Progressive Pedagogy in the U.S. History Survey

This article is about the pedagogy that I practiced in a U.S. History survey course at Westfield State College in Massachusetts. What should progressives aim for in such a course? One goal should be to teach in a manner consistent with the admonition that "[i]n a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people… not to not be on the side of the executioners" (Zinn, The Twentieth Century, x). History teaching should also "be more critical of the present order than affirmative of it, and for a simple reason: most of what appears in the culture of the present already affirms that culture" (Megill 36-37).

More positively, one objective should be to create a learning environment in which students want to discover what actually happened and why. As ambitions go, this is a demanding one. Factory-style education, standardized tests, and entertainment masquerading as news all combine to vitiate the curiosity of working class students. Years of scorn for government as a tool for redistributing power and wealth, of the adulation of information gadgetry, and of anathematizing all doctrines but that of unbridled capitalism have helped fashion a popular culture that rewards deference to economic power and technology and disdains inquiry and dissent. In this climate, simply wanting to learn what happened and why has become unusual. The progressive teaching of history can help destigmatize curiosity, especially about how people have interacted with one another and their environment in the past. And curiosity in combination with skeptical inquiry is a tool for active citizenship.

In class I try to model the kind of skeptical inquiry that I want my students to engage in, not only in the way they read history books but also in the way they respond to power in society. Gaining an understanding of how textbooks shape perceptions and beliefs about the past, and about what is and what is not possible for people to achieve by acting together, is an exercise in identifying, and to some extent reclaiming, power.

Underpinning this approach are my political principles, which developed while I was growing up in Wales and England. I describe myself as a green social democrat. In the United States that places me, precariously and with frequent discomfort, with the progressive wing of the Democratic party. Philosophically I suppose I fall into the category of humanist. Bringing these perspectives into the classroom is hardly tantamount to proselytizing for godless socialism, but what it does mean is that at least for the duration of our class the students have the opportunity to look at life through these lenses. Is this, in itself, radical? I believe so: at a time when religiosity sits atop a high public pedestal, casting a long dark shadow over political and scientific discourse, skeptical inquiry, by introducing light, verges on the subversive.

In addition to skepticism my students encounter an ongoing tension, namely the apparent contradiction between a key goal (finding out what actually happened and why) and a key lesson (history is constructed by historians). Far from being a source of despair or frustration, in my own mind the tension is integral to the joy of history. Learning and re-learning on the one hand the boundaries of possibility that inhere in the study and production of history and, on the other, the power of narrative, keeps history a stimulating field of endeavor.

But, from the point of view of an undergraduate, does this make history a fool's errand? When this question comes up, I argue that it is not and try to convey my belief that the obvious tension should not in any way deter students from further inquiry. My teaching introduces students to the existence of this tension without presuming to resolve it for them. Squaring the circle is a challenge that the course lays down for them.

Such an approach seems timely. This generation of undergraduates has no personal memory of the Cold War or of any struggle between capitalism, communism, and socialism. For them, communism and socialism have always been in the past, while al Qaeda...