Bob Bain, Teaching as an Epistemic Activity
I’m listening to a very interesting talk by Bob Bain, a historian of education who followed up a long career as a high school history teacher by starting a second career as an education professor. I won’t try to summarize the talk, except briefly, but take some notes on the thoughts it stimulates in me.
He began with a very interesting example of a discussion of student beliefs about Christopher Columbus, pointing out that a) the belief they had that prior to Columbus people believed the world was flat is easily debunked [as I understand it, the controversy was about how big the world was—Columbus thought it was much smaller than it is, something Erastothenes had determined with surprising accuracy circa 200 B.C.], and that b) the treatment of Columbus and 1492 changed dramatically across the various centennials of the event.
The field of social studies is defined in an amazingly broad and imperialistic way by their professional group, i.e.,
Social studies is the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence. Within the school program, social studies provides coordinated, systematic study drawing upon such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology, as well as appropriate content from the humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences. The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.
Bob argues that teaching history is a separate topic, more than adequately daunting in and of itself.
It’s interesting to see the parallels between the issues that arise in attempting to teach history adequately and those that come up in domains with which I’m more familiar with—the key role of content, but the need to understand how students conceive of and comprehend that content.
An important argument he makes (that comes up with science education) is that history textbooks are not true to the methods and language of history. “High school textbooks say that that were three causes for the Civil War; college textbooks say that there were five, but that’s about the only difference.” Both speak with an authoritative voice and don’t raise issues of evidence and interpretation.
Interesting issue, but it’s import isn’t completely clear to me. I suspect that everyone has some domain for which they just want to know the answers, and not the thought processes behind. Common examples are cooking and statistical analyses, although often for different people. Some of these issues are discussed well in a classic paper by Paul Meehl (Meehl, P. E. (1956). Wanted: A good cookbook. American Psychologist, 11, 263-272.).
History is also a very interesting domain because it might be the best locus for understanding some issues that come in literacy development—1) the fact that in middle elementary school there arises a group of students who are reported as having difficulty in reading when they hadn’t been so identified before; presumably because they have trouble reading to learn new information rather than just decoding the words to read aloud, and 2) the problem of the “ninth grade bulge,” which we’ll be focusing on in the course that Annemarie Palincsar and I are teaching this semester. One claim is that teachers have new expectations for interpretive reading and writing for high school students, and history would be a likely locus for problems with these issues.
One problem with the interpretive framework is that it probably looks very different from the teacher and student perspectives. Barb Hofer told me about data she collected from Middlebury students about their reaction when their professors disagree with the textbooks. Surprisingly to me, they tend to go with the textbook (hope I’m not distorting what she said…).
Very interesting, thought-provoking talk.
It’s also interesting because “Jenny D” is sitting in the row in front of me, presumably recording her thoughts on this event.