Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History ed. by Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, Sam Wineburg, and: Ľhistoire à ľécole: Matière à penser by Robert Martineau (review)

Book Reviews Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History. Edited by PETER N. STEARNS, PETER SEIXAS, and SAM WINEBURG. New York: New York University Press 2000. Pp. 576. $55 cloth, $25 paper L'histoire al'ecole: Matiere apenser. ROBERT MARTINEAU. Paris/Montreal: L'Harmattan r999. Pp. 400. $53-95 These two books are products of a new and expanding field of research that Stearns, Seixas, and Wineburg describe as a 'scholarship ofhistory teaching.' It consists of the investigation of what is involved when students learn or at least study history, whether in schools or elsewhere, and when teachers teach or try to teach it. As such, it promises to bring a much needed empirical element to what to date has largely been a rhetorical, anecdotal, and often polemical debate over the state ofhistory in the schools and in public life more generally. These two books are neither polemical, rhetorical, nor anecdotal. They ground their arguments in research and base their conclusions on the investigation ofwhat actually takes place, or fails to take place, in classrooms and other settings where people encounter history. The Stearns, Seixas, and Wineburg (henceforth ssw) volume is a collection of papers presented at a conference on history teaching organized by the American Historical Association in 1998. The Martineau volume is a published version of Robert Martineau's doctoral thesis, written at Laval under the supervision of Christian Laville, and consists of an investigation of the teaching ofhistory in selected Quebec high schools. ssw divide their book into four sections: current issues in history teaching; changes needed to improve history teaching; research on learning and teaching history; and models of teaching. Their contributors provide a useful overview of the new research on the teaching and learning of history, largely focused on the school but including some discussion of university teaching also. This research embraces many methodologies, ranging from large-scale surveys of thousands of students across a variety of countries, through intensive long-term studies Book Reviews 549 of samples of students, to observational studies of individual teachers and students. Whatever their methods, the researchers share some common concerns. What do teachers actually do when they teach history ? What distinguishes effective from ineffective teaching? How do students set about the study ofhistory and with what results? As ssw observe, this growing research enterprise has three foundations . One is the cognitive revolution in psychology, which sees students as active makers of meaning and not simply as more or less willing recipients ofteachers' information. A second is the historicization ofhistory , which has placed one question above all on the agenda ofhistorical education - what or whose history should we teach? A third is a related concern, both public and academic, with questions ofidentity, heritage, collective memory, and the representation ofthe past. In other words, as ssw point out, the treatment ofhistory in the schools and elsewhere is the visible tip ofan iceberg ofmuch deeper significance, raising a host of questions of culture, ideology, authority, and power. And though students learn about the past from many sources, ofwhich school is not necessarily the most potent, school is the first, and for many the only, place where they will encounter the discipline of history, where they will encounter not only the past but what is involved in studying it. It is, of course, this capacity of schooling that has led to calls, in Canada and elsewhere, for increasing the amount of history in school curricula, for restoring narrative political history to its former place in the sun, for teaching a more truly national history, and for using history to strengthen national unity and citizenship. Both these volumes suggest, however, that making history teaching more effective will require much more than a reordering of curricular content, and more even than placing more history specialists in school classrooms. One ofthe more counter-intuitive findings ofthe research into history teaching and learning is that, even when student-teachers take university history courses that introduce them to history as a form of disciplined inquiry, involving the use of sources, the analysis of evidence, the criticism of interpretative accounts, and the rest, their view of what it means to teach history in school remains unchanged. Although they know what...