Sam Wineburg Research Articles

Plowing New Fields of Scholarship in Social Studies: Planting New Seeds With Civic, Economic, and Geographic Thinking

This manuscript is the introductory article for the special issue of the Journal of Social Studies Research titled Teaching Disciplinary Thinking, Literacy, and Argumentation Skills. In it, the authors provide an historical overview of disciplinary thinking as outlined by Edwin Fenton and Sam Wineburg. They talk about how the C3 Framework is a melding of a focus on disciplinary thinking outlined by Fenton and Wineburg with the emphasis on preparing K-12 students for their future roles as democratic citizens as stressed by scholars like Shirley Engle. Then, the focus of the manuscript shifts to highlight the underdeveloped areas of disciplinary thinking in civics, geography, and economics. The authors define economic, civic, and geographic thinking and provide habits of mind for each of these disciplines along with classroom activities for each. They close with arguments for why K-12 social studies teachers and social studies education scholars should focus on developing K-12 students’ civic, economic, and geographic thinking skills.

The silence of the ellipses: Why history can’t be about telling our children lies

History textbooks are less likely to be complete renderings of the truth than a series of stories textbook authors (and the many stakeholders who influence them) consider beneficial. Sam Wineburg describes how the process of writing history textbooks often leads to sanitized and inaccurate versions of history. As an example, he describes how the story of Crispus Attucks and the Boston massacre has evolved over time. The goal of historical study, he explains, is not to cultivate love or hate of the country. Rather, it should provide us with the courage needed to look ourselves unflinching in the face, so that we may understand who we were and who we might aspire to become.

Jonathan Zimmerman and Emily Robertson. The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools; Sam Wineburg. Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone).

J<scp>onathan</scp> Z<scp>immerman</scp> and E<scp>mily</scp> R<scp>obertson</scp>. <i>The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools</i>; S<scp>am</scp> W<scp>ineburg</scp>. <i>Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)</i>.

Randall Curren and Charles Dorn, Patriotic Education in a Global Age &amp; Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)

Randall Curren and Charles Dorn, Patriotic Education in a Global Age &amp; Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)

Review: Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), by Sam Wineburg

Review: Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), by Sam Wineburg

Boudicca, broken bones and behaviour management: a case study of teaching causation at Key Stage 3

I have always thought that teachers should not teach what to think but how to think, and I wanted to embody this attitude within my own practice of teaching Classics. It was also interesting to me to link this to the ongoing debates in history teaching surrounding the relationship between the acquisition of substantive knowledge (i.e. the facts of history: dates, battles, names, etc.) and the acquisition of second-order concepts (i.e. the framework within which such knowledge is understood: e.g. historical interpretations, ascribing significance to events, understanding causation). According to Ford, ‘the challenge of restoring the link between substantive knowledge and conceptual understanding is one which the whole profession needs to address’ (Ford, 2014, p.33). Having previously taught philosophy, causation seemed to me to be a topic I would be well-suited to tackle, and I was intrigued to discover that there were opportunities to teach causation as early as Key Stage 3 (KS3). In fact, enshrined in the current National Curriculum (NC) for KS3 history is the key aim ‘to understand historical concepts such as … cause and consequence’ (DfE, 2013, p.1). Given that Stanford professor Sam Wineburg (2001) refers to historical thinking, albeit archly, as an ‘unnatural act’, I wondered whether it was possible for 12 and 13-year old students to ‘understand’ the complex concept of causation. But I was also eager to test out some of the pedagogical theories floated at the beginning of the PGCE course, in particular, Bruner's hypothesis that ‘any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development’ (Bruner, 1960, p.33).

Historical Thinking: Analyzing Student and Teacher Ability to Analyze Sources

The purpose of this study was to partially replicate the Historical Problem Solving: A Study of the Cognitive Process Using Historical Evidence study conducted by Sam Wineburg in 1991. The Historical Problem Solving study conducted by Wineburg (1991) sought to compare the ability of historians and top level students, as they analyzed pictures and written documents centered on the Battle of Lexington Green. In this version of the study, rather than compare historians and students, we sought out to compare the analytical skills of teachers and students. The main findings relate to the fact that the participants lacked the ability to engage in the very complex activities associated with historical inquiry and the utilization of primary sources in learning about the past. This lack of ability should be used to improve teacher professional development programs and help them develop the skills needed to not only engage in historical evaluation themselves but to also develop skills that will allow them to instruct students to do the same.

Historical Thinking -- and Its Alleged Unnaturalness

No articulation of `historical thinking' has been as influential as Sam Wineburg's position, according to which historical thinking is, fundamentally, the recognition of the ways in which the past is different than the present. Wineburg argues, further, that achieving that state is `unnatural.' This paper critiques both of these claims, arguing instead that we should replace a generic conception of historical thinking with one that is much more rooted in the specific practice of the discipline. It is surely necessary for students to learn this practice, but it is not unnatural. Instead, learning to think historically is learning to speak the language of the discipline that we call ‘history.’

