In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • “The Music Is Nothing If the Audience Is Deaf”: Moving Historical Thinking into the Wider World
  • Linda K. Salvucci (bio)

Readers of Historically Speaking are certainly no strangers to practicing and reflecting upon “historical thinking”; witness the 2008 publication of several essays and interviews in the Historians in Conversation series, as well as explicit or implicit references to its nature and process in virtually all recent issues.1 Still, most academic historians, scholars, and authors of popular works of history rarely connect with what goes on in terms of historical thinking in K-12 classrooms in more than a casual—usually parental—way. To be sure, ongoing controversies such as those involving the Texas social studies standards, the role assigned to slavery in textbook accounts along with commemorations of the outbreak of the Civil War, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s recently issued report card for state standards for U.S. history, and the yearly polls every July 4th that suggest how poorly Americans understand their Revolution provoke a collective beating of breasts—followed, in some circles, by ritual finger-pointing at K-12 educators. Unfortunately, with the conspicuous exception of collaborative opportunities presented by the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History Grants program, there is little constructive and sustained interaction between those who teach at the university or college level and those who prepare the very students we eventually encounter in our own classrooms. The essays by Fritz Fischer, Bruce Lesh, and Robert Bain each offer compelling reasons for why the larger historical community, if not the general public, should be paying much greater attention to issues involving the training and professional development of K-12 teachers, the effective instruction of U.S. history high school students, and the pedagogical challenges of teaching increasingly popular and state-mandated courses in world history.

Fischer brings a wealth of professional experiences— as a K-12 teacher, college history professor and scholar, and program director for history education— to bear in striving to link the world of academic history with the world of history pedagogy. As a “go-between,” or “translator,” he emphasizes the process of historical thinking at all levels, drawing upon cognition-based studies, such as Sam Wineburg’s path-breaking Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, that explore how students learn history.2 In many respects, those of us who teach undergraduate and graduate students instinctively practice what Fischer preaches; that is, we blend “content” with “process” in our classrooms. However, he rightly exhorts us, borrowing the words of Ed Ayers, to show the “ropes and pulleys” by doing history in an even more deliberate and transparent manner. The goal is to transcend what Stéphane Lévesque labels as “memory-history” by showing students at all levels how we practice our craft.3 After all, when was the last time we merely memorized some facts in preparing a college lecture or professional presentation? Rather, just as when we pursue our own research, we teach college students by moving well beyond the collection and compilation of evidence to analyze, contextualize, and interpret sources, culminating with the articulation of arguments about the past. If K-12 students could learn history by thinking historically as opposed to memorizing bits of information, they would be more apt to be college-, career-, and citizenship- ready. When it is their turn to debate history and social studies standards, they would do so with an enhanced appreciation of perspectives and points of view, and thus be able to lift the current level of public discourse above silly squabbling about “your heroes versus mine.” They would have learned to construct and even appreciate well-reasoned and informed arguments; in short, they would know how to engage and listen and debate in meaningful, productive ways because they had internalized “History’s Habits of the Mind.”

Pie in the sky, you say? Not so, according to Bruce Lesh, who effectively demonstrates how content and process can be taught simultaneously in a sophisticated and demanding manner to public high school students in Maryland (admittedly a state with relatively enlightened standards). Several years ago, this master teacher began his own journey away from memory-based history, determined...

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