Odds and Ends
Talking to TeachersI really enjoy talking to teachers. At the OAH conference today I had lunch with a number of historians, good and dedicated scholars who also really cared about teaching history well. I was struck by the amount of though and care they put it into engaging students in history. Their goal, across the board was simply this: to have students do history, not memorize history.
That's such an important distinction. They want students to think about history, about exploring the past, and about learning from it so that they can understand it deeply and relate what they learn to their lives now.
History for these scholars isn't just a list of dates and causes, but rather is, to put it crudely, critcal immersion in the past. The people here that I've met want their students to viscerally experience the past and the struggles, passions, and day to day life of it.
It's all very vibrant and exciting.
Doing HistoryI'm at the Organization of American Historians conference in Memphis, TN. One of the things I'm hearing in sessions and conversations is the distinction some historians make when they teach. Instead of teaching history --i.e. telling students about history via lectures-- there's an effort to have students do history --having students engage history the way historians do. So there's a growing emphasis on primary documents, on field work, on historical thinking, while at the same time trying to have students read and learn history.
Yesterday I attended an excellent session: "Reaching with Technology: Approaches to Increasing Involvement through Instructional Technology."
The session opened with Bradley Austin, of Salem State College describing a teacher outreach project he worked on while at Ohio State. The Goldberg project is designed to have college historians work collaboratively with high school historians, with an eye toward helping both groups improve the teaching of history. Technology played a role in outreach --a WWW site was used for online meetings, file sharing and so on. What Bradley showed, however, was how things don't always go as planned, and talked about what the Goldberg team learned from the first year to the second of the project. And really it came down to discovering a better model of hybrid teaching -- part face to face and part distance. The first year, there was too much distance and the beginning face to face was overwhelming, with too much technology training. The second year, the program was reorganized, with more face to face, and more direct contact from teacher to teacher in the program. Everything Bradley described as working with colleagues also holds true when teachers work with students, and many of the teachers are taking the kinds of online activities and interactions they had with one another and are doing the same things with their students. So this was a tale of obstacles overcome. The Goldberg project WWW site is at
http://goldberg.history.ohio-state.edu.
John Tully from Ohio State described how he uses not only primary documents, but primary artifacts --posters, art, and other images (which are plentiful on the WWW --see for example, that National Archives at
http://nara.gov/). Instead of just reading a textbook, and gliding by an image or map that might be in the book, he gives students primary sources and asks that they "read" those, that they think critically about them. He provides them the kinds of questions historians ask. The process has students investigating the images and not passively reading what someone else thinks of the image. John found that this process, which takes advantage of the multimedia age students grow up in, has helped students become interested in history and
wanting to read about it. Their questions and thinking about the images spark their interest and curiosity. And their work on the images is part of the course's grading economy; students get tests and assignments where image analysis plays an important role.
David Stricklin of Lyon College described a very neat project where students did fieldwork, interviewed people, did historical research, and then worked together to create a radio documentary. Why that? The idea was to get them to synthesize and present all their data and research in a format that required them to think carefully about how to present the information, to think creatively. But radio was used instead of say a WWW site because they had access to a some cassette editing equipment and some tape recorders, but not a computers for doing a WWW site. It was a great assignment --students produced their show and played it for the community -- and an ingenuous reminder that multimedia doesn't necessarily have to be WWW-based and with images. A lot can be done with just voice, sound, and recording.
Peter Rutkoff lead us on an overview and tour of North by South, an ongoing research project that follows African American migration patterns from south to north. Students visit a southern city, and then the northern city that African Americans migrated to. They do interviews, visit sites, and look to see how the movements affected African American culture. Very cool, very smart. And with a very nice WWW site at
http://www.northbysouth.org/. Peter focus on the field trips, and he takes students to places he hasn't been, to explore things he doesn't know yet. By doing this, it's clear to student that they're co-investigators, explorers. Peter, like David in his project, are more coach and consultant than fonts of all knowing. But here's the kicker: Peter doesn't know a thing about building WWW sites, HTML, or any of those things. However, his students do. So he comments on the site's design, but the entire site was designed and built by students, who again, like David's students, made very sophisticated and smart decisions about how to organize and integrate and present intelligent very detailed and complicated research.