The History Textbook, Born Digital

This essay explores how the American Social History Project's work in history education (professional development programs with K-12 and college history faculty, websites, and CD-ROMs) has developed over time. It considers the possibilities inherent in a radically rethought history textbook — grounded in research by Sam Wineburg and others into how people learn about history — to create a new model for history learning that uses digital tools to foster basic literacy, historical thinking skills, and deep understanding and inquiry into historical content.

Making Historical Thinking a Natural Act

Making Historical Thinking a Natural Act Bruce Lesh (bio) Nicole came to my class last year assuming that history would be taught as it has always been. The textbook would serve as the core instrument for delivering the catechism, lecture would break up the reading, and she would again memorize and then regurgitate the content dictated by the curriculum. Nicole understood historical thinking as a methodology defined by the consumption of facts that are communicated by an authority—textbook or teacher—and processed in order to replicate an approved narrative about the nation’s past. But she left my class nine months later with a different perspective. She now likes the “idea of debating the past and looking at different types of sources to understand the past.” Her definition of thinking historically now encompasses notions of evidence, investigation, discussion, and interpretation. Nicole’s testimony confirms my core belief about classroom instruction: history teaching must move from lecturing about the past to investigating it. My efforts over the past fifteen years, narrated in “Why Won’t You Just Tell Us the Answer?” Teaching Historical Thinking in Grades 7–12, have focused on creating a history course that promotes the investigation of historical questions through the analysis of historical evidence.1 Why take time to develop, implement, and promote a course that is so different from the tried and true methods that have defined history instruction for well over one hundred years?2 Simply because every major measure of students’ historical understanding since 1917 has demonstrated that students do not retain, understand, or enjoy their school experiences with history.3 This dismal track record, combined with an alternative model for history instruction— first manifesting itself in England, and now growing in the States—provides an avenue by which we can alter students’ comprehension, appreciation, and performance in historical studies. A growing body of research indicates that students can evaluate various historical sources, apply them to the development of an evidence-based historical interpretation, and articulate their interpretations in a variety of formats. When taught to pose questions about evidence, causality, chronology, change and continuity over time, and other “categories of historical inquiry,” students become powerful creators of history rather than consumers of a predetermined historical narrative.4 Sam Wineburg describes historical thinking as “an unnatural act,” and he’s right. But Wineburg’s conclusions are not a death sentence for invigorating classroom instruction; instead they are a challenge. In my classroom I try to teach my students [End Page 17] to think historically. The traditional approach to teaching history centers on identifying the dates, individuals, events, or ideas that students must know. In my view, instead of identifying content, curricula should identify core historical questions for students to investigate. These questions should be provocative and encourage debate. They should compel students to consider causality; chronology; multiple perspectives; contingency; empathy; change and continuity over time; influence, significance, and impact; contrasting interpretations; and intent and motivation. The question-driven investigative process requires students to formulate evidence-based historical interpretations. To develop responses to the questions students must become comfortable with analyzing a variety of historical sources. A great way to get students to start thinking historically is to expose them to primary sources from the past and ask them to consider the following questions: What does the source say? What information does it provide? What was going on when the source was produced? What do you know about the historical context for the source that helps to explain the information it provides? Who created the source and why? For whom was the source created? Structuring students’ source work so that they habitually approach all historical sources in the same manner enables them to develop the cognitive skills necessary for making the unnatural natural. Once students have examined the sources, they then work together to aggregate, compare, contrast, and apply this information to the discussion of the investigatory question.5 A lesson on the Panama Canal that I have taught for a number of years can serve as a window onto how this kind of exercise works in my classroom when historical thinking collides with teenagers.6 The investigation begins with students confronting a selection...

Putting History Teaching "In Its Place'

March 2011 The Journal of American History 1067 1 Lee Shulman, “Signature Pedagogies in the Professions,” Daedalus, 134 (Summer 2005), 52–59; Lee Shulman, “Pedagogies of Uncertainty,” Liberal Learning, 91 (Spring 2005), 18–25. 2 Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Philadelphia, 2001); Lendol Calder, “Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey,” Journal of American History, 92 (March 2006), 1358–70; David Pace, “The Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,” American Historical Review, 109 (Oct. 2004), 1171–92; Arlene Diaz, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Leah Shopkow, “The History Learning Project: A Department ‘Decodes’ Its Students,” Journal of American History, 94 (March 2008), 1211–24. 3 Stephane Levesque, Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the Twenty-First Century (Toronto, 2008); Keith C. Barton and Linda S. Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good (New York, 2009); Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke, “What Does It Mean to Think Historically?,” AHA Perspectives, 45 (Jan. 2007), 32–35. Putting History Teaching “In Its Place”

