Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past

Abstract

Historians, especially academic historians, who normally avoid the literature on history education for its banality, thin research base, or ideological cant will overlook this book at their peril. Sam Wineburg, professor of cognitive studies in education and adjunct professor of history at the University of Washington, brings both a burning concern for the state of history instruction and a wide knowledge of history to his research agenda. That agenda is to understand how teachers and students of history think—what he calls their “historical cognition”—when working within their discipline. He also seeks to discover how, on the basis of knowledge of that cognition, we might become and create better teachers. Wineburg's methods, sure to be appealing to historians, are more ethnographic than sociological, and the discursive presentation of their results bears the kind of humanistic weight usually lacking in educational research. The book's ten essays—all but one previously published and some written in partnership with Suzanne Wilson—evince Wine-burg's conviction that history teaching is a “complex intellectual act.” The essays range widely over many subjects—the “unnatural acts” of historical learning, how different minds (students' and teachers' alike) work over the same materials, the intractability of received knowledge, and how collective memory can bar the way to fresh learning in teachers as well as the young. Displaying an attractive earnestness while writing with an informal pen, Wineburg insists on the moral significance of learning and teaching. From his research with students and teachers, however, he can only imply, he does not propose, what we should conclude. Nor does he, because I suspect he cannot yet, provide any techniques for insinuating historical understanding into the minds of adolescents. Therefore, this is no how-to book; readers seeking ideas for improving their own instruction will find only suggestions and no conclusions.