I have also recorded the lectures as part of our effort to promote blended learning during the pandemic, and am thinking of perhaps making them publicly accessible in the future—just let me know if you’re interested! So here are the courses (click on the title for the syllabus):

COR2217: SITUATING THE MACHINE: TECHNOLOGY, POLITICS, AND SOCIETIES

Take your smartphone out and study it. Its shape and functions—do you wonder how they were influenced by social, economic, political, and cultural forces? Do you think it changed the way people interact with one another? In this class, we will explore how technological artifacts and systems— from early factories to the internet—have shaped (and are shaped by) social, cultural, economic, and political factors. The course’s underlying premise is that “technology”—a concept that carries a multifaceted ideological baggage—only makes sense when understood as being embedded in specific social, material, and ideological configurations. That is to say, there are histories of technologies. Instead of a comprehensive survey, the course will unfold through chronologically arranged topics that include the emergence of industrial society, imperial mobility, urban spectacles, systems of mass production, gendered consumption, digital cultures, and risk in the Anthropocene. The unifying theme weaving all these topics together will be that far from being deterministic, technology is instead better understood as a site of contestation and negotiation for different visions of society. So that students can dig deeper into those tensions, each week will feature scholarly readings and two primary source-driven case studies in which groups will explore the complex intersection between technology and society—including Singaporean rickshaws, the Magnitogorsk Soviet industrial city, the contraceptive pill, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. For their final project, students will select a technological artifact and write a historical essay about its relationship to society.

COR2218: OUTBREAK: EPIDEMICS AND PANDEMICS IN THE MODERN WORLD

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in 2019 presented the global scientific community with major challenges, from uncovering the origins of this new strain of coronavirus to developing a vaccine to help prevent future outbreaks. However, epidemics and pandemics are not just biological phenomena—they are also intimately intertwined with society and culture. Throughout history different communities have found diverse ways to make sense of and tackle the rapid spread of disease. In turn, those intense experiences have shaped questions concerning rights and responsibilities, the boundaries of belonging, and risk and prevention. This course introduces students to the different ways humanists and social scientists have approached the study of communicable diseases in the modern era. It begins with discussions of how to talk about and how to frame this field of study, and then follows a loosely chronological structure—starting with nineteenth-century debates about the nature of cholera and ending with the complex relationship between emerging viruses and globalization. On the way we explore how tropical diseases helped shape and were shaped by colonialism; the networks that connect diseases, vectors, and populations; the fraught history of vaccine resistance; the massive mobilization in response to the devastating 1918 influenza pandemic; and the way stigma and activism has defined the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

“Lockdown” boomerang…

Singapore has technically not gone on “lockdown” since we arrived, but as you know there have been periods where restrictions have been tightened.

Well… last time I was celebrating how restrictions were being eased, but since then it has been somewhat of a rollercoaster. Shortly after I sent the newsletter, cases in Singapore rose to levels unseen since last year (this Delta variant is brutal). Emily and I scrambled to set up a date night before all the restaurants and bars closed down for indoor dinning again. We went to our favorite bar, Native, where we downed some delicious cocktails (funny enough, it’s also where we went before the previous shutdown).

Behold the Aegean Negroni (Tanglin gin, tsipouro, vermouth, and tangerine) and the Pandan (Indian single malt whiskey, pandan, jaggery, and Himalayan salt) accompanied with some kimchi crackers…

…and the Oyster Omelette (a savory cocktail made with oyster distillate, miso cured eggs, kampot pepper, coriander shoots, and calamansi).

We then had dinner at this Argentinian place called boChinche, since both of us had been craving a good cut of steak…

We definitely made the right decision in gambling a few years of good health in exchange for the provoleta (grilled provolone cheese). We also got lucky and were served some free champagne, since the restaurant was celebrating an upcoming move to a larger spot.

Although indoor dinning was not available, we continued to explore outdoors. We had a nice walk around Arab Street, which is home to the beautiful Sultan Mosque…

… and we have been seeing our share of big monitor lizards, including this guy who thought it was a good idea to climb up a palm tree!

Monday, 9 August, was National Day, which is the date Singapore commemorates its independence. Although we couldn’t attend the parade, which was restricted to only about 600 people, we did get to see parts of the flyover, including these helicopters carrying huge Singapore flags. They had been practicing all month, and it was both fun and annoying how often they flew by our building…

Indoor dinning was still closed, but we decided to celebrate National Day with style. We ordered delivery from Hawker Chan, the first hawker to be awarded a Michelin Star and, consequently, the cheapest Michelin meal you can have (I’m speaking of just a few dollars). As you can see, we enjoyed it alongside some Tiger, the national beer. Although it was delivery, it was one of the softest and most flavorful chickens I’ve ever eaten, and the roasted pork and char siew (Cantonese barbecued pork) were perfectly cooked.

Finally, on Tuesday, the day after National Day, indoor dinning restrictions were lifted. Emily and I celebrated by going to a nearby hawker center, Zion Riverside Food Centre, and ordering one of our favorites: prawn noodle soup.

We are hoping that this was the last round of restricted measures we have to face for a while. Vaccination rates in Singapore are quite good, and the government is cautiously opening things up and even planning to make traveling a little easier as we get closer to 80 percent. We are really at a loss for the situations in the United States and in Brazil, and hope our families and friends there are doing as well as possible given the circumstances… It feels a little weird to instrumentalize the situation in both countries, but I’m pretty sure my students will want to discuss the troubling numbers of vaccination resistance in the United States and the Brazilian government’s utter incompetency in managing the pandemic.

Alas, hoping that all of that soon ends up becoming the subject of history, rather than of daily news…

1. The latter is especially important because my general sense is that students (and people at large) have a tendency to see us somehow inhabiting the highest point of historical progress, and that we will continue moving up that arc. Historians call this the “whiggish” interpretation of history, and I think it’s safe to say that when you look at the historical record reveals to be quite silly. (In fact, Whig history had its heyday in Europe in the nineteenth century, and we all know how the twentieth century had plenty of catastrophes to undermine that kind of teleological faith).