The Historian as Translator: Historical Thinking, the Rosetta Stone of History Education

FOR SEVERAL YEARS THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY HAS EN-joyed a productive collaboration with the National Council for History Education. The Historical Society salutes the NCHE for its outstanding efforts to improve the teaching and learning of history at the K-12 level. The NCHE emphasizes (1) history’s vital unifying themes (such as civilization, cultural diffusion, and innovation; human interaction with the environment; values, beliefs, political ideas, and institutions; and conflict and cooperation) and (2) history’s “habits of the mind” (such as understanding the significance of the past to students’ lives and to their society; perceiving past events and issues as they were experienced by people at the time in order to develop historical empathy and counteract present-mindedness; grasping the complexity of historical causation, respecting particularity, and avoiding excessively abstract generalizations; and appreciating the often tentative nature of judgments about the past, thereby avoiding the temptation to seize upon particular “lessons” of history as cures for present ills).

One of the best sessions at the Historical Society’s biennial conference at George Washington University last summer was organized by the NCHE. It featured papers by historian and teacher-educator Robert Bain, chair of the NCHE board of trustees Fritz Fischer, and high school history teacher Bruce Lesh. Linda K. Salvucci, Historical Society board member and chair-elect of the NCHE board, supplied a commentary. Expanded versions of their papers appear in the roundtable that follows.

For at least the past fifty years academic historians and K-12 history teachers have experienced an uneasy relationship. Clearly, the two groups have much in common, most importantly the shared responsibility for educating the nation’s students about the meaning of the past. Common sense suggests that there should be a seamless connection between the two groups and that they should consistently cooperate with and learn from one another. Alas, in the world of education, common sense does not always rule. Until very recently, history teachers at the K-12 level have rarely been prepared for their profession by those who understand history as a discipline, while history teachers at the university level have been provided with scant preparation or understanding of the unique requirements of the pedagogy of history. It often seems as if we are even speaking in different languages, making it virtually impossible to bridge a gap that should not exist to begin with.

In the last twenty years a burst of scholarship on the pedagogy of history and research on how history is learned by students provides promise for a change in this situation. We now know much more about the composition of “historical thinking,” an idea that many scholars in history take for granted but rarely consciously consider. These ideas and this scholarship should allow for a translation between the language of academic history and the language of history pedagogy. Historical thinking is, to use a historical image, the Rosetta Stone that can connect the world of the K-12 history teacher and the world of the university historian.

A brief excursion into my own history as a history educator illustrates the more general problem. My first job in the world of history education was as an 8th and 11th grade U.S. history teacher. My undergraduate and MA degrees were in history, not education, and I taught for five years in public and private schools. I then went to Northwestern University, where I became part of the school of “new diplomatic history” as I crafted my dissertation on Peace Corps volunteers. Just as importantly, I learned very early on about the abysmal state of preparation for teaching in Ph.D. programs. My advisors were superb teachers and cared very much about teaching, but there was virtually no systematic discussion within the department on matters of pedagogy in history. In short, I found that because of my experience teaching secondary history, I had thought much more deeply about the craft of teaching than any of my colleagues and many of my mentors. It was while I was a doctoral student that I began my career as a “translator,” working with the Preparing...