Ragland And Woestman, Eds., The Teaching American History Project

This book delivers the first scholarly examination of the Teaching American History Project, which awards grants to colleges, universities, local educational agencies, schools, libraries, museums, and nonprofit historical and humanities institutions, to improve instruction in American history. The editors are Rachel Ragland, assistant professor of education at Lake Forest College near Chicago, and Kelly Woestman, a former teacher who now is professor of history and history education director at Pittsburg State University in Kansas. The editors have organized the book well. Its contents include a foreword by leading education researcher Sam Wineburg, a preface by the editors, and four sections: Emerging Practices for Historians: Introduction, Emerging Practices for Classroom Teachers: Introduction, Emerging Practices for Professional Development: Introduction, and Emerging Practices in the Larger Perspective: Introduction. The editors frame each section with an introduction that articulates the themes and overviews the chapters in each section.

Democratic Bankruptcy: Three Programs to Help Prevent It in Our Schools

Introduction Are many of America's public schools advocating an open classroom environment to invite students to engage in an expression of their opinions on current issues? Are many of the curriculums used in America's public schools reflective of opportunity for students to research, formulate opinions, recite rationally, and promote deliberation? Are many of America's teachers modeling a practice in their teaching to help foster support for values, participation in political discussion, and civic engagement? We believe that no is the answer to these questions though there are important exceptions that we discuss in this article. We fear that our schools are on the verge of what we call democratic bankruptcy or the loss of ways of teaching, learning, and deliberation, and we argue that emphasis upon programs such as we discuss here can combat antidemocratic tendencies in our In social studies classes specifically there has long been a call to help students develop into responsible citizens of tomorrow's world. According to Walter Parker interaction in schools can help students enter the social consciousness of puberty and develop the habits of thinking and caring necessary for public life (2005, p. 348). Recently John Rossi (2006) has argued that preparing students to discuss public issues lies at the core of our democracy. Peter Cookson (2001, p. 42) suggests that is always personal, passionate, and difficult--the opposite of training, regimentation, and standardization. Education is never linear, but creative and continuous. The search must begin for ways to incorporate programs that are designed to allow students to practice the habits of inquiry, fairness, empathy, critical analysis, rule of law. This process can be related both to American citizenship as well as global citizenship. In this article, we shall discuss three such programs that foster these habits of inquiry: We the People, Choices for the 21st Century Education, and Doors to Diplomacy. We shall show that the roots of these programs are in John Dewey's social philosophy, most clearly stated in his favorite book, Democracy and Education (1916). Educators should be careful about eliminating programs that help develop deeper and richer understanding of the principles of our democracy. These programs are at risk of being eliminated when schools try to adhere strictly to the requirements of a standardized federal agenda, such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2002. According to the Center on Education Policy (2007), since NCLB was instituted in 2002, 36 percent of surveyed school districts reduced time for teaching elementary social studies. That percentage increased to 51 percent in districts with failing schools. While this relates directly to elementary schools, Jeff Passe (2006) notes that this loss of instructional time in the social studies at the early stages of a learner's development has a direct effect on secondary social studies teaching. Passe further states that it is well documented that high-stakes competency tests have influenced the quality of social studies education at the secondary level. Teachers have begun shifting emphasis from higher-level concepts to lower levels such as recall and comprehension to reach students who enter the secondary social studies classroom without ever having been exposed to most of its basic concepts and skills (p. 189). Social studies at the lower level have long been referred to as the 'bump,' or superfluous subject in the elementary grades, but it is now disappearing from the school day (Passe, p. 189). Sam Wineburg (2006) echoes this finding, bringing to our attention that during a time of crisis social studies can be expendable (p. 402). James Lick High School in San Jose, California, eliminated social studies from the ninth grade curriculum, citing the need to acquire more time to learn and practice reading and writing. …

The History Learning Project: A Department "Decodes" Its Students

It is a story replicated in many history classrooms during the course of a semester. Students have once again done poorly on an assignment or exam. Their essays are the sites of massive, undifferentiated data dumps. They have paraphrased primary sources instead of analyzing them, ignored argumentation, confused past and present, and failed completely to grasp the “otherness” of a different era. A few students, as always, have done extremely well, but many have done poorly. What is wrong with these students? How can a teacher help them understand history? These sorts of poor performance often result from a mismatch between what college history teachers expect of their students and what those students imagine their task to be. Most college professors learned how to be historians more or less by osmosis, without explicit instruction on how to perform many of the operations necessary to produce historical knowledge. They, like the minority of students who seem to perform historical tasks effortlessly, are naturals who have not had to reflect consciously on what they do automatically. As a result, professors often do not model for their students some of the most basic—and most essential—steps in historical analysis. As Sam Wineburg has noted, it is so habitual for historians to check the author and date of a passage before they begin reading it that they do not realize that such procedures are not natural for many of their students.1 Such intellectual maneuvers, unmarked by the professor and as invisible to the