Argument and WarIn addition to working as the Director of New Media for a college textbook company, I also teach first year college writing as an adjunct about once a year. I'm not teaching now, but I wonder what I would be teaching about the rhetoric around the war if I were teaching now.
I think the trick would be helping students write persuasively even when I fundamentally disagreed with their positions. And as part of that, sharing my opinions and thoughts during class discussions in a way that doesn't make students believe they have to adopt them. It's a delicate balancing point that I know many teachers are trying to find.
Jonathan Zimmerman had an op. ed. in Sunday's Boston Globe (No point in linking; you have to pay to get it now.) where he pointed out that people tend to believe that if they make a good argument, others, being reasonable, will agree. And when people don't agree, we tend to view them as unreasonable, even suspect, even evil or looney or against us. Both the left and the right in this debate fall into that trap. They forget that reasonable people can disagree, and they see anyone who disagrees with them as defacto unreasonable. So Zimmerman reminds us:
Both sides, then, are operating in profoundly bad faith: they each presume that decent, knowledgeable people will agree with them. But the true democratic faith, the one that John Dewey proclaimed, teaches us that decent people disagree -- often profoundly -- about the same knowledge. Now, more than ever, it's a lesson that all of us need to learn.
I think if I was teaching now, I'd try to teach my students that. So they'd listen to one another, and then discuss differences without attacking motives and personalities.
On Making War (and Peace?) VisibleI'm fascinated by how the 24/7 news coverage of the war in Iraq effects so much of what goes on. The presence of cameras and journalists, embedded and otherwise, from around the world, makes this a real-time war. That has affected directly the way coalition troops are prosecuting this war and fighting battles. Yes, there's intense bombing, and the war is violent and bloody, but also, there's an effort to keep it as clean as possible, to minimize when and where possible not only civilian deaths, but opposing troop deaths. The preference is that enemy troops surrender, not fight. And as much I was against the war and the immediate need for it, now that we're in it, I hope it ends as quickly and as bloodlessly as possible. I hope the strategies work exceptionally well, even though the danger in them is that they do make war seem more palatable.
With opposition to this war so strong and pronounced, there are political reasons for taking this approach. And with the stated aim of making this a war not only one of deposing a man willing to use weapons of mass destruction, but also one to liberate the people he controls by fear, the war has to be fought as cleanly as possible.
The real struggle will begin after the regime is removed. The questions will be, what next and how? No one knows the details, or what the plan is, not even the White House apparently.
But that the coalition forces are conscious of being watched closely, and that Bush's motives for insisting upon this war are justifiably mistrusted (In large part because he kept shifting his reasons for this war and because his foreign policy is based largely on arrogance and impatience.), means, that for now, there is some hope that the aftermath of this fight might mean some progress for the Iraqi people.
The forces move with care, in part, because every civilian death is not only a tragedy, but also a long term political, cultural, and military liability.
War is wretched; it's reached when there's a failure of diplomacy and foreign policy. In this case, the foreign policy failure is long and historical. It is the failure of the U.S. to follow and assert democratic liberal values in the region -- We helped bring Hussein to power; we armed him in his war with Iran; Reagan sent Cheney to Iraq to look into oil rights in the 80's. We supported him as dictator and only oppose him now because we believe he's too much a danger to us. Our failures go back a long way and continue to this moment.
Bush's incompetence to date, his inability to articulate a consistent and believable case for choosing this war, and the fear and mistrust he's brought to bear on the United States as world power, can only be reversed if all goes well after the war. The scary thing is that America's an impatient country, and that Bush has a history of not funding his promises and carrying through.
So any chance for a democracy of some kind evolving in Iraq will only happen if the depth of attention being paid now to the battle is also paid to the much less dramatic and tedious and hard process of building the peace.
The only hope now is for the post-war process to be ethical, honest, patient, and with a sustained commitment to helping Iraq become a free and independent democracy shaped by Iraqi people. That means, really, that antiwar marches must become peace and freedom marches for the Iraqi people. If the anti-war movement becomes a peace movement, then it can play vital and necessary role in making the best of this sad situation.
Anything less a free and independent Iraq after this, and this war will have been for nothing, and all the fears about the bad consequences of it -- more unrest in the middle east, more terrorists attacks here and abroad -- will come to pass, and that would only this war more tragic than it already is.