Building Historical Thinking Skills In The U.S. Survey

As a history educator I am constantly reminded of the gulf between how I think about history and how my students think about it. Sophisticated historical thinking, Sam Wineburg has suggested, involves using the facts of history as knowledge that is "organized in interconnecting networks of meaning and significance," or, he suggested in an earlier article, as "subtext." Historians have disciplined themselves to see the connections; students are just beginning this training.1 To bridge the "breach," I have found that a project-based approach that teaches some basic disciplinary skills, primarily critical thinking and writing skills, increases student involvement in their history courses and aids retention of the material.

NCATE Has a Lot to Say to Future Social Studies Teachers: A Response to Sam Wineburg

THE PREPARATION of teachers in any discipline is a complex enterprise with an array of stakeholders serving as gatekeepers. In the May Kappan, Sam Wineburg focused his analysis of the preparation of social studies teachers on the curriculum standards of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and on the teacher preparation standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). We find his argument to be incomplete, for we believe that it ignores forces--subtle and not so subtle--that are also a part of this complex enterprise. The preparation of social studies teachers involves colleges of education and the liberal arts, K-12 schools, state departments of education, social studies/social science professional organizations, and accrediting agencies. These major players are influenced by societal trends; by interest groups; by research in social studies, in the social sciences, and in education; and by society's proclivity for developing programs that are cost-effective, well grounded in research, sufficiently flexible to be implemented in a variety of settings, and capable of satisfying the ever-changing demand for teachers. Moreover, the preparation of social studies teachers is influenced by the ideologies espoused by the various groups involved in this complex enterprise. And these ideologies address questions that educators have struggled with for decades: What is the definition and purpose of social studies? What are effective approaches for implementing social studies education in K-12 schools? How should children and young adults demonstrate their knowledge and competencies in social studies? Despite all of this complexity, we must still ask the important question: What educational experiences will lead to the effective preparation of K-12 social studies teachers? Focusing on the NCSS curriculum standards and the NCATE teacher preparation standards, as Wineburg does, does not take account of all parts of this complex enterprise. So what do the NCSS/NCATE standards have to say about the preparation of social studies teachers, and what impact can they have on that preparation? Let us reflect on the second question first and consider, as an example, the relationship between professional education programs and the liberal arts. Education faculty members are not solely responsible for the preparation of teachers. Indeed, if we hope for social studies teachers to be more literate in their content fields, we must look to the social science faculties at our colleges and universities to help us meet that need. However, relations between liberal arts faculty members and education faculty members are often distant, and collaboration and communication are not common. Faculty members in the social sciences are often not rewarded for expending energy on teacher education. That is not why they earned Ph.D.s in history or political science, nor is it why they were hired as professors. Furthermore, it is often the case that courses offered in history and the social sciences do little to facilitate an understanding of literacy in those disciplines. Rather than thinking like historians and political scientists, undergraduate majors in social science disciplines spend much of their time learning information. Not surprisingly, many of the questions Wineburg raises are rarely dealt with in courses in the disciplines. However, the NCATE/NCSS teacher preparation standards have promoted initiatives to improve communication between faculty members in the arts and sciences and their peers in education. In order for programs preparing social studies teachers to demonstrate that their teacher candidates have acquired the necessary knowledge and skills to teach social studies, education faculty members must collaborate with faculty members in history and the social sciences. In short, dialogue about the appropriate skills and knowledge for teachers of social studies, which has been promoted by the NCATE/NCSS teacher preparation standards, has fostered cross-disciplinary cooperation. …

Historical Thinking is Unnatural, and Immensely Important: An Interview with Sam Wineburg

Historical Thinking is Unnatural, and Immensely Important: An Interview with Sam Wineburg

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

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.

Social History Goes to Class

Book reviewed:Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas and Sam Wineburg (eds.), Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives

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

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsHistorical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Sam Wineburg Peter N. StearnsPeter N. Stearns Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Education Volume 109, Number 4Aug., 2001 Sponsored by the Penn State College of Education Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/444338 Views: 22Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 2003 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Carlos Muñoz, Bastián Torres, Rosendo Martínez, Olga Carrillo Teaching History in a Post-pandemic World: The Perceptions of Teachers on Training, Frontiers in Education 7 (Apr 2022).https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.866731Hanne Egenæs Staurseth (Geo)grafiske representasjoner i ungdomsskolens samfunnsfag: En case-studie av hvordan en ungdomsskolelærer og hans elever skaper literacy-praksiser i møte med grafiske representasjoner i samfunnsfag, (Aug 2020).https://doi.org/10.31265/usps.